Transcription
In this video, I’ll show you how to collect user feedback, prioritize it, and then display it on a road map. This is perfect. If you run a membership site, sell software or even just do online courses anywhere, you have a community and you want to find out what is important to them. You’ll want to watch this video. Stay tuned. What’s up, everybody, it’s Dave here from Profitable Tools. And today we’re looking at a simple feature request.
This is a WordPress plugin that allows you to collect feature requests from your audience and then display it in a roadmap. Without further ado, let’s hop over to my WordPress demo site. Here is demo client AMCOM. Use this site on a lot of different videos to what I think about 90 plug ins installed here. I just got the simple feature request plug in installed over here. You can see it added a new custom post type called request. So go ahead and check this out.
There’s a couple of things we need to do it to get set up. So let’s go over to settings and then head over to general. Now, the first thing we need to do is create an archive page. Now, this is much simpler than it may sound. If that sounds technical to you, don’t worry. All you need to do is copy this little shortcut right here. I’ll press command, see? And then let’s go ahead and make a new page.
Essentially, this is the page where your feature requests will come in. So I’ll call this feature requests and add the shortcode. I’ll just hit the little button over here, look for the short code block and paste it in. Great. I’m good to go. I’ll go ahead and hit publish here. Now, before I take a look at this, I do need to go back over to the simple feature request, plug in and let them know about the new archive page I’ve just created back over to request down to Settings General and then under archive page, I’ll choose my feature request page.
There we go. We’re all set. Let’s go ahead and save changes now just so you can see what we’re going after. This is the simple feature requests demo site. We’ve got a very nicely designed implementation of their in right now. We’ve got a feature request I could enter in my own if I wanted them to add a new feature to the plugin. I can see a lot of people are already doing this. Of course, I could upvote other people’s requests, so if I think something’s a good idea, I’d be able to update that.
You can see that there are statuses assigned to some of these, like this feature request is planned. Well, some of the others are in review or maybe even declined or planned. Those are the different options you get in the default settings for different statuses. If you look over at the right hand sidebar, you see the opportunity to register or log in for your account so that you can go ahead and participate in the feedback. You can also see what the top requests are at a glance so you don’t have to scroll through looking for the best ones.
Once you’ve collected your feature requests, you can display them in a nice looking road map. Let’s go and check out what that’s going to look like. So here are the different categories of their demo site right now. They have requests that are either under review, planned or started. But we will be able to customize this and have it show up for different statuses that might be relevant to your business. Back over to the demo site. You can see that the shortcode is displaying correctly on the feature request page.
It’s taken on the style of my theme. So the buttons are dark, grayish. We’ve got a more boxed in look versus the wide look of the simple feature request demo site. Overall, this is looking really good, with almost no effort put in at all. I’m going to go ahead and create an account here and then make a feature request that we can see the entire process to register. All right. I’ve got some account credentials that register great.
Now I am logged in. I’m going to go ahead and request some new features on it. So I went ahead and added a feature request. I have also included a description to be a little bit more elaborate about what I’m looking for. Let’s go ahead and submit this. I got a message that says thank you for the request. It’s currently pending. So that means I’ve got to go over in the back end and review this. I can either declined the request or maybe say that it’s going to be planned for later or even say it’s already developed.
Now, I do have the opportunity to leave a comment here. This is something you can toggle off on the back end and I’ll show you that as well. So we’re back over the admin area here. Let’s go over to requests. I’ll choose all requests. Here is the request that I just submitted as a different user. Let’s go ahead and edit this so you can see over here in the sidebar, I can change the status of this request.
Currently, it’s set to pending. I could say it’s published under review, planned, started, completed or declined. Let’s go ahead and choose planned late update. And now if I refresh this page, I can see that this item has been marked as planned. Now, if I wanted to turn off the ability to have comments under feature requests, I could do that inside of these settings, General. And then right here, there’s just a little checkbox that’s enable comments.
Let’s go in and turn that off. Let’s save changes now for refresh the page. The comments here will disappear. You might be noticing there’s a powered by simple feature request icon right here that might bother some of you. You want a white label stuff, you can also turn that off over. In general, there is a label credit right here. Let’s go and save that and reload and that’s gone as well. OK, this looks great. But what if you have multiple products or services that you’re trying to collect feedback for?
Well, there are categories to solve. Just that back over in the image panel will go over to request and then choose categories. Let’s add in a few categories here. All right. I’ve got three categories added. Now, let’s see what this looks like on the front end. Over in the sidebar, I can sort by the different categories that are available. I also have a drop down menu to sort by categories here. If I go ahead and add a new feature request, I also have the ability to assign it to a category so it could correspond to a particular product, if you like the looks of this page, but maybe you’re not crazy about having the sidebar.
