I am super happy to announce the release of Bricks 1.0 today. After putting in thousands of design & development hours the Bricks theme ships as the most complete initial release of any WordPress site builder. Yes, we could’ve released Bricks over a year ago, but excellence takes time.
Bricks is and has everything I ever wished for in a visual site builder for WordPress. An incredibly powerful tool that you can enjoy creating stunning sites with on a daily basis. It focuses on open development, speed, customizability, and a beautiful interface that’s fast & fun to work with.
No more forth-and-back into the WordPress dashboard, or cobbling together your site with dozens of incompatible and expensive plugins that slow down, or even worse, break your site.
This entire website has been built with nothing but Bricks (except for our public roadmap & idea board).
Let’s explore some of its highlights, and why now is a great time to take it for a spin …
Public, User-Driven Development
Before we dive into any specific features, I’d like to share with you how we approach product development. This should give you a good understanding of how we do things around here, and what you can expect going forward.
I never understood, nor appreciate everyone keeping their roadmap top-secret. You the user, deserve to know exactly, and at all times what is coming next, and also to have a real say at what is coming next. Product updates should be well-known and anticipated events, not sudden, big surprises.
That’s why Bricks entire development process is 100% public and user-driven.
I encourage you to submit your own feature requests via our idea board. Once an idea has been published, anyone can upvote and comment on it.
Ideas with enough traction (upvotes) will make it onto our public roadmap. Where you can follow along with their development in real-time. Ideas with the most upvotes are developed first.
Bricks is built for you, and will evolve with your help and collective feedback into something beautiful.
A Pretty & Productive Interface
Personally, I just can’t work with software that is not pleasing to my eye. Especially if it’s something I use on a daily basis. So we’ve spent countless hours to get every pixel right. Inside the builder and on the frontend. You probably only need to adjust typography and colors to your liking, and you are good to go.
The builder hosts countless little gems that help you create your sites in record time all on one screen. Some of which we’ll explore further down this article.
Unmatched Customizability
Bricks enables you to create beautiful, responsive, and fast loading sites. A big part of this is made possible by its vast options.
We like to say: “If it’s in WordPress, you can edit it with Bricks”. As you can pull any WordPress data from your database onto any page via dynamic data. With full support for all your custom fields (and ACF, Pods, Meta Box, and CMB2).
With more than 50 elements (packed with controls) and fully customizable layouts, you can finally bring any design to life. All editing is done 100% visually, in real-time, on the frontend of your site. Via dead simple, instant drag & drop. If that’s not enough, you can always create your own elements, without having to compile them as Gutenberg forces you to.
The builder itself comes in light & dark mode. You can freely resize & position the builder panel anywhere on your screen. Customize the autosave interval or enable manual saves. A snapshot (revision) is created on every save, so you can continue editing from any point in time.
Define granular builder access capabilities for every user or user role to provide either full access, edit content only rights, or block builder access completely.
Truly Responsive Editing
As more and more people access your site from their mobile devices providing a highly responsive website is an absolute must.
Bricks allows responsive mobile editing of any styling control. Visually adjust and optimize your site for desktop, tablet, mobile landscape & portrait devices.
You can quickly switch between different breakpoints to preview and edit your design via the toolbar or the “CTRL/CMD + B” keyboard shortcut.
Any Font You Want
Choosing the perfect font has a big impact on how your site is perceived. You can upload your own Custom Fonts, choose from over 800+ Google Fonts, or play it safe by using a customizable array of websafe fonts.
Template Library
We’ve got dozens of ready-to-use templates for you. So you can hit the ground running. Insertable with a single click anywhere on your site. Which you can then tweak to your liking. Or create your own templates. Accessing your templates from different Bricks installations is possible, too (via remote templates).
