Recap and live replay: Nexcess Software Town Hall

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the October 14 town hall. This recap follows the session order, for anyone who couldn’t make it. You can also watch the full recording. 

Who was on the call

• Camber Clemence, Senior Product Marketing Manager. Camber has been here a little over five years, mostly in software. She spent the last year working on cloud hosting and bare metal, and she’s glad to be back on software. 
• Jack Kitterhing, VP of Product. Jack has been in WordPress for 20 years and here for six. He started out answering support tickets at WPMU Dev, then moved to LearnDash, where he was the original product manager.
• Jehrome Griffiths, Senior Product Manager across software. Jehrome has 15 years in WordPress, seven of them as a freelance web designer, and he cofounded a platform called Atrium. He’s been here four months, and much of his work focuses on new initiatives and growth.
• Graham Hoffman, Staff Product Manager for Managed WordPress and WooCommerce. Graham joined a month ago, after serving as general manager at BuddyBoss.
• Jamie Wilson, Account Services Manager, who leads account services for software and hosting. 
• Morgan Hugoboom, Product Marketer. Morgan primarily worked on Give when she originally joined, but later moved to support all software products, work that she continues today.

Meet the teams

The session also introduced more people behind our products. We’ll introduce more of them in upcoming issues of our newsletter, which you can  Sign up here.

Ways to stay in touch

You’ll see more of our product managers from here on, sharing work in progress, asking for your feedback, and keeping you posted on what’s next. 

Here are the places to find us right now:

• Feature boards: they’re back, with one for each product: Kadence, LearnDash, The Events Calendar, and Give. 
• Support and account services: can help with account or billing questions. Submit a ticket from your portal.
• Newsletter: software news and product updates. Sign up here.

Where we’ve come from

Customers often ask what Liquid Web and Nexcess are, so the session included a timeline of how the company got here:

Kadence, Give, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar have been part of the Liquid Web family for several years. Together, they sit within a larger group of products and services for building and running websites, with a history going back 30 years.

New in Kadence: the design system

We released the Kadence Blocks design system on October 14. When you update Kadence Blocks, you’ll find a new style library in the WordPress admin.

You set base styles once, including colors, typography, shadows, border radius and padding. Presets for buttons, advanced images, and other blocks draw from your style, so when you change it, every block that uses it updates it across your site.

In the session, Jehrome demonstrated these new functionalities by walking us through a demo site he’d built. He changed a heading color and a button color in two edits, without searching through every block. (You can see the demo in the Town Hall replay.)

The design system is most useful if you build multiple sites or work with other designers, because everyone draws from the same library. That keeps your sites consistent and makes changes faster. 

More block presets are on the way, and the ones available now are the ones users rely on most.

Questions from the session:

• Global styles: You can set collections of styles and update them across a site today, using the design system.
• Full site editing: We’re building Kadence full site editing to work alongside the design system, so you’ll be able to use block presets in the full site editor. The Kadence feature board is the best place to follow progress.
• Import and export: You can’t import or export presets yet, and they don’t use JSON. Jehrome agreed the idea makes sense, and will take it to the team.
• Accessibility: It remains a priority. We continue to work with Equalize Digital, who audit our updates, and we patch the issues they find.
• AI and MCP access: Many of you already build with Kadence and AI, and we’ve enjoyed seeing that work in the community. For now, the Kadence team is focused on full site editing and the design system, which will put Kadence in a better position to work with AI tools. The goal is for you to work with whichever AI tool you prefer. We don’t plan to add new chat windows to the site builder, and we’ll only add AI where it’s useful.

New in Give: standalone and embeddable forms

We also released standalone forms and embeddable forms on October 14, and Jehrome walked through both in test mode.

A year ago, a Give form could only exist inside a campaign. Standalone forms bring back the option to create a form on its own.

Embeddable forms let you copy a script from a form’s external website option and paste it into any site, whether it’s built on Shopify, Squarespace, Wix or WordPress. The full donation flow then runs on that site with no extra setup, which helps if you manage donation forms across many sites.

In progress: LearnDash certificates

Jehrome showed an early version of a new certificate builder. 

The current builder is dated and clunky, so the new one is meant to fix that. It uses drag and drop and snaps items to a grid, so lining things up is easy. It’s still early, so stay tuned for more news and a demo closer to release. 

Not signed up for our newsletter yet? Subscribe here for updates.

Certificates will also become verifiable. Learners will be able to share a link showing where the certificate came from and which site issued it, which helps with policy review, employee training, and compliance records. 

In progress: The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar team is updating the older parts of the interface. The current focus is on recurring events with tickets. An attendee asked about accessibility issues flagged in audits, and Jehrome will take that question to TEC product manager.

Updated Nexcess branding in the plugins

Licensing inside each plugin now carries Nexcess branding, and the portal will follow. We’re also redesigning the portal to make it easier to manage licenses, activate sites, and handle subscriptions.