You can customize that all by modifying the shortcode just a little bit over in the simple feature request documentation. There’s a. Pacific shortcode without a sidebar, let’s go out and copy that and see what it looks like on the front end. I’ll go ahead and modify that shortcode. I added in, let’s say, up to here and let’s refresh the page. All right. There you go. And I have a full with feature request area. Maybe you still want to embed the sidebar?
Well, you can do that with a separate sugarcoats. You could do this with maybe a little pop up icon or something using Elementor. It could be a great way to add some extra functionality without taking over the extra screen. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. Here is the sidebar shortcode. I’ll go ahead and copy this then over and Elementor. I’ll go to templates and pop ups. Well, then you pop up. I’ll call this feature request sidebar and I’m just going to choose one of their templates to keep this easy.
I’ll clear out the templates, contents. And then finally, I’m going to add in that short code for the sidebar only for we’re all done with a pop up. Let’s go ahead and hit the gear icon down here. I’m actually gonna have this show up on the right hand side bar. Let’s go ahead, make it a little bit taller here. Will choose custom and let’s go ahead and say it. Custom height. I don’t know. How about this?
Big looks pretty good. And lastly, I want to change this style because I’m not super crazy about that background color. I go ahead and make it all white. All right. That’s looking much better. Let’s go ahead and hit update now. I don’t need this to display anywhere, so let’s just go ahead and hit save and close back over my feature request page. I’m going to go ahead and open this up with Elementor. But before I do that, I’m going to copy my shortcode and actually get rid of this block and lets it edit with Elementor.
Let’s add a new section. I’ll add some text here to drop in my shortcode. Next, let’s add in a button. I sit down here in a new section. We go ahead and rename this and quickly style the button to look a little bit more palatable now and select the button, go over to Advanced and choose position. I’m going to choose fixed right now and go ahead and move this around a little bit. Right now I’ve got the button in the lower right hand corner of the screen.
Let’s go and link this up to my pop up over to content and under link will hit the dynamic. Tagg’s, scroll down to actions and choose pop up. I’m going to search for my feature request. Pop up. Here it is. So here’s our new feature request page that we made inside of Elementor. Obviously, it could have taken more time to really make this look amazing, but right now it looks pretty darn good. And I have my feature request button or request a feature button down the corner.
Of course, I can click on this. I’d be able to log in, create an account and then be able to see all of the top requests over here right in the right hand side bar, and it doesn’t get in the way of the rest of the user interface. So why do I go through the trouble of showing you how to use a pop up inside of Elementor inside of this video? Well, I want to get you thinking about different ways that you could use this shortcut and not really just be stuck with the default layout if you want to get a little bit more creative with the plug in.
All right. So we’ve got some user feedback coming in. And, of course, now we want to display that in the form of a road map. Well, there’s a shortcut for that. So let’s head over to the docs. I’m going to copy and paste that. We’ll make a brand new page for the road map. Here is the road map shortcut. Notice that there are a bunch of parameters you can use to modify the short code if you want to be a little bit more precise.
But for me, I’m just gonna go ahead and display at the entire road map. Obviously only have the two requests that were just submitted back over in the admin panel will go over two pages, add new and this time we’ll call this road map. Might as well open this up in Elementor as well. This time I’ll add in a heading, then I’ll grab another text widget for the shortcode was hit publish and see what this looks like on the front end.
I’m only seeing the one card and that’s because I didn’t go ahead and change the status of the other submission. That’s actually on purpose because we don’t want any old card to randomly show up in our product roadmap. The other thing that’s kind of jarring here is that the headlines are displaying really, really large and that has to do with my theme setting, not necessarily the settings inside of simple feature requests. So let’s change both of those things. First of all, I’m going to go into my theme and modify the heading like customize because I’m using Astra.
I’ll go to global typography and then under headings I can go ahead and change the H2 here. Right now it’s set to be a very large 42 pixels. Let’s make it a little bit more reasonable. All right. There’s twenty five that looks a lot better. Let’s go ahead and save this. Now, back over in the dashboard. Let’s go ahead and give the other item a status. So under requests, I go to all requests. So let’s go ahead and change the status to started to update and let’s refresh the page.
There we go. Now we have both columns displaying planned as well as started. So that’s it. That’s simple feature request. I think this is a great way to keep your audience engaged with what you’re working on. You want to grab a copy of this? Of course, the link will be down below. That will be our referral link for the channel. So if you click on that, we will get a little bit of a commission on the back end.
You have any questions about this plugin or anything else related to WordPress software as a service, lifetime deals, anything in that vicinity. Make sure you leave me a comment down below or head over to the Facebook group. I’m on there each and every day interacting with a community of amazing entrepreneurs. So you do it for this video. I hope you found it helpful. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next review.
