Anticipate is the name of the Elegant Themes maintenance mode WP plugin. It’s a simple plugin that lets you show a ‘Coming Soon’ or ‘We’ll Be Back Soon’ page to visitors. This type of plugin is useful when you want to work on something in the background without worrying about what your visitors are seeing on your live website (i.e. errors etc).’
What is Anticipate Plugin?
The plugin options page will only take you a minute to complete. There are fields for your website logo and social media such as RSS, Facebook, and Twitter too. The completed field is useful too. It lets you specify how much of your project or maintenance you have completed e.g. 60%.
In the center of your page is a slider for pages. You can specify which pages are to be shown via the settings area. By default, the title of the page being shown is shown using a cufon font though this can be disabled if you wish (the cufon font does look much better).
Launch Day Feature
Below the logo is a countdown to when your website will be launched (or relaunched). The pop-up calendar makes it really easy to specify the date you are launching. You can set the exact day, hour and minute of the time you are launching your website.
Once you have configured your settings area, you can view the final output. You will need to either log out or view your website via another browser in order to see your coming soon page as if you are logged in, you will still see your activated WordPress design. This is of course by design and the main benefit to using the Anticipate plugin in the first place.\
Social Media Links
At the bottom of the page you will see your social media links. These will open in a new tab or page if a visitor clicks on them. There is also an email field for collecting visitors email addresses so that you can send them updates about your website, service or product.
There is a smaller error here. The text says ‘Enter your email to receive update’ rather than ‘Enter your email to receive updates’. I assumed that the text had simply been entered wrong however in the anticipate-maintenance-page.php file the following code can be found.
CSS Code To Create A Coming Soon Landing Page
<div id="anticipate-subscribe">
<form method="post" id="searchform" action="#">
<input type="text" value="Enter your email to receive updates..." name="anticipate_email" id="searchinput" />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" id="searchsubmit" />
</form>
</div> <!-- end #anticipate-subscribe -->
To correct this, you need to adjust the width of the search field. You can find this in the css/style.css file. Look for this part:
#searchform #searchinput { background: none; border: none; float: left; margin-top: 9px; padding-top: 0px; width: 187px; padding-left: 14px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; color: #5f5f5f; text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #fff; font-style: italic; float: left; margin-top: 7px;}
As you can see, the standard of CSS coding leaves a lot to be desired. The left float and the top margin were both declared twice, with the second declaration of the top margin conflicting the first. If you change width: 187px to width: 200px it should correct the issue regarding the email request phrase though hopefully Elegant Themes will resolve this in the next release. Until then, you will need to correct this yourself.
Anticipate Plugin Review
Despite this small CSS issue, I was pleased with Anticipate. It’s a very basic plugin though it functions well and is quick to set up. The plugin is free to all Elegant Themes customers who own a developer membership. This membership retails for $89 a year and comes with 4 WordPress plugins and a whopping 75 WordPress themes (and counting).
Unfortunately, the plugin is only available to Elegant Themes members and cannot be purchased on its own. This is not a problem in my opinion as I can’t recommend anyone paying for Anticipate. It does what it is supposed to do however there are alternatives such as Ultimate Maintenance Mode, CGC Maintenance Mode, ThemeFuse Maintenance Mode and WP Maintenance Mode that can be downloaded for free from the official WordPress plugin directory. Most of these offer more features than Anticipate too.
If you are an Elegant Themes member already, it’s worth trying out, though I’d also try out some of the free alternatives mentioned above as well to see which one suits you best. To summarize, Anticipate is a useful WordPress plugin but there are more feature rich alternatives available for nothing, which makes it difficult to recommend.
