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Elementor to Roll Out Significant Pricing Hike for New Customers

Earlier this week, Elementor announced a significant pricing hike coming in March 2021 for new customers:

On March 9th, 2021, Elementor will be adding new Studio and Agency Pro subscription plans and adapting the Expert plan, to best accommodate users’ growing needs. These changes will only apply to new purchases. If you’re on an existing active subscription plan, nothing changes for you.

The most radical change is coming to the Expert plan, which previously offered 1,000 sites for $199/year. The plan has been pared back to support 25 sites. Users who need support for 1,000 websites will need to purchase the Agency plan at $999/year, a 400% increase on the price for what was previously offered under the Expert plan.

Elementor emphasized that customers with an existing active subscription will not be affected by the pricing changes. The company is also giving customers a chance to purchase the current Expert plan ($199/year for 1,000 sites) before it is discontinued before March 9, 2021. Existing customers on the Expert plan have the option to upgrade to the Agency plan at a 50% discount (valid from March 9, 2021 until June 9, 2021).

Over the past 48 hours, Elementor’s announcement has received 270 comments primarily from disgruntled customers. Some of them are opposed to the pricing hikes and others are unclear about what it means for their subscriptions long term. Elementor representatives’ responses to questions on renewal have been studiously unclear.

One customer points out that the announcement does not explicitly say that existing subscriptions will retain the legacy pricing past the end of the billing period for this year. It does not state that existing active subscriptions will remain at the same price indefinitely, nor does it specify a term after which the pricing will go up.

Elementor Evangelist Ben Pines, head of the company’s web creator program, has left the question regarding renewals open, saying he “cannot see into the future.” Customers were left wondering whether the lack of clarity on the future of renewals is a foreshadowing of prices going up after the current billing year.

“No one can predict the future, and offering a lifetime price guarantee is irresponsible for any future-facing company,” Pines told the Tavern. “What we can guarantee for sure is the extent to which we value user loyalty. This is why they have never experienced any price change in 4.5 years. We value our users’ trust, and have taken every step to ensure that our loyal users’ active subscriptions are not affected.”

The company has not confirmed whether existing active subscriptions will be guaranteed the lower pricing forever and reserves the right to eliminate legacy pricing at any point in the future.

In the announcement, Pines said the pricing model for Elementor Pro has hardly changed since it was introduced in 2016 and that it is time to update it to best accommodate customers’ evolving needs. Elementor is now installed on more than 7 million websites and caters to a wide community of users with varying levels of expertise. The new plans have access to 24/7 live chat support and a handful of other benefits, but many customers participating in the comments said they do not require chat support.

The upcoming pricing hike has heightened tensions for customers who feel the dramatic increase is unjustified for the software in its current state. They cited usability issues, persistent bugs, and performance problems that remain unfixed. Additional support features do not make the higher prices more compelling for this segment of the company’s customers.

Some who were disturbed by the radical price increase called for the company to consider creating a middle ground offering for the updated Expert tier.

“I agree that 1,000 websites for $199 is low,” one customer commented. “Many small people will never create 1,000 websites. What bothers me is $199 for 25. Would it be more reasonable if it was $199 for 50, to have some middle ground? Or maybe you do not want the little people around any more.”

A handful of customers commenting were unfazed, noting that anyone who builds 1,000 websites using Elementor and cannot afford $1 per work order should reconsider their business model.

Pricing changes can be a major source of friction for existing customers, as GitLab recently discovered when dropping its Bronze/Starter Tier and imposing a 5x price increase on those features in a higher tier. Although the immediate impact of pricing increases will primarily hit new customers, it’s the existing customers who have been paying for subscriptions for years who have the strongest opinions on the changes.

Raising prices to introduce more value for customers or to account for the increased support burden is a natural evolution for companies that experience rapid growth over a short period of time. Getting existing customers to lock in their auto-renewals by offering legacy pricing is also a strategy for ensuring a more predictable financial future for the company. But Elementor’s lack of clarity regarding term length for the discounted renewal pricing is the primary reason for all the agitation in the comments on the announcement.

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What Are the Key Changes in the Dotenv-Linter V3.0.0 Release?

We have developed dotenv-linter — a useful tool for checking .env files. It helps to find problems in .env files that you might miss at first, but that later may result in applications working incorrectly. We made the tool universal so it can be connected to any project, regardless of the programming language. Dotenv-linter is developed as an open-source project by Mikhail Grachev, Evrone’s software engineer.

