An Interview with Cristian Antohe

Sorry some of the audio gets a bit funky at times.

Cristian Antohe is part of the team that built Profile Builder Pro, a front end registration, login, edit profile and user listing plugin for WordPress. He’s a WordPress developer, web designer and Open Source fanatic.

A couple of years ago he co-founded Reflection Media, a “custom WordPress solutions” company and every Thursday curates wpMail.me, the free weekly WordPress newsletter.

In this interview he talks openly and honestly about getting premium WordPress plugins to market and the challenges of managing client work.

For your chance to win $148 worth of premium plugins, including the WordPress Creation Kit and the Profile Builder Pro, leave a comment below this video with a suggestion on a feature you would like Cristian to include in a future version of either of the plugins.

Cristian will be back in one week to award the prizes.

Links

WordPress Creation Kit
Profile Builder Pro
Cozmos Labs
Reflection Media
WPMail.me

23 thoughts on “An Interview with Cristian Antohe

  1. Hi, I am a blogger – not a developer – but used to be a coder – in the old days – too much has happened and I cannot keep up – but I try. I found the comments here as interesting as the video – almost. Keeping up with my life, my blog and learning what you are offering Troy is more than a full time day – but your information and videos are always excellent. As a blogger, not a developer – who is interested in being able to do more than basic back end stuff – like, I want to be able to change the oil in my own car, change my own brakes, change my own flat tire- etc… on my website – and would love to have access to a tutorial specifically designed for people like me on analytics that help me analyze where to spend my time best, how to use the analytics and employ the changes I need to at my level
    🙂
    Valerie

  2. Me again. I just looked at the WordPress Creation Kit. ALl I have to say is “WOW!”. This looks extremely useful. I am off to study it. Is there a test site where one can take it out for a spin?

  3. Interseting interview. Thanks very much for sharing. Profile Builder Pro – If it had a way to define and link to a number of “sub-profiles” it would be a great way to regiuster children for events. The profile would be in the parent’s name and the “sub-profiles” would define their children. The ability to add and define the fields of the sub-profile would also have to be there. Field examples would be: birthday, t-shirt size, grade in school, etc. I am not sure if the plugin is multi-site compatible, but I would like it to be that as well. I would love to have an opportunity to explore the use of Pro version to see how I could expand and use it. The test drive using the free version just doesn’t give one the opportunity to explore the real capabilites and functions that are described in the feature list. Thanks very much for listening!

  4. No suggestions at this time but looking at WCK it may be just what I’ve been looking for to create a directory that a client wants on their website, that can be added to by their members. WCK looks pretty comprehensive and hopefully is straightforward to format the front-end, both from the members point of view and the website visitors (they want that to look really good – they’re architects!!).
    Glad I read this post. Now to pop and see how the other plugin can help me 🙂

  5. Profile Builder looks to be awesome. One thing I would love to see is this integrating with BuddyPress. I am running 3 BuddyPress-based sites and I can see this would streamline the sign-up process enormously.

    Another thing that I don’t see there (unless I have missed it) is subscription processing. i.e. taking the money for signing up.

    Nice job.

    • Hey Ken – congratulations on winning a copy of the profile Builder Pro plugin.

      Thanks for contributing. Check your emails for details on how to redeem your prize.

  6. Great interview. I’ll love to see a link to a demo site with the plugin. Also, including social media log in options will be nice.

  7. I’ve previously looked for solutions that are addressed with Profile Builder, but I must have been searching with the wrong terms.

    This looks like a great plugin that can easily manage the requirements for user registrations and updates.

    This appears to be quite a mature product and I can’t see any deficiencies at all!

    Thanks also for highlighting wpmail.me

  8. First I’d like to express my thanks for wpMail.me. I’ve been a subscriber for about a year and have benefited immensely from it’s insight and news.

    Over the last 9 years, I’ve been building WordPress blogs (initially) and sites (more recently) as an increasingly larger percentage of my one-man consulting business. With about 60 WordPress sites behind me, I’ve learned its many, many advantages but also a few areas of WordPress weaknesses.

    I was unaware of Cristian’s plug-ins until watching this video and quickly clicked over to the Cozmos Labs’ site and reviewed both. It became instantly apparent to me that Profile Builder fills a recurring need I’ve run into multiple times!

