Ether Content Builder & Elegant Builder

Obviously there are times when it’s very convenient to drop jQuery into a page or a post to present information a little differently. Well, as many of you that have tangled w/ WordPress in the past probably are already aware, there’s just not an easy way to go about this that can be passed onto your clients (or at least not that I have found — until now!).  A few months ago I located what I thought was going to be a huge game-changer for me in the Ether Content Builder Plugin.

And, don’t get me wrong, I think Ether Content Builder Plugin is an awesome plugin, but I got tired of trying to troubleshoot ever project in Internet Explorer that used the tabs or accordian widgets. They never worked for me in IE. I reached out to their support but never got a response back from them so I went on looking further for a similar tool to accomplish what I wanted to do. That’s when I stumbled upon Elegant Themes Builder Plugin.

Elegant Themes Builder Plugin – $89 Subscription

The Elegant Themes Builder is a plugin that provides some incredible tools for structuring the content on your page. These tools were previously only available in our Convertible theme, but now they have been added to a new plugin that will work with any theme. The plugin creates a visual drag-and-drop canvas where you can add, arrange and re-size advanced elements on your page. This builder appears below the normal text editor when you create a post or page, creating a unique canvas for each. The builder allows to you quickly create columns, sliders, tabs, buttons, toggles, boxes and so much more. Click here to learn more…

Ether Content Builder Plugin – $30 License

Ether Content Builder is visual content composer for WordPress. It features lots of predefined widgets such as columns, image galleries, custom bullet lists and many more. Pages are assembled via very convenient drag & drop interface and no coding knowledge is required. Ether Builder is a powerful tool for building custom content pages aided with innovative visual composer. It comes equipped with many commonly used widgets that can be laid out via interactive drag&drop interface. Ether Builder can use 3rd party widgets as well as custom crafted ones. Ether Builder is actively developed by Por Design and gets regular updates and bug fixes.

Some of the widgets included are: 12 combinations of columns, Heading (h2-h6), Plain text, Rich text (Now available within some widgets since v.1.6.0.), HTML, Image, Post Content, Divider, Message box (6 types), Blockquote, Custom bullet list (12 types), Button, Video – YouTube, Vimeo or Blip.tv, Media Grid Gallery – custom grids of images and videos up to 6×6 (grid slider ready), Table generator, Twitter Feed, Testimonials (grid slider ready), Services (grid slider ready), Post feed (grid slider ready), Pages feed (grid slider ready), Tabs
Accordions / Toggle boxes (constrained or loose), Nivo slider, Pricing table, Pricing box, Contact form, Flickr Feed, Roundabout slider, Google map, Code View, Facebook Like Button, Facebook Like Box, Facebook Comments, Custom widgets can be also added.

Comparison Notes Between Plugins (Likes / Dislikes)

Okay, so after having used both plugins I will say that the Elegant Builder Plugin seems to be more reliable when it comes to cross-browser compatibility and it is somewhat intuitive once you get the hang of it. I’m not as big of a fan of how Elegant Builder is accessed via Post or Page Edit mode because it’s somewhat hidden below the editor window. The one thing that I really liked about Ether Content Builder was that it created a third (middle) tab in the post / page editor of wordpress called Builder, and it was very intuitive for clients to pick up on and use. The elegant builder is yet to be proven in that respect…