A Few More Builder Highlights:
- Edit your website copy like a document
- Apply hover styles visually to any block
- Pin elements for even faster access
- Searchable panel controls
- Structure panel for a birds-eye view of your entire page
- One-click in-builder preview (or via “CTRL/CMD + P” keyboard shortcut)
- Create & browse between pages within the builder
- Fully translatable & Right-to-left language support
- Built-in documentation & contact form
Theme Styles
Although Bricks looks slick out-of-the-box you can always visually adjust the default styles of your site and elements by creating your own Theme Styles. Import & export your theme styles for reuse in any other Bricks installation.
1 Million High-Quality Royalty Free Photos
Finding affordable website photography, that doesn’t scream stock photography, used to be a nightmare. With Bricks, you have access to over 1 million commercially free photos (via Unsplash) right from within the builder. Rename and download any image with a single click straight into your WordPress site.
R.I.P PhotoShop
Ah, PhotoShop. One of those tools no one enjoys using but ends up using all the time. With Bricks, you no longer have to fire up PhotoShop for every minor image tweak. You can visually adjust any image via CSS filters (blur, brightness, contrast, hue, invert, opacity, saturation, sepia).
Add unlimited gradients & overlays (those work for text, too), and highly customizable shape dividers to break up the standard box model.
Global Custom Color Palettes
Colors matter, a lot. That’s why Bricks comes with its very own custom color picker. Adjust hue, saturation, lightness, and transparency independently. Giving you the ultimate freedom to find the perfect color tone for any block.
Create your own custom color palettes, and add all the colors you need to them. Import & export entire palettes for reuse in any other Bricks installation. No need to recreate anything from scratch.
Changing any color automatically updates any other instance that is using the same color. Helping you maintain a consistant design system.
A Few More Design Highlights:
- CSS transformations
- 2000+ icons (FontAwesome, Ionicons, Themify)
- Custom CSS (global, per page, per block)
- Entry animations
- SVG upload + auto-sanitization
- One-click style reset
- Unlimited sidebars
- Global elements
- Visual block styling (margin, padding, copy & paste styles)
Performance & SEO
The builder itself runs on VueJS 3. The latest, most advanced, and loved JavaScript framework. All components are 100% custom-coded and optimized for Bricks. Builder render & load times are more than 50% faster than in Vue 2. Giving you a smooth and instant editing experience without any lag.
Thanks to clean, semantic code, and smart asset loading & optimization Bricks generates blazing fast, grade “A” loading websites out-of-the-box. No optimization plugin needed.
Search engine and social media settings are available for every page, right in the builder. Default WordPress scripts can be disabled, too.
Lifetime License
Celebrate the release of Bricks with us by getting your lifetime license below. This gives you regular one-click updates and support for life.
- STARTER: $59 (1 website)
- ULTIMATE: $149 (1000 websites)
To get a more in-depth idea of how Bricks works, make sure to check out its official knowledge base, the Bricks Academy, over at https://academy.bricksbuilder.io
Not a native English speaker? Fear not. Bricks is available in the following languages, which more being added as time progressed:
- English (default)
- German
- Portuguese (Portugal & Brazil)
- Spanish
- Russian
- French
- Italian
- Dutch
- Polish
I am not a fan of fake scarcity, so there won’t be any “only 78 licenses left, hurry up!” messages. But this lifetime deal will either go up in price by at least 40% or disappear in favor of a yearly subscription. I’m not sure yet which road we’ll take. So if you want to be an early adopter, and help shape Bricks with your own ideas, now really is the best time.
Bricks is also 100% bootstrapped and will stay that way. So we can move, pivot, and improve at a much faster pace than more established players. This brings me to our last point …
What’s Next
Feature-wise, our public roadmap is the single best place to see what’s next. Or contribute your own ideas.
WooCommerce Builder
We are already halfway through the WooCommerce builder. Which allows you to create your entire online store visually (in great detail): product listings, single product pages, checkout, account, and cart. We’ll provide you with pre-designed WooCommerce templates, too.
Affiliate Program
If you’d like to help spread awareness for Bricks and get paid for doing so, why not become an affiliate? I manually review every application, so please provide as many details as possible in case you apply.
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I can’t wait to see what you are going to build with Bricks. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to get in touch via email: help [at] bricksbuilder [dot] io
Best,
Thomas
