Artbees, the developer of the Jupiter X WordPress theme, has made a huge enough step by making a switch from WPBakery to Elementor. The developer doesn’t completely get rid of WPBakery, though. However, WPBakery is now a recommended plugin, instead of a required plugin. The decision is reasonable enough as Elementor can be got for free. Plus, Elementor is today’s most popular page builder plugin with massive growth.
Another reason, Elementor has a very open ecosystem that allows third-party developers to develop add-ons. To make Jupiter X look more exclusive, Artbees develops an add-on that is made exclusively available only on Jupiter X. The add-on is Raven.
What is Raven?
Raven is a premium Elementor add-on developed by Artbees. This add-on is built exclusively for the Jupiter X theme. The initial version of this add-on had 22 widgets. Today, there are 26 widgets offered by Raven (version 1.9.2).
What you can do with Raven?
Along with Elementor, Advanced Custom Fields, and Jupiter X Core, Raven is a required plugin on the Jupiter X theme bundle. Just like other Elementor add-ons like JetElements, Essential Addons, and Happy Addons, Raven also adds extra widgets to your Elementor to allow you to add more creative elements to the web page you are working on. With Raven, you have more options to customize a theme part like the header, the footer, and more especially the single post layout. There are at least four widgets you will need to customize a theme part:
- Navigation Menu
- Post Content
- Post Meta
- Site Logo
In addition to the four widgets above, Raven also comes with the following widgets.
- Alert
- Button
- Categories
- Countdown
- Counter
- Divider
- Flex Spacer
- Form
- Heading
- Icon
- Image
- Photo Album
- Photo Roller
- Posts
- Posts Carousel
- Post Comments
- Products
- Search Form
- Shopping Cart
- Tabs
- Video
- Breadcrumbs
As you can see on the list above, Raven has some widgets that are only available on Elementor Pro such as Posts, Form, and Search Form. These widgets are crucial enough to build a website with Elementor since they allow you to add key elements of a website. For instance, you can use the Posts widget to display articles on your website by a certain parameter. While the Form widget, you need it to create a contact form or an email subscription form.
Does Raven has a dependency on other plugins
Of course, you need to activate Elementor before being able to use Raven since it is an Elementor add-on. What about other plugins?
First, you need to know that Jupiter X is a WordPress theme that is bundled with several plugins, including JetPlugins. Technically, Raven has no dependency on plugins other than Elementor. So, if you want to simplify your WordPress site to make it lighter, you can disable other plugins. In fact, the Artbees team suggests you disable the unneeded plugins since too many active plugins may slow down your site.
Jupiter X itself has only 4 required plugins:
- Advanced Custom Fields
- Elementor
- Jupiter X Core
- Raven
Integrations and flexibility
As you can see on the list of the Raven widgets above, Raven comes with a Form widget that you can use to create a form to your website. You can use this widget to create an email subscription form as Raven supports integration with Mailchimp. We have written an article on how to integrate Jupiter X with Mailchimp here.
In addition to Mailchimp, Raven also supports integration with reCAPTCHA. You can make use of this integration to lessen the spammy comments by adding reCAPTCHA to the comment form on the single post layout. You can go to Elementor -> Settings to configure the Raven integrations.
Unlike JetElements and Essential Addons, Raven doesn’t allow you to disable the widgets you don’t need.
The bottom line
Jupiter X is a WordPress theme that is bundled with lots of plugins. There are about 24 plugins in total available on the Jupiter X bundle. You might think, doesn’t installing too many plugins slow down your site? You are not wrong. That is why Artbees, the developer of Jupiter X, recommends you deactivate the plugins you don’t really need. Although Jupiter X is bundled with many plugins, there are actually only four required plugins. Raven is one of them.
Raven already has all of the basic elements to customize your Jupiter X theme. It has the Navigation Menu widget to allow you to add a navigation menu to your header or footer. It also has the Post Content widget and Post Meta widget to allow you to create a custom single post layout. You can even add a featured image to your custom single post layout without activating other plugins apart from the required ones. There are also useful widgets like Photo Roller, Tabs, Form, Counter.
With Raven alone, you have countless possibilities to customize your Jupiter X theme. So, you can disable other plugins (unless you really need them), to simplify your website and make it lighter to be loaded.
