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Sarah Gooding

WordPress Product Launches Roundup: APPExperts, WP Wallet, Block Styles, and Stock Control for WooCommerce

Despite the flurry of April Fools day jokes circulating today, the WordPress product market has been heating up in the past couple weeks with new entrants that we are highlighting in a roundup. These products range from newly in beta to fully launched. Some are banking on the freemium model and others are fully commercial products.

APPExperts Mobile Application Builder Plugin Now in Beta

APPExperts is a new mobile application builder plugin that is now in beta, developed by the WPExperts team. It turns WordPress and WooCommerce websites into fully functional apps for  iOS and Android phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. The plugin on WordPress.org functions as a connector to the APPExperts platform, which is powered by Flutter.

Users can create their first app for free and the commercial version includes additional features like push notifications, ads integration, and plugin integrations. APPExperts is going up against more established competitors like AppPresser, which bills annually for the use of its platform. During its pre-beta period, APPExperts added 500 users on its connector plugin who generated more than 1,000 apps for iOS and Android.

WP Wallet Organizes Commercial Theme and Plugin Licenses Into a Single Dashboard

WP Wallet is a new product, created by the team behind MasterWP, that helps WordPress site owners keep track of their license keys for commercial themes and plugins. The idea is to prevent users from missing license renewals, losing license keys, and struggling with invoicing. The service scans each website added to the account and retrieves any commercial license subscription fees, capturing any administrative details. It can also send invoices for payment via PayPal or Stripe with no transaction fees. Everything related to commercial licenses is organized into a single dashboard.

WP Wallet is free forever for up to three websites and is supported by ads. Free users can share access with unlimited team members and connect to Stripe or PayPal. Upgrading to Pro is less than $10 per month and allows users to add unlimited sites, connect multiple payment gateways, and will soon include a Chrome Extension and API.

Block Styles Plugin Now in Beta, Brings Advanced Styles to the Block Editor

Block Styles is a new plugin now in beta that lets users further customize core blocks with unique styles. It works with many popular block collection plugins and boasts “fully responsive block-level design control.” This allows users to change style attributes based on desktop, tablet, and mobile sizes, and eventually customer device sizes, hover/action states and pseudo elements.

The Block Styles plugin has advanced layout controls with visibility settings that can be set based on user role, device size, and login status. It also adds the ability to customize the background of every Gutenberg block with colors, gradient options, and linear and radial settings. The team is working on adding multiple backgrounds and video backgrounds. The plugin has support for advanced border styles, typography controls, special effects, animations, and custom CSS for every block.

Pricing for the Block Styles plugin ranges from $69/year for one site to $499/year for unlimited sites.

Stock Control for WooCommerce Makes It Easier to Manage Inventory

Stock Control for WooCommerce is a new plugin that launched this week, created by plugin developer Edith Allison. It makes it easier to manage WooCommerce inventory and make quick adjustments. Store owners can manipulate stock, and change descriptions, images, attributes, and categories all on one page.

Product changes can be published immediately or saved for review later. The plugin also logs who made the changes and when. It uses the Heartbeat API to monitor the shop and will notify if there is an editing conflict with another site manager. It will also notify if stock quantities change while the site owner is working on the products.

Stock Control for WooCommerce starts at €29,90/year for single site licenses and goes up to €149,90/year for agencies. The roadmap for future updates includes more translations, an attribute manager, bulk actions, scheduled publication of changes, compatibility with Woo Product Bundles, and a way to show “held” stock.

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14 responses to “WordPress Product Launches Roundup: APPExperts, WP Wallet, Block Styles, and Stock Control for WooCommerce”

  3. This is the best example of the total failure of the Gutenberg force-in that I have seen in a bit.
    The fact that you need to spend $70 or more per year for basic styling of blocks that Automattic has spent gob knows how much money and time developing, and beggin’ the world to donate time to make better, for how long now?

    And still you can’t do many basic things without an extra plugin, and often times a paid upgrade to some random third party that no one knows if we can trust a year from now.

    I weep for wordpress seeing this today.

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    • I get your point, and I think you are speaking in broad strokes, but the team behind block styles has been in WordPress for over 70 years combined. I have been using WordPress since 2007. Most of us are core contributed. We wrote most the original documentation for Gutenberg. We run our own WordCamps (Me personally, WordCamp Orlando since 09) and help with Meetup all over the world. We run Wapu.us and give back well over 10% of our time to core.

      We(the people behind blocks styles) are well known but the brand Block Styles is new.

