DEAL ALERT - Get 10% off Simple Feature Requests using code 'wpbuilds10' at the checkout!
If you have a product or service, it's critical that you have a mechanism for users to be able to offer their feedback. That could be comments, but perhaps more importantly you'd like to offer your users a way to help you make the product better. Give them a way that they can suggest features and vote for the features that others have already suggested. Better yet, it'd be nice to be able to display all of that on an easy to understand Kanban style roadmap. Today we've got a WordPress plugin which can do just that... and it's called Simple Feature Requests.
Before we get into that let's introduce you to James Kemp. He's the developer of the plugin and he's got heritage working with WordPress, so you know that you're in good hands.
In the podcast we find out that James has been working with WordPress for quite some time. Not just WordPress though, he's also got a history of building extensions for the popular Magento eCommerce CMS.
He started out creating software which he sold on Code Canyon. I'm sure that many of you have bought from there and perhaps still do. It has a large audience and many people can make a decent living if they manage to choose the right niche and get a good reputation and following.
So it was with James. After a short spell working for an agency, he went freelance, selling his plugins on Code Canyon.
This didn't last too long though and James decided that he wanted to set up hos own plugin company, which he did. It's called Iconic.
Iconic's strapline is:
Optimize Your Store With Our Feature-Rich, Sales-Boosting WooCommerce Plugins
Iconic Website
That's what they do. James' work with Magento provided a solid foundation for building up an impressive suite of plugins which will help your WooCommerce store to do more. At the time of writing, Iconic has 14 plugins for WooCommerce, each of which adds in an element which you might need, but which WooCommerce does not have out-of-the-box.
It's things like:
You get the idea. Nice additions to any store.
Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent, but it was needed, because...
With all of these Iconic plugins, James needed a way to keep in touch with his users to get feedback about where they wanted the plugins to go in the future. What could be improved? What feature was missing from the plugin? How would they like it to change over time?
There's heaps of 3rd party solutions for this kind of thing, but like any developer who's curious, James decided to scratch hos own itch and build the solution himself. And what better way to do that than build a WordPress plugin so that the likes of you and I could make use of it... Nice.
It's called Simple Feature Requests and it's great.
It's not got a million an one options, because, as the name suggests, the intention here was to keep it... erm... simple!
You've seen the interface before, it's common and that's a strength. Something familiar takes less energy to use.
Install the plugin, configure a few options and paste a shortcode (or use their premade pages) and you're done. Start getting client feedback in a matter of minutes. You can see a demo of how it all looks on the Simple Feature Requests website.
The strapline is:
Manage User Feedback in WordPress. Collect and manage user feedback using your existing WordPress website. Prioritize the product features important to you and your customers.
Simple Feature Requests Website
You can get users to submit their own ideas, vote on ideas that have already been submitted, put all the ideas on a kanban style roadmap so that users are in-the-know about what the piorities are. All with a few clicks.
Because it's WordPress all of the categries are easy to work with, and it'll work with your theme, but it offer some nice styling options as well, so that it looks exactly like your own brand.
He's a list of what the Simple Feature Requests WordPress plugin does / offers:
There's a functional free option on the WordPress.org repo, but for the full experience, you might like to look at the Pro version of the plugin. Which as you can see above adds a few nice little additions.
So in the podcast we talk about all this and what James has in store for the future of the plugin, which he decided upon using his own plugin!
Have a listen to the podcast and leave a comment below or in the WP Builds Facebook Group, where there's always a thread for the lastest podcast episode.
DEAL ALERT - Get 10% off Simple Feature Requests using code 'wpbuilds10' at the checkout!
Simple Feature Requests
Iconic
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