What Is a .env File?

A .env file or a dotenv file is a simple text file that contains all the environment variables of a project. Storing configuration in the environment variables is one of the tenets of the Manifesto of Twelve-Factor App. The .env file has a simple key-value format. 

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INSERT UPDATE process not working

I have a snippet that inserts data in a row in a MySql database. If that data already exists the existing row should be updated. In my case, I continue to get insert only. What is wrong with this snippet?

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The Importance of Measuring CES

If you get an immediate call from a customer support agent and he quickly sorts out your issues, how do you feel? I'm betting you will feel good and share this effortless experience with your friends and family. And, further, you will become a loyal customer of that brand.

Similarly, your customers want their queries to be solved quickly. Thus, the overall customer experience or satisfaction level is influenced by the efforts your customers are deploying to get their work done. Thus, overall customer satisfaction can be achieved by measuring the Customer Effort Score (CES).

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Is CSS float deprecated?

An interesting conversation came up at work the other day: Should we use the CSS float property now that we have CSS Grid and Flexbox?

The short answer

No! Well, mostly. I’d only use it today for wrapping text around images, though and I’d avoid using float entirely for layouts.

The longer, more annoying answer

Before flexbox and grid, we had to use the CSS float property to make grids and layouts. In fact, it was the first thing I learned about web design. On one hot summer afternoon I cracked open a copy of Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman and then moved a tiny red div with float: right. It was magic. There was power in the float.

It was so easy to move something around on the screen that I now wonder how many designers fell in love with the web simply because of how easy it is to use move things around like that.

But using float to build complex layouts was always a hack: it was only really designed to let text wrap around an image.

img {
  width: 150px;
  float: left;
}

The problems with float begin when we try to build giant layouts and magazine-style grids. But that’s what we had to do since there were no alternatives back then like we do today.

One problem with the float property is that you’d have to wrap floated elements with something called a clearfix that looked like this:

<div class="clearfix">
  <div class="float-left">Column</div>
  <div class="float-left">Column</div>
  <div class="float-left">Column</div>
</div>
clearfix:after {
  content: "";
  display: table;
  clear: both;
}

Jay Hoffman described the clearfix hack a while back:

The clearfix, for those unaware, is a CSS hack that solves a persistent bug that occurs when two floated elements are stacked next to each other. When elements are aligned this way, the parent container ends up with a height of 0, and it can easily wreak havoc on a layout. All you might be trying to do is position a sidebar to the left of your main content block, but the result would be two elements that overlap and collapse on each other. To complicate things further, the bug is inconsistent across browsers. The clearfix was invented to solve all that.

Things began to slowly change after that. Back in 2017, Rachel Andrew explained how browsers can handle the clearfix problem without any hacks at all. All we need is the following CSS to make the same fix:

.container {
  display: flow-root;
}

The odd thing is that I didn’t know the flow-root value existed until about three minutes before I typed that. But I guess this sort of defends the argument I’m about to make here: with CSS Grid and Flexbox we don’t really need float at all. The property was really designed to do one thing: let text wrap around images. But now, with grid and flexbox, we have wonderful powers that can do all the heavy lifting for real layouts.

Back to the argument I was having at work. Some folks said that we should go back and delete all the instances of float in our codebase because it’s old code and we can easily replace it with flexbox or grid. But this is where I’d say, Whoa! hold up a sec. I don’t think having the float property in a few places in our codebase is doing that much harm at all — this isn’t radioactive code that’s causing problems.

So should we be using CSS float for anything besides letting text wrap around text? Nope. But should we all go out and immediately purge the web of CSS float declarations because it’s not pure and not the “correct” way of doing things? Nope again.

The nifty thing about the web is that old code shouldn’t break things. Just ask Chris. A website that isn’t using the fanciest CSS properties or the coolest tricks isn’t useless or bad. We’ve simply replaced float with alternatives that are better. I think it’s a good lesson here that these CSS properties are likely going to stick around forever because they still have applicable use cases in modern web design.

And that’s okay.

The post Is CSS float deprecated? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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Progressive Web Apps in 2021

Maximiliano Firtman has a look at PWAs this year, including trying to get a bead on how widespread they are:

At the end of 2020, approximately 1% of websites included a Service Worker, and 2.2% had an installable Web App Manifest file. Remember that some platforms -such as Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android- do not require a Service Worker to have a standalone experience after installation. We can assume that 2.2% of websites are installable, and 1% may pass the PWA criteria on Android, 71% of which offer some offline experience.

