People have asked me what I use to build my Beaver Builder live demo sites and I’ve avoided doing a video because I was unsure of my set up.

When I started in 2014  I used Ninja Demos (from the team who created Ninja Forms).  It was a unique product, but they did not have the time to improve and support it. They dropped it a year later.  It’s still on few of my demos, but not for much longer.  I always had to hide error messages, use other plugins to alter permissions and hide things.

Luckily MotoPress came out with WordPress Demo Builder which I have been using since January 2017.  I believe it is a fork of the Ninja Demos plugin, but came out much improved with less bugs. It also has lifetime updates for one time payment making it very attractive.

My initial concerns:

1. I’ve seen quite a few other Demo Builders not getting supported and eventually disappearing.
   This seems unsurprising.  It’s not for the masses as has potentially high support demands. Also unlikely customers will have the developer skills to create their own.
2. I  don’t know who MotoPress are.
   Early documentation tells me English is not their first language and I can see they have been selling on Envato market place since 2014.
3.  The Ninja Demo fork.
   I think this is a great example of why the freedoms of GPL are so important. Just as WordPress exists because it was able to folk the b2 platform, my demos live on because of this.  But, of course, it’s hard to be sure of the commitment of those who have forked. They have invested less initially.

Why I’m not worried

1.  Having a demo has never been critical to me.
2.  I have not had a single reported issue with Motopress’ WordPress Demo Builder sites.
3.  It has continued to get updated (although not many are needed).
4.  Judging by the reviews and comments on them,  they take customer care seriously.
5.  I suspect, because of the fork, (and I guess that they are based in Asia) the plugin will be profitable enough for them to continue supporting.
6.  I have bought and have been looking at the chat and change-log of their Hotel Booking plugin. I feel they are serious people. Not just another me too product.

Main features

1.  Visitor activation by email that can be displayed as a form or pop-up.This is a departure from Ninja Demo which used a simple sum captcha question. On balance I think the change to email was an improvement. The old captcha seem to fail for some and I got too many multiple signups from I guess clever bots. It is reassuring to see an email.
2. Mailchimp integration.
3.  Personalization of emails via shortcodes.
4. Automatic clean up (you set the time allowed).
5. Ability to archive demo sites.
6. Easy user Roles and Restrictions.
7. Responsive Toolbar.

Important:

On one of my Ninja Demos I discovered one database had  grown to 20gb. This could still happen with WordPress Demo Builder as it clears the default tables in WordPress on deletion but not those added by other plugins.  There is instructions for developers on how to create a simple plugin to delete these too, but I have not tried this yet.

This will not be an issue if your plugins are all saving to the main WordPress tables.  Much of my weight came from WordFence tables.

Extras

This was the CSS I used to to style the activation widget (may need tidying up!)

.fl-content-builder .item-title{

color:#222;
font-weight: 400;
}

.mp-start-demo{

text-align: center;
}

.try-demo INPUT.mp-submit
{
padding:14px 18px;
color: #FFFFFF;
/*+border-radius: 0;*/
-moz-border-radius: 0;
-webkit-border-radius: 0;
-khtml-border-radius: 0;
border-radius: 0;
font-size: 18px;
margin-top: 10px;
}

.try-demo INPUT.mp-submit:hover
{
color: #FFFFFF;
background-color: #98AA01;
}


.fl-content-builder .mp-start-demo FORM .mp-demo-email
{
background-color: #F4F4F4;
padding: 19px;
color: #2D192A;
font-size: 18px;
}
.fl-content-builder INPUT[type=text]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=password]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=email]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=tel]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=date]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=month]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=week]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=time]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=number]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=search]::-webkit-input-placeholder, INPUT[type=url]::-webkit-input-placeholder, TEXTAREA::-webkit-input-placeholder
{
color: #2D192A;
font-size: 18px;
}

Links:

WordPress Demo Builder
Beaver Junction
WP Portfolio

Please don’t use our client demo site as I delete anything unexpected.