Changes to software plans

Starting with renewals on or after November 16, Kadence, Give, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar come together as one software package: the Nexcess plugin stack.

Why we’re doing it

By bringing our software solutions into one package, there’s one version of each product to build on. That means updates and fixes (including vulnerability patches) can reach you sooner, more of our time goes into improving the products you use, and because everyone is on the same version, our support team can find and solve issues faster.

Earlier this year, we folded more than ten LearnDash add-ons into the core LearnDash product. The package follows the same idea: one license covers everything, and you install only what you need.

What’s included

Every plan includes all four products with every premium feature, on every site in your plan. There are no tiers to move through, and you install only the products you need, when you need them. Billing, invoices, and downloads are all in one account, and our team supports all four products. Kadence Security is sold separately. 

Each product includes:

• Kadence (design, theme, blocks): Kadence Theme Pro, Kadence Blocks Pro, and the marketing suite with pop-ups, slide-ins, and sale banners. 
• LearnDash (courses and memberships): Build courses with a drag-and-drop builder with eight quiz question types, and sell memberships, subscriptions, and course bundles through MemberDash. You can sell group seats to organizations, add more than one instructor to a course, track enrollment, completion, and quiz results with ProPanel reporting and a gradebook, and award certificates and achievements.
• The Events Calendar (events and ticketing): Sell tickets with QR check-in and 0% ticket commission, and set up assigned seating with a seating map builder. Promote events with scheduled and triggered email campaigns, run virtual and hybrid events, and accept community event submissions.
• Give (fundraising): Accept recurring donations, let donors cover processing fees, and run peer-to-peer fundraising, tribute gifts, and funds and designations. Gift Aid and currency switching support international donors, and Give connects to Mailchimp, Salesforce, Zapier, and more.

With all four in one package, you can use them together: 

• If you sell courses, you can run live workshops and sell seats with The Events Calendar, take donations with Give, and redesign your site in Kadence. 
• If you run a nonprofit, you can sell gala tickets with assigned seating, train volunteers in LearnDash, and build campaign pages with Kadence. 
• If you build client sites, every site in your plan gets courses, events, fundraising, and store tools, with no extra licenses. 

What isn’t changing

These subscriptions stay as they are:

• Kadence subscriptions, including lifetime, annual, and unlimited sites
• Iconic products
• The LearnDash app
• LearnDash add-ons we acquired from WisdmLabs
• Products formerly known as Solid, such as Kadence Security
• Restrict Content Pro
• StellarSites
• LearnDash Cloud and LearnDash Domains
• Any unlimited site license, lifetime license, or The Events Calendar Multisite license (the specific product built for WordPress Multisite)
• Accounts with more than 100 active licenses

Customers who hold one of these licenses alongside something that is converting will see a change only to the converting one. 

For example, if you have a Kadence lifetime license and a LearnDash subscription, your Kadence license stays as it is and LearnDash moves to the package.

If you have a Kadence Ultimate lifetime plan plus LearnDash and The Events Calendar, your Kadence plan stays the same, and LearnDash and The Events Calendar combine into one package subscription.

Plans and pricing

Plans are priced by the number of sites. Every plan renews yearly and includes all four products.

A few notes on how this works:

• Agency pricing is back for up to 100 sites. The 100-site plan comes to as low as $9.99 per site.
• To add sites, you move up a plan instead of buying new licenses.
• Accounts with more than 100 sites get a custom plan through our account management team.
• Kadence Security is sold separately. If you have it today, it stays on its own plan and renews as it does now.
• Before you renew, you’ll get an email with your plan, number of sites, price, and renewal date. You can also find your renewal date and site count in your account.

What you need to do

You don’t need to do anything right now. Your current plans keep working until it renews, your renewal dates stay the same, and your license keys don’t change. You’ll get the usual 30 days’ notice before you renew.

Timeline.

• Week of October 12: emails go to customers who renew between November 16 and December 1.
• Week of October 19: emails go to customers who renew after December 1, plus a newsletter and a new customer resources page. 
• November 3: You can log into the portal to see which plan you’ll move to and your site count.
• November 16: the first renewals into the stack begin.

Over the next couple of weeks, our customer success and billing teams will also email customers about what applies to their accounts.

If you have several plans on different renewal dates

The first renewal to come up becomes the stack. The other subscriptions are canceled when the stack is applied, leaving one subscription to manage.

Customers who prefer not to renew into the stack can cancel any time before the renewal date.

For more information on the new stack and what it means for you, check out this guide.

What happens next

Our town hall was a packed session, with several new releases and plenty of thoughtful questions. 

To catch the next town hall and stay current on product news, watch for our newsletter. Anyone who hasn’t subscribed yet can sign up here. 

To tell us what features and functionalities you need, post on the feature boards: Kadence, LearnDash, The Events Calendar, and Give.

Thanks again to everyone who spent an hour with us. To catch the full replay, watch here.