    The WordPress Creation Kit is also intriguing and could obviously become a powerful tool for selected clients.

    Thanks, Cristian, for all of your great work!

  9. Hi Cristian,
    what I would like to see in WCK, that is an awesome plugin, it’s the same that I asked you in your blog comment, months ago: a template composer.
    You made creation of custom posts/taxonomies and fields a breeze but when need to display those information on front end page, need to code many many things that is beyond normal WP user (and some advanced too) skills.
    Also, in forum and comment, how to display data are the most common questions, so why don’t reduce them boosting WCK capabilities and sales?
    With this feature WCK should be the best in its field and something that worth to pay for.
    Please, again, think on this 😉
    Thanks in any case for plugins and support.

    Marco

    • Hey Congratulations Marco – you won a copy of Profile Builder Pro and WordPress Creation Kit.

      Thanks for contributing. Check your emails for details on how to redeem your prize.

  10. For the WordPress Creation Kit, I couldn’t see if this is a feature or not but what I’d love it is an approval process for existing content that has been edited i.e. user edits item, admin pinged for approval, admin approves changes, changes pushed to site. This would be applicable to so many of the sites I manage and would be a great way to be a buffer between editors and the live content. It would be great!

    • Thank you for the feedback!

      That’s the current functionality now, when admin approval for new posts is active. What’s not implemented is admin pings, however that could be achieved with a simple plugin.

    • Hey Congratulations Simon – you won a copy of WordPress Creation Kit.

      Thanks for contributing. Check your emails for details on how to redeem your prize.

  11. For WCK, it’d be nice to see something specifically about creating Events as custom post type. I suppose you can figure it out with the kit, but I’m guessing it may be difficult for a beginner to set up?

    For the Profile Builder plugin, my understanding is that it improves the user interface for logging in and… ? I’m not super clear on what it else it does. The page copy says that default WP user registration sucks, but then doesn’t really clarify exactly which part is bad and how the plugin fixes that.

    On both the plugins, I feel like going through the description I’m missing something key. I simply not sure where I would use them, so it’s hard to think of what extra I’d like to see them do.

    I know I’d like user registration to offer an opt-in directly to Constant Contact, but I assume I either need a constant contact plugin specifically, or I can use the Pro version’s redirect to take users to a thank you page that has my sign-up form embedded. It’d be nice to have it on the log-in or sign-up page though. Since it uses shortcodes, maybe I can still do that?

  12. Listened to the interview and the Profile Builder Pro has caught my eye. Would love to see a feature that lets one manage more than one profile at a time with ease! Perhaps incorporate pre-designed custom profiles that one can integrate with the click of a mouse. Hope I win! 🙂

  13. Great interview, Cristian, and thanks for all you’re contributing to the WordPress community.

    I find that the premium plugins that add the most value play well with others. For Profile Builder Pro, I’d love to see integrations with email services like MailChimp’s Mandrill. Email is still the key to building strong relationships, and Mandrill and similar apps offer great tools to help make it happen. What do you think?

  14. Hello,
    I would love WCK to change the add new post/page UI so that there are 2 new options: 1) Save and New (save item and open the add new item interface), 2) Save and Close (save item and return to the all posts/pages list).

    This is how Joomla does it and it speeds up content creation.

    Hope that’s a useful suggestion.
    Thank you.

  15. Hi! I’m a big fan of Wpmail.me!

    I’m wondering if I could add fields to Profile Builder for membership level, and use with my membership plugin.

    Then use the Advanced User Listing to be able to list and filter/search by level on the front.

    That would be extremely useful for my members.

  16. After reviewing all the info on Profile Builder Pro. The suggestion I think that would hopefully help Christian sell more is to include a link to demo version of a basic site running the profile builder. It saves someone the effort of uploading the non-pro version to be able to test-drive the capabilities and have a real experience from the front-end and admin of what it is like to use the plugin. I find that I am way more inclined to buy something if I can actually get a quick test-drive prior to downloading it myself and a nice demo could have more impressive data already uploaded to wow people immediately.. in this age of instant gratification. I thought the video on the wordpress.org page was nice and would also include it or another type of video on the actual product page at cosmoslabs. It’s a very impressive plugin. Hope my $.02 is helpful. Thank You.

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