We are asked often: “Does Matador Jobs Pro” work with page builder plugins and themes and the answer is “yes, but.” Yes, because, at the end of the day, Matador Jobs Pro was made by WordPress experts for WordPress users, as are the page builders plugins and themes, but some of the features that make those page builders may not be optimized for Matador or vice-versa, and a developer relying on a page builder theme may find themselves with questions or needs specific to using Matador in that plugin or theme that we are unable to answer.
“Page Builders,” What & Why?
WordPress was initially released in 2003 as a blogging platform. WordPress was a tool to help people to maintain content for online journals or “blogs” without needing to write code. Back then, a lot of the things we now think of when we think about WordPress were not included in the software. We didn’t have the ability to create static “pages”, install our own “themes” to make our site unique or look different than the default, or install “plugins” to adjust or augment behavior and features. These were added as WordPress grew over the last 20 years.
By the 2010’s, WordPress had evolved into a fully-featured Content Management System or CMS. In general, people with limited or no coding skills could create and publish content on their own websites without needing a developer, but they found the content editor lacked tools to build highly formatted content like columns or pricing tables, etc, and that if they wanted that highly designed content, they still needed a developer to step in; the promise of WordPress being an easy to use content editor was a promise not kept as the design requirements went up.
Meanwhile, other online CMS platforms had robust visual editors but not the customizability WordPress offered plugin developers. So plugin developers solved the problem by creating robust visual editor experiences which came to be known as “page builders.”
If your site uses Elementor, Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, Divi, or others like it, you’re using a page builder.
The WordPress community knew it was behind the ball, and since 2016 has been aggressively building an official, included with WordPress editor code-named Gutenberg and officially known as the “Block Editor.” While this tool, with every release, does more and more, it’s been slow to be adopted.
With time, WordPress evolved into a fully-realized CMS, or content management system, meant for managing all types of content on the web, including “posts” and “pages” and other content types added to it by plugins like Matador adds “jobs” and “applications.”
Efficient Design Principles
Before I explain the how, let me explain the why.
Matador Jobs is built by passionate, experienced WordPress experts to be effective and useful for people in all parts of the WordPress ecosystem. We try to design features that are generic and useful for a majority of our users, but must also keep the size of Matador small so it can be updated and maintained efficiently.
To accomplish this goal, we focus on optimizing to greatest common traits of our users, which includes WordPress core of course and Bullhorn and some support for some essential third-party plugins. This helps us focus and helps us keep a smaller, more efficient, easier to maintain codebase. We cannot design an efficient maintainable piece of software if we set out to explicitly support each quirk of a user’s tech stack.
We listed the five most popular 3rd Party Page Builders, but there are many more that are less popular while still being prevalent, and in addition to those 3rd Party Page Builders, we must support the core WordPress editing experiences of the “TinyMCE,” aka “Classic Editor,” and “Block Editor,” aka “Gutenberg Editor.”
Matador Jobs Pro is built by extremely experienced WordPress professionals with great care for honoring and working within the amazing WordPress ecosystem. That said, WordPress is not without fault, and was slow to extend advanced design tools to its users, resulting in users who couldn’t afford skilled developers being unable to deliver the websites they want.
With