      I know the Block Styles site is a little weak, but we did not expect it to be shared out yet really. We will work on the trust factor a bit.

      Lastly, I posted a different comment about the pricing. The plugin itself is only $39. The $69 is for the full membership, extra plugins like dynamic content and a block pattern manager, plus a FSE theme. Along with added design assets constantly being added.

      Thanks for your feedback
      – James

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      • I know the Block Styles site is a little weak

        The Block Styles site is definitely not ready for public consumption. It displays terribly at anything below 1200px.

        What I’m wondering is, do you see this as an issue with WordPress core styles or the product you’re offering?

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      • Indeed my comment was meant as broad strokes and a criticism of wordpress/gutenbloat/automattic and not just your plugin, and not people individually.
        While you added some details that showed reasons to trust your crew, you actually made the spotlight much bigger in the core problems with core and the conflicts that are not taken seriously.
        (I also wish you added the ‘per year’ and ‘per site’ to your comment)

        The fact that a core contributor and doc writer for gutengerg would release an expensive plugin to add basic things that should ship with the core package (since gutenberg is forced, not an optional addin as so many of us have said it should be) – it’s kind of mind boggling from this side of the glass frankly.

        Maybe Matt can pay the $250 per year for unlimited sites and include it with the next core update so we have something else to add to the performance issues, and we can be saved from writing 3 lines of css, or paying a core developer to not exclude basic things which can be charged for.

        It makes me wonder if the existence of this plugin will mean that we won’t get backgrounds options in core blocks and visibility settings for device sizes of blocks and backgrounds.

        Again this is about WP, not your specific thing.

        I hope your thing is successful and you all get rich and keep it up to date and don’t sell out – that’ll be great.

        If I was looking for the ‘special effects, animations, and custom CSS for every block.’ – and could know that they could be triggered on entering the view port – it may save me from installing another plugin ( Animated Blocks on Scroll ) – on a few sites – so I would consider it – just to try to reduce the bloat and having too much dang JS loading to show a page.

        For now I can get by with the astra theme pro options and generate blocks to do the things I had assumed would of been on the roadmap for gutenberg and coming soon.

        I had no idea that we’d be seeing an expensive per year plugin from some of the core devs to handle some basics, and so I continue to weep for WP.

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        • Remember “core contributor and doc writer for Gutenberg” are both great titles but come with Zero pay. Easily Amused is a team of 10 people and we all have families and kids. We are just trying to pay our bills, not looking to take advantage of anyone.

          Block Styles give users the ability to control more than 125 settings per block. Core might do some of what we offer in the long run but never the full package.

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          • It is my hope that you folks can not only pay the bills but make plenty of money to flourish.
            With the animation effects and stuff like that, I actually hope it’s really useful and successful and you all can get rich from doing stuff like that – and somehow make it super lean to only load what is needed and when to keep core vitals in the green as well.
            I do also hope basic things like backgrounds, and settings for different viewports, and basic containers and such will land in core very soon – so long as this basic stuff remains as addons only it’s a huge blemish for WP imho.

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        • “If I was looking for the ‘special effects, animations, and custom CSS for every block.’ – and could know that they could be triggered on entering the view port – it may save me from installing another plugin ( Animated Blocks on Scroll ) – on a few sites – so I would consider it – just to try to reduce the bloat and having too much dang JS loading to show a page.”

          Yes, it can do this, and we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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  4. Thank you Sarah for covering the exclusive news related to APPExperts plugin beta launch in this article along with other WordPress products. I always admire your story building capability and a huge fan of WPTavern blog. 🍻

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  5. I totally agree with DJSteve. It’s absolutely incomprehensible that Gutenberg hasn’t had responsive features since its inception. Certainly there was so much to do, but it should have been a priority. The most worrying is the lack of clear visibility when responsive will arrive officially in Gutenberg.

    And by the way $70 to have the responsive is overpriced. For example, Clicwy, which offers much, much more in terms of features for Gutenberg, is $49/year for three licenses.

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    • Hi MobileClo,

      The pricing listed for BlockStyles.com in the article was for the full membership, not the stand-alone plugin. The single plugin is $39/year.

      For $69/year you would get full block styles design controls(over 125 design settings per block), plus Dynamic Content, a block pattern maker/manager, a Full Site Editing theme called Gesso, and premium design assets that will be constantly added to by award-winning designers.

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  6. Block Styles starts at $39. The $69/year is a full membership with Dynamic Content, a Styles Library to save, manage, and browser block patterns. And a new Full Site Editing Theme call Gesso.

    Also, hover and pseudo-elements are available right now.

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