That data is from the HTTP Archive, which looked at 7.5 million websites. So 1% might seem like a small number, but that’s lots of sites with PWA tech on them, and 170% year-over-year growth. Those are just the minimum requirements, though. I’m sure fully embracing PWA-ness (e.g. real offline usage) is a tiny fraction of that. Maximiliano has lots of more detailed data, so be sure to dig into the article if you’re interested in the nuance.

Anecdotally, I’d say PWAs fell out of general conversation last year. I don’t think anybody is exactly against the technologies that make them up, but they aren’t embracing them either. My guess? Everyone is scared of Service Workers. I’m scared of Service Workers. They do scary things, like aggressively hold onto cache. I think a whole dev team really needs to understand them and embrace them into their workflow and build process for them to be effective. Generally speaking, we just aren’t there yet.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Progressive Web Apps in 2021 appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Your Input Needed to Determine Path for Jakarta EE/MicroProfile Alignment

As you are likely aware, Java EE has transitioned to Open Source governance in the Eclipse Foundation as Jakarta EE. MicroProfile has been moving forward as an independent initiative to optimize enterprise Java for microservices architectures. The Cloud Native for Java (CN4J) Alliance has recently been formed to promote better alignment between Jakarta EE and MicroProfile.

One of the key issues to sort out is how Jakarta EE can consume MicroProfile specifications (such as MicroProfile Configuration). There are several alternatives as to how this could be done. The following is a brief analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, as discussed in the CN4J community thus far. At the end of the analysis, there is a survey you should weigh in on. In addition to choosing the option you believe to be best, it is very valuable to provide comments justifying your preferred alternative. The results of the survey will be shared with the CN4J community and key decision-makers.

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How to Create WooCommerce Product Photos

How to Create WooCommerce Product PhotosWooCommerce has been a fascinating prospect for WordPress users to create online stores without going into the development technicalities. Outright e-commerce functionality is available to your WordPress based website with the simple installation process of the WooCommerce plugin. Along with the whole prospect of product and order management portal, this plugin allows you to upload […]

The post How to Create WooCommerce Product Photos appeared first on WPExplorer.

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Legalesign Launches New Real-Time Events API

Legalesign, a provider of esignature services that are aimed at enterprise businesses, has launched a new API: Legalesign Firehose. This new real-time events API provides developers with esignature integration capabilities and implements OAuth 2.0. 

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Using Neural Networks to Discover Antibiotics

Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest challenges plaguing modern medicine. More than a hundred thousand people die every year because doctors cannot treat bacterial infections. However, there is an unexpected ally in this fight for lives, which can help to solve the problem of bacterial resistance to existing drugs. This ally is neural networks. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated that well-trained neural networks can successfully identify new antibiotics from millions of candidate molecules.

Why Many Antibiotics Are Becoming Ineffective

Simply put, the mechanism of bacterial adaptation to antibiotics can be described as follows: random mutations constantly occur in bacterial DNA, and due to their huge number, there is always a probability that some of these mutations will help particular bacteria survive in new conditions. The rest of the population might die, but the surviving ones will quickly multiply and take their place. Bacteria are unlikely to survive boiling or intense irradiation, but many of them no longer respond to antibiotics. Developing resistance requires a certain period of time, and with each year, less and less time is needed. For example, by the early 1970s, most of the gonococcus bacteria had developed high-level resistance to antibiotics of the penicillin group.

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WP Feedback Rebrands To Atarim, Moves To a Full SaaS Model

Earlier this week, WP Feedback founder Vito Peleg announced the company was changing its brand to Atarim. After 18 months since its launch, it would also be moving toward a complete Saas (Software as a Service) model.

WP Feedback was created as a standalone plugin. The goal was to provide a visual feedback tool that agencies and developers could use to communicate with clients rather than spending time deciphering unclear emails, chat messages, and phone calls.

“Starting as a freelancer and then an agency owner myself, it was always a huge pain to get clients to provide me with the content and design feedback I needed,” said Peleg. “And this led to us building a tool for us that worked extremely well with our workflow, which led to the decision to take this to the market.”

However, over time, the product evolved into something bigger.

“As we started gaining traction, I always kept a pulse on our users (now with over 5,000 freelancers and agencies), and it became clear that a standalone plugin, while it did do the trick, was simply not enough — especially for those that manage multiple websites and clients at the same time,” said Peleg. “It solved a huge part of the problem, but not the workflow in its entirety. There was a clear demand for us to build a centralized area to gather all feedback so we then created our Agency Dashboard — a cloud-based application that allowed our users to gather all the requests from different clients and websites to manage them in a single place.”

