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.
, 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.