Team Builder — Meet The Team WordPress Plugin Review

This week we are going to review Team Builder, our very own plugin that is designed to build a showcase for your team on your WordPress site. There are plenty of team showcase plugins and add-ons but I’m sure you won’t find anything better than Team Builder. In industries where the people behind your work are just as important as your work – having a team showcase is a good idea for any company or organization. It’s a nice way to show your team members how proud you are of them as well as show your visitors just how awesome your team is.

People are naturally curious and adding a team showcase can satisfy that curiosity as well as gain their trust. This is especially important if you are in the design or tech industry. Nowadays there are all sorts of phishing scams lurking on the internet, many people can’t or won’t do business with a company they don’t trust.

In just a couple of minutes you can build a slick showcase for your team. This is a multi-purpose plugin that does more than just team showcases for your business. You can use it for anything you want really — build a grid of products, showcase testimonials, keep track of your favorite sports players and more. Team Viewer is versatile enough to get a lot of mileage out of. In this review we’ll go over the plugin as we build a showcase for a pack of huskies that are ready for adoption from a local rescue shelter.

Review

This plugin is very lightweight, it loads fast and in the admin panel as well as on your website. There are so many possibilities when it comes to styling your employee showcase. Add pictures, links, desriptions, social media buttons and more. There are many built in options to change the responsive nature of your team showcase as well as the layout.

Take things even further by using custom CSS styles. In this review I am not going to play with styles too much, I am going run through all the options and put up a basic showcase. Before we begin with our project we’ll go through some of the options.

After you install the plugin you will see Team Builder in your dashboard menu. Click on it to enter the plugins main panel. You can see below that I’ve already created some employees and a team. There are two main areas. “My Teams” and “All Employees.” Up in the right hand corner of the screen there is a “+” button to add employees or teams and a “?” that offers some tips. The first thing you should do after you checkout the documentation is click on the “?” You will see a screen pop up as shown below. Here you get a basic idea of how this plugin works. Everything is really simple and intuitive.
Let’s start with the husky project. We want to showcase the dogs at the shelter and all we need is their picture, name and maybe a brief description. Highlighted are some of the buttons that you can use to get started.After you have built your team showcase and are ready to post it, you can click here to get the shortcode. Just copy and paste to put it on a widget, post or page.

1. This button takes you to the team panel where you can edit your team. Here is where you add employees, change photos, layout, colors and other options. We will have more on that later.
2. You can delete the team from here.
3. This button allows you to add employees or team members. I suggest you add the employees first, that way they will be ready to add from the team member panel.
4. This button is where you can open up the tips box as mentioned before.

First we will add an employee, or in this case a husky. Click on the plus button and choose Add Employee from the drop down menu. We are going to keep things simple. All we are adding is a photo, name and brief tagline about the dog. For the photo it recommends at least 100×100. I chose to make my file 500×500 just to make sure the resolution was crisp when it shrunk down. After you have added everything in click the Save button.

In my browser it refreshed the window. I closed it and I still didn’t see the employee. So I refreshed the page and she showed up in the list of employees. To add someone to the team go back to the main panel and click the plus on the team you would like to use. If you don’t have a team created yet, you can click the button in the right hand corner or type in the name of your team and hit “enter” in the My Teams Panel. I already have a team so I just needed to hit the add button.
In my browser it refreshed the window. I closed it and I still didn’t see the employee. So I refreshed the page and she showed up in the list of employees. To add someone to the team go back to the main panel and click the plus on the team you would like to use. If you don’t have a team created yet, you can click the button in the right hand corner or type in the name of your team and hit “enter” in the My Teams Panel. I already have a team so I just needed to hit the add button next to the team members under My Teams. This will take you to the Team Builder. Here is where you will decide how everything will look and function. You will notice that there are 4 options panelsGeneral Information – here is where you can edit the Team Name, Team Title and add a description if you need to. All I want to display is a Team Title so I filled it in accordingly. All Employees – all the employees that aren’t already in the current team you are working on will display here.Builder – here there are some display options for how you want each employee to look. My layout is very basic so the builder is only showing options for the picture and name. If you hover over the section it will be highlighted and an edit button will pop up to the side. Design Customization – most of the options you will play with will be here.There are options for Layout and Template at the top to select predefined looks. There are 7 different sections in the Design Customization panel:

• Interface Elements
• Interface Styling
• Effects
• Layout Settings
• Card Settings
• Block Visibility
• Custom CSS

Now that you have an idea of all the options available let’s see what our team showcase of huskies will look like on the site. To add an employee to the team, just drag and drop in the Team Builder.In this example we are keeping things very simple. Below you can see the options we chose for the display. Under Card Settings we only have Body, Photo, and Name Enabled.

Conclusion

I was excited to get to test out this awesome plugin for free since I got to write about it. I’ll definitely be purchasing it to use on some other WordPress websites — it saved me hours of time I would’ve spent playing with the CSS and HTML code. Team Builder was very simple to use and easy understand. You don’t even need to read the documentation to get started even though you should.

Everything is fairly straightforward and I didn’t run into any problems. This is a versatile plugin that has a number of different possible uses. In the future I will have some more in depth reviews for other projects I use it with. I tested my showcase on a few different browsers and mobile devices and it adjusted nicely on each of them. I was really happy with everything with everything Team Builder had to offer.