I’m really happy to share something we’ve been working toward for a long time. Since 2019 we’ve been using our own internal theme + plugin called Renick.Blocs, and we’ve shipped a lot of client projects with it over the years.
Now we’ve taken everything we learned and rebuilt it from the ground up as Renick.Content, this time with a strong focus on our clients UX. The idea was simple: let clients edit their own content much more easily, and even spin up whole new pages with AI assistance. IMHO, that part alone saves us a ton of support time
Under the hood it’s a structured block editor (clean JSON instead of rich-text soup) with a three-pane editor, theme-accurate live preview, version history, templates, multisite and optional AI that’s off by default.
One thing I want to highlight: it’ll be priced very affordably (15$ for now, might get cheaper), no comparison with other plugins out there. So even tiny projects can use it without thinking twice. Also we try to provide a Claude-skill which creates a customized theme in a few minutes (this is actually critical to us, because our competition basically sells cheap landing pages and we need to offer something similar)
On top of that, we currently have a native iOS app in TestFlight (iPhone + macOS) that lets you edit your OctoberCMS content on the go, with partial offline support. The Tailor app can even be white-labelled straight from the backend, so it fits your own branding. Best feature: Works offline, and syncs the changes to the backend once back online.
The plugin is submitted now, let’s see what the review says
If you don’t mind me saying, maybe a little too cheap? Don’t be worried to charge fairer pricing–if it means you will continue to support and maintain it for the long term.
There is also an option to enable Localized Pricing in the plugin settings that will let you set the maximum price and it automatically gives a discount based on the customer region.
We currently use OFFLINE.Boxes for one of our clients, does it take any inspiration from that? What is the main point of difference?
We’ve been using our internal plugin for years for one main reason: standardization. All of our projects share essentially the same codebase, so when we need to apply a change, say, for GDPR compliance, it’s not a problem at all. Just a small update, rolled out everywhere.
We also rely heavily on plugins from other developers. The Redirect plugin , for example, is both feature-rich and free, and we’ve benefited a looot from using free plugins off the marketplace. We’ve contributed a few of our own as well, like our Matomo integration… nothing complicated, but useful for some.
Since we’re already migrating our new projects to the new plugin, more updates are definitely on the way.
Imho, I’d like this plugin to work for every project, from the smallest to the large ones. Boxes is to me fairly expensive and quite limited in features. Our internal plugin has been around since 2018 and leaned heavily on repeater functions, which became very slow once a page had a lot of elements. Boxes arrived late, and for us, paying $99 for a tiny landing-page project just isn’t worth it. I did try the Boxes online demo to see what it offered, but I never actually installed it anywhere. we already had something similar in our hands.
I want people to actually use this plugin, so I think keeping the price low is the right call. We could always offer additional themes as paid add-ons for a bit of extra revenue.
One of the strength of OFFLINE.Boxes in my opinin is the capacity to create at will your own blocks with partials and even with the possibility to use existing or new components.
Yes, the plugin has some api where the theme can deliver custom blocks. The theme I provide as example for this plugin shows how. So it can be used in-relation or without relation of the theme. For example when you use the content editor field with Tailor and one page has isDefault for the Tailor model, this page gets used for rendering the live preview.
Hi Renick!
When installing, I get this error from composer:
- Root composer.json requires renick/content-plugin ^1.0, found renick/content-plugin[dev-main] but it does not match the constraint.
<warning>Running update with --no-dev does not mean require-dev is ignored, it just means the packages will not be installed. If dev requirements are blocking the update you have to resolve those problems.</warning>
I changed the constraint in composer to dev-main
Another little thing, the links to the documentation on your site are not working, maybe they are not finished yet. Just a heads up if they should work
Now I am about to test and use it, where would be the best place to write issues/feedback?
Hey We shipped the first patches incl. the installation through the marketplace. Beside that, we didn’t receive any bug reports so far. Feel free to send all bug reports through our support form
Some insights, from a WIP-theme, how we use the plugin ourselves. We extensively use theme-specific blocks, but make it fully customizable/ editable for the client. Some clients come with designs (Made by AI of course…) to us, and we provide them with the technical expertise.
You know what? I got some bug reports from the first buyers of the plugin, and prepared some patches. And just some patches would be boring, wouldn’t it?
What am I most excited about? The AI workflow is now a bit cleaner and easier to use (for a v1). See yourself: https://youtu.be/EyGKp6qE1YI
My clients can now freely choose: Use the templates we create for them; or just tell the AI the most hilarious ideas for a landing page and get it asap
I made some tests and quite like your approach to manage complex content for a model.
However, I had the bad surprise to see that the setting tab for a bloc don’t seems to be configurable. You can just set the visibility on or off, but it would be required for me to be able to organise settings how I want (remove some, add some others…) and it seems not possible
We never thought of customizing the default settings, especially because of compatibility issues between OctoberCMS installations. Call us lazy but we’ve ready-to-use landing pages which we can rollout between clients
The idea behind the “Settings” tab of the block is, to have some meta-attributes which can be shared between all themes, e.g. L-padding above a heading, S-padding above some text element.
The new update (which still is in internal testing) introduces a lot of small changes, for example you can now have more than one attribute in a row. Makes things a bit more readable if a block has a lot of attributes. So it could fit more attributes then for custom blocks
In the future, I will think about introducing a hook where you can register custom settings attributes. Not something I can fit in the next release, because the editor itself can not register dynamic settings attributes at the moment.
Also saying, we know the Dawn theme is code-wise a bit messy. But providing a OctoberCMS standard theme with multi-site presents to show a real multi-language demo page wasn’t too easy haha…
Happy that some people bought the plugin, even if we said if might be not perfect. So I’m giving you a preview what you can expect with the next update:
I’m happy to tell you the next integration we add: OFFLINE.Mall e-commerce plugin. We support placing categories (list, grid, card view) or selected products directly into the Content editor.
Of course I can imagine adding Meloncart integration some day in the future. But Mall is a very accessible plugin, so for me it made sense to add first.
@OFFLINE-TK Thanks to OFFLINE for the open-source Mall plugin
There are default block settings I dont want to give to the client, and there are some others I would like to add in that tab, that’s why make it customizable would be a great plus to me.
, for example, is both feature-rich and free, and we’ve benefited a looot from using free plugins off the marketplace. We’ve contributed a few of our own as well, like our Matomo integration… nothing complicated, but useful for some.
Viele Grüße 
as I played around with AI to support a lot of languages out of the box 
integration some day in the future. But Mall is a very accessible plugin, so for me it made sense to add first.