The other half of the August cycle: six new plugins from a form builder to A/B tests, a Video Studio that turns posts into narrated Shorts, affiliate links and ad experiments measured with real numbers, a real-visitor performance panel, automatic critical CSS, and sitemaps that announce every language you publish in.
The August round-up covered memberships, migration and integrations. This post covers the other half of the cycle: the tools that arrived around that wave — new plugins, a video pipeline, revenue instruments and a performance layer you can verify with your own numbers.
Six new plugins
All six ship with the product, install from the plugin manager and are written by jekcms — nothing to buy or keep compatible:
- Form Builder. Unlimited custom forms with ten field types, embedded anywhere with the
[form id=N]shortcode; submissions collect in the panel. Conditional logic and multi-step forms came later in the month, so a quote form can show its price step only after a service is picked. Honeypot, CSRF and rate-limit protection are on by default. - Web Push. Visitors subscribe with one click and get a browser notification when you publish. The keys are pure-PHP VAPID generated on your server — no OneSignal-style middleman, the subscriber list stays yours. A campaign composer, click statistics and a welcome notification followed within the month.
- Digital Downloads. Sell files or give them away as lead magnets with the
[download id=N]shortcode: delivery is token-based, and each file can carry a download limit and an expiry. - Editorial Calendar. A kanban board (Idea → Draft → Review → Ready) plus a month view; assign posts to authors, set due dates and editorial notes. The publish decision stays where it always was — with you.
- Audience (CRM). Newsletter subscribers, form leads, download recipients and commenters are unified by e-mail address into one contact list with tags, segments, a per-contact activity timeline and CSV export. Newsletter campaigns can target a saved segment instead of the whole list.
- A/B Tests. Headline and call-to-action experiments with
[ab id=N]: assignment is cookieless and deterministic, and the panel shows impressions, conversions and the rate per variant.
Video Studio: posts become Shorts
Video Studio turns a written post into a narrated vertical video: an AI voice-over reads your summary while the post's images carry the visuals, rendered with FFmpeg in the Shorts/Reels format. Videos are capped at 90 seconds so they stay eligible for Reels, and the finished file publishes to YouTube and Instagram from the panel. A post you wrote once now reaches readers who never open a browser tab for it.
Revenue, measured instead of guessed
- Affiliate Links. Every affiliate link becomes a clean
/go/slugaddress with click tracking that separates bots from people, and the requiredrel="sponsored"attribute is added for you. Rename or repoint a link in one place without touching any post, and dead destinations are caught automatically. - Ad A/B testing. Define two or more size or layout variants for the same ad slot. Each visitor gets a cookieless sticky assignment; impressions, clicks and CTR are measured per variant with bots filtered out. Enter your RPM and the panel compares estimated revenue — you learn which placement earns more from data, not from a feeling.
SEO that tells you what to do next
- Search Console Insights. Your Search Console history becomes an action list: declining posts, keywords sitting just off the first page, and two posts cannibalizing the same query are flagged automatically.
- A weekly e-mail summary. Google Console now sends a digest of rising and falling queries with an opportunity list, so the panel comes to you instead of the other way round.
- Every language, discoverable. On multilingual sites the posts sitemap now lists published posts in every public language, and translation pairs are announced with
hreflangalternates includingx-default— the format Google recommends. Duplicate feed addresses now 301-redirect to the canonical/feed. - AI visibility. A new audit covers
llms.txtand your AI-bot policy, so you decide how AI crawlers see the site.
Performance you can verify
- A real-visitor performance panel (RUM). LCP, CLS and INP are measured from your actual visitors and reported as p75 the way Google reports them: overall, by device, by page type, plus a slowest-pages list. It is cookieless and stores no IP addresses — no external service involved.
- Automatic Critical CSS. Above-the-fold styles are extracted from your site's real pages per theme and inlined, while theme stylesheets load asynchronously. There is nothing to configure; the extraction refreshes itself when you change themes.
Smaller, but you will notice
- Quizzes gained a premium engine: time limits, instant per-question feedback, a reusable question bank and scored personality results.
- Recipe cards are now edited in a visual panel inside the post editor, and readers get a serving-size adjuster that recalculates ingredient amounts.
- The contact form grew up: reply from the panel, bulk actions, CSV export and a phone field.
As always, the complete, itemized list is in the changelog. Between the two August posts, this is the shape of the cycle: the membership platform arrived in the first half — the tools that make it earn, measure and travel arrived in the second.
