I’ve set up a copy of my site on a developer server (though I’m not a developer) to work out if I can escape a dependency that my website has on a customised version of Pagebuilder, done by ThinkUpThemes, the theme developer. Support has been poor and going foward I’d much rather be using SiteOrigin’s standard Pagebuilder plugin for the future.
I am running the Minamaze Pro theme on WordPress 5 with the Classic Editor. There are 310 pages and 31 posts. About 280 of those pages use some widgets from the customised Pagebuilder, and nearly all those pages have an identical layout overall.
When testing by swapping back and forth between these two Pagebuilder plugin versons, its clear that the chosen widgets from one version are not cross-compatible with the other.
When I switch to the standard SiteOrigin Pagebulder, missing widgets in the layout come with a message like “The widget thinkup_builder_divider is not available” or “The widget thinkup_builder_image is not available”.
So, what are my chances of resoving this relatively quickly, besides doing a manual edit and rebuild of neary 300 pages on the site..?
One idea: using a plogin like Search and Replace, maybe I could replace all instances of “thinkup_builder_divider”, “thinkup_builder_image”, etc. etc. in the database with the standard SiteOrigin Pagebuilder equivilant widget?
Hi mw
Thanks for reaching out.
Sorry to hear you’re in this position. Our products are open source so we, unfortunately, can’t control forking. Because there is a lot of possibility for extending Page Builder and the Widgets Bundle without forking, it isn’t our preference.
A quick heads up, most of our widgets are contained in the SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle.
I don’t know that anyone has ever looked at an automated replacement of the above widgets. We don’t have a divider widget in the SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle plugin but there are plugins that use the SiteOrigin Bundle framework to add their own widgets. One of those is Widgets for SiteOrigin which does offer a divider widget in their free version. Livemesh SiteOrigin widgets is the other maintained plugin that extends the Widgets Bundle. I assume the Builder Image widget is just an image widget? If so, you could swap to the SiteOrigin Image Widget part of the SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle or the SiteOrigin Editor widget > Add Media. Just remember to deselect the automatic paragraphs option bottom left in the Editor widget if using it only for an image, this avoids additional paragraph space being added.
I’ll ask Alex from SiteOrigin to comment here and offer us some feedback on the possibility of automatically swapping widgets.
(If it ever comes to doing a manual swap, I can recommend perhaps contacting a company called Raysoft in Chennai. I haven’t used them for a while but in the past, they did a lot of bulk e-commerce data related work for me at affordable rates. This work occurred over a period of years. If you ever look into this route, please let me know so I can offer a few tips for hiring and specifying the job.)
Hi Mw68,
Unfortunately, the ThunkUpThemes widgets are all custom and not derived from our widgets. This sadly means that updating the widget names won’t work as the settings and functionality are different. There honestly isn’t a simple solution in this situation. You’ll either need to hire a developer to convert the widgets programmatically or look at rebuilding the pages. I’m sorry mate, I’m really sorry about this whole situation.
For the former, we recommend using Codeable.
God help me :( Thanks for the responses.
I should never have chosen a proprietary version of the plugin but at the time (4 years ago) I didn’t understand the implications.
Can you please elaborate on how a developer might “convert the widgets programmatically”? Keeping in mind that the two versions of PageBuilder can’t be run simultaneously. Some understanding will help me brief a developer to get a quote at least.
Hi Mw68,
Effectively, the developer will need to write a script that converts the settings to the same settings set up as an equivalent widget is using. If the equivalent widget is missing an important feature that you rely on, they’ll need to add additional code that functionality if you wish to continue using it. Does that make sense?
Thanks Alex, that’s fairly clear.
The biggest widget issue for me will be the image one – that’s a Thinkup widget.
Fortunately my chosen visual editor widget when I built the site was a 3rd party one, Black Studio TinyMCE Widget, which seems to be compatible with both versions of Page Builder without needing any adjustment…unless you guys know of a compatibility issue with that widget?
Thanks.
Black Studio TinyMCE is what we used and recommended before we added the SiteOrigin Editor widget to the Widgets Bundle. It’s fully compatible with Page Builder. Glad to hear you’re making use of it in places :)
Thanks Andrew.
For sure :) Good luck.