I spent months cold calling local service businesses (trades, salons, small restaurants). Originally I was selling websites, but the conversations kept drifting into how they track customers.

What I heard over and over: - Their "CRM" is a notebook, a phone's recent calls list, or the owner's memory. - They've tried real CRMs. Most quit within weeks because setup felt like a second job. - What they actually want to know is simple: did more people call this month, where did they come from, and what should I do next to get more?

That pushed me to build something much lighter, mostly tracking calls and Google listing views and turning it into a short weekly to-do list, rather than a pipeline tool. (I'm the founder of that, not linking it here.)

Question for the CRM folks: for a one- to five-person business, what's the minimum version of "customer tracking" that actually sticks? Have you seen any setup an owner keeps using past month two?

Every site I build starts the same way. A field plugin, a form plugin, an SEO plugin, and then four or five one-trick utilities for the things WordPress does not do by itself. Four admin menus, four sets of conventions, four things to keep updated.

So I wrote one plugin that does those four. It is free on wordpress.org and it is called Ultivo Toolkit.

What is in the free version:

• Custom fields. Visual builder, location rules, 33 field types including repeater. Stores data in exactly the same meta pattern as ACF, so existing field data keeps working and there is a migration tool for field groups and acf-json.
• Forms. Drag and drop builder, entries in the admin, notifications, file uploads outside the media library, optional spam protection.
• SEO. Title and description templates, Open Graph, sitemap. It prints nothing at all while Yoast, Rank Math or AIOSEO is active, so you can install it next to what you already run.
• Seventeen switches for the usual chores: duplicate posts, SVG and AVIF uploads, a custom login URL, manual content ordering, limit login attempts, redirects with a 404 log, SMTP, admin menu organiser. All off by default.

It needs WordPress 6.0 and PHP 7.4, so it should install on just about anything you still maintain.

Three things I would want to know if someone posted this at me:

Is it heavy? Each of the four parts can be switched off, and when it is off it registers nothing: no menus, no screens, no hooks, no queries. Measured on a stock install, the whole thing adds eight queries to a front end page.

What if I uninstall it? Your content stays. Field values go into ordinary post meta, the same shape ACF uses: client holds the value, _client remembers which field it came from. Delete the plugin and those rows are still on your posts, and get_post_meta() still returns them. Nothing is kept in a table of its own, and nothing is cleaned up on uninstall. You lose the builder, not the content. That is also why you can leave ACF switched on while you try this: it never switches off a plugin from someone else, it just points out where the two overlap and lets you decide.

Where is the catch? There is a paid version. Pro adds Blueprints (export your post types, taxonomies, field groups and forms to a file and import them on another site), Flexible Content and the Clone field, and it starts at $49 a year for one site. Everything I listed above is in the free version and stays there, including repeater, options pages and the ACF migration. Nothing is sent to us, ever. Two features do reach an outside service: spam protection if you switch it on, and the map preview in the admin.

It went into the directory five weeks ago and has had six releases since, so it is new and barely used, but it is not parked. That is exactly why I am posting. If you build sites for a living I would rather hear what is missing than get a download: what would stop you switching?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultivo/

https://preview.redd.it/k3fqazen1avh1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=b8c3fc2e55c681c45dcbb2721bf8f085943a7bcf

#WPML

Hi everyone,

I'd be interested in your opinion concerning the evolution of WPML v5.

****** This post was not to open a debate about translation plugins, so thanks in advance to do not start a debate to compare WPML with other solutions. ******

WPML Marketing Strategy:
I'm really upset that with the BIG update, they have put Automatic Translation with PTC by default, even on website that had never been translated with ATE, or even the Classic Translation Editor. I manage many websites, and I'll have to reconfigure WPML settoings on all of them and explain my client that this had to be done because of WPML, which they don't even know what it's about !

UX:
I understand that this is a first version, but hey, how come WPML made all those settings in TABS instead toggles or accordions ? Is feels like back in 2000.

Support:
Robots seems to be your support. I guess that if the robot fails to help, it will go to a human, but after how many chats ? I don't know yet !
That said, from what I tried, there robots seem not that bad, but I haven't had very difficult case for now. Did you ?

"Community":
Before, when you needed support, you could go in the "support section", type what your problem was, and before everything, it was showing you a forum with real cases with real people. It was not made to be a community, but there was something human.
All is gone ! No more forums !

https://preview.redd.it/k3fqazen1avh1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=b8c3fc2e55c681c45dcbb2721bf8f085943a7bcf

So, I was asking myself if I was the only one feeling that way with WPML, which I've been using for more that 13 years.

And as the only thing I found was a Reddit group for WPML with 2 users and not active for 2 years, I thought I'd have more feedback here ! ;-)

So, what's your experience / opinion ?

Hey guys, first time posting here. I'm redoing my site and for some reason now the cart has this horrible page populating issue where giant black boxes appear while the page is loading. Sometimes they go away in about .5 seconds or so, but a lot of times, you have to refresh the page to make them disappear. The overlay boxes are different every time. I'm attaching a few photos for reference. They always seem to frame a subsection, image or text. I'm wondering if anyone's had the same issue or knows a fix for this.

For what it's worth, my site is built with Wordpress , and hosted on Hostinger. Payment processing, licensing and products are handled by Woo. I've added a lot of customizations and Woo overrides to the cart because the stock Woo cart is heinous to look at. Any help is appreciated, thanks :)

Shopify and WooCommerce aren't competing for the same part of the web any more. Shopify has taken the top of it and WooCommerce has everything below, so both of them can fairly call themselves the biggest platform.

I think that explains why the figures that people publish never agree with each other. Elementor, Hostinger and WPBeginner quote numbers 4x apart, because each of them measured a different slice of the internet and none of them said which.

WooCommerce has also started falling. It lost three years of growth in the last 12 months while Shopify hit an all-time high - on the current trajectory, Shopify will overtake outright around the end of 2027.

I've written everything up, including the data, at: https://barn2.com/blog/shopify-vs-woocommerce-market-share/

I recently ask it to:

• delete 665 unused photos in media lib. And It checks and knows what's unused.
• generate webp photos manually, no plugins needed. It's one-time job
• install + setup site A->Z in one prompt. I used to do it manually: install, ssl, dns etc.

Everytime, I was like 🙄 why on earth I did those things by hand, for many years.