Peleg said the Agency Dashboard revealed a more complex problem in the industry. Agencies were patching together several different tools to provide various aspects of their services. These tools were leading to unnecessary friction and slowing down jobs, often adding weeks of additional time.

The team tackled more than they had initially bargained for. In 18 months, they added over 150 features to the WP Feedback platform. Peleg said the project has helped agencies and developers reduce between 50% and 80% of the previous time delivering projects and supporting clients.

In 2020, the WP Feedback’s users marked over 100,000 tasks as complete. Peleg calculates this has saved the industry over five years of unnecessary back and forth.

“The name WP FeedBack continued to position us as what version 1.0 was — a basic visual feedback plugin,” he said. “So along with version 2.0 that is releasing this week, I decided it’s a great opportunity to revamp the whole experience with a rebrand, repositioning, and a whole bunch of new ways that users can use our software to improve their lives.”

Peleg said that nothing is really changing for existing customers other than having access to more tools. It should be a smooth transition for them. The goal now is to attract new customers.

“I also hope that this transition will allow our industry to see the new reality we’re creating for delivering website projects and why it’s insane that a 5-6 days project still takes 6-8 weeks to complete,” he said.

How the Service Works

Screenshot of the Atarim Agency Dashboard tool.
Atarim Agency Dashboard.

There are two sides to Atarim. One is a client-interface plugin installed on each project website; the other is the Agency Dashboard.

“The plugin’s role is to provide a simple experience for clients to provide the content you need, approve the designs and request ongoing support,” said Peleg. “Allowing to visually click any part of the website (including in the wp-admin screens) and just leave a comment. The agency will get an automated screenshot, the screen size, browser version, and a button that will take them directly to the request, logged in, with one click.”

Freelancers or agencies work from within the Agency Dashboard. This serves as a central location for all of the work that happens around client websites.

Technically, WP Feedback has already been a SaaS product with an accompanying plugin since launching its central dashboard early in the product’s history. Version 2.0 completes the transition from a plugin to a full-on SaaS. Feedback and other data are no longer saved to the client websites. Instead, they are hosted via Atarim.

“Over time, we noticed that it created unwanted bloat to the websites that were using our tools extensively, so off-loading all the data and loading it from our side, was the natural route,” said Peleg. “But since this is how the platform was initially built, this was a massive undertaking that I’m very happy that we finally completed.”

The client-interface plugin is built for WordPress. However, the technology stack behind the new Atarim Agency Dashboard is on Laravel and React. The team thought it would be the best framework for speed and to work with as the company continues to scale.

“I’ve been using WordPress myself for more than a decade — so it really comes naturally to me by now,” said Peleg. “The SaaS world is a different animal.”

“One of the biggest challenges was transitioning everything we have built, to be pulled from the cloud as opposed to being stored locally on the client’s site. The ‘cloud migration’ project, as we called it internally, has been a year-long endeavor that, whilst it was developed constantly, was pushed back by our need to support our existing users, our growth, COVID-19, and all the other fires that happen when you’re running a startup.”

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How To Measure the Success of a Conversational AI Chatbot

Illustration by Quovantis

Last year, when one of our healthcare partners (we refer to our clients as partners) were looking to build a conversational AI chatbot, I was apprehensive about guiding them. I had only worked on the level 2 (out of the 5 levels of conversational AI) type of bots. But this time our partner wanted to build a contextual/consultative AI-powered chatbot assistant.

I was concerned about how the bot would understand end-users’ problems. What features can we build to make it more humanistic? Would it be successful in replacing human care and compassion? Would it replicate the same emotions of empathy, compassion, and care?

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Deploying Spring Boot Application on Kubernetes

What You Will Learn

  • How to enable Kubernetes with Docker Desktop for Mac
  • How to create a pod
  • How to deploy a working spring boot application on Kubernetes
  • How to monitor and manage Kubernetes cluster with Lens IDE

Moving on, you may not know this, but you can have a functional single-node Kubernetes cluster running locally with your Docker Desktop by following the below steps. But wait, What is Docker Desktop?

What is Docker Desktop?

As per the official documentation, Docker Desktop is an application for macOS and Windows machines for the building and sharing of containerized applications and microservices.