ambera Theme Builder

Description

Build the whole website with one visual builder — and hand it over without handing over WordPress.

ambera Theme Builder is a page builder and a theme builder in one plugin — and the only one that gives your client a back end of their own. They run the site at /themebuilder/admin/, in plain words, with your logo on top, and never see wp-admin, a plugin list or an update notice. Forms, media, SEO, statistics, security and speed are built in. No Elementor, no stack of add-ons, and no visitor of yours ever makes a request to somebody else’s server.

Unlock the shop, memberships, courses, appointments, the newsletter, thirty languages and everything else with ambera Pro.

Build professional websites

  • Visual builder. Drag blocks onto the page, style them in a design panel, and see the result at once — on desktop, tablet and phone in the same window.
  • A back end your client can use. Pages, blog, messages, media, forms and statistics in plain words — and no wp-admin behind it.
  • Complete theme builder. Header, footer, single posts, archives, search and 404 in the same editor, with conditions that say where each one applies.
  • 100 blocks, 55 of them free. Layout, text, media, menus, blog, forms — and with Pro a shop, memberships, appointments, events, jobs and downloads.
  • A design system, not a stylesheet. Colours, fonts, spacing and text styles are set once and used everywhere. Change one, and the whole site follows.
  • Work on a page that is already online. Saving keeps a draft; you publish when it suits, now or at a time you set. Two versions side by side, with what changed marked in green, red and orange.

Give clients their own back end

In the editor, a role can be allowed to change words and pictures without being able to move a block. That makes ambera useful for agencies and freelancers — not only while the website is being built, but for the years after it is handed over.

Key features

Everything marked [Pro] is in the separate Pro plugin. Nothing in this free plugin is locked or greyed out.

  • Page builder: blocks, a design panel, three screen widths, a layer tree, undo and versions.
  • Theme builder: header and footer free; post, archive, search, 404 and menu templates with Pro.
  • Client area: pages, blog, messages, media, forms, statistics, tasks and users — in plain words, with your logo on top.
  • Access control: per role and per area — see and change, see only, or hidden — down to publishing, deleting and changing an address, and rules for a single page.
  • Forms and inbox: contact, booking and application forms, an inbox with every field, and a log of every mail sent.
  • Media manager: folders, search, cropping, alternative texts — and WebP and AVIF in every size, served to the screen that asked.
  • SEO: titles, descriptions, sitemap, structured data, and a ring on every page that says in per cent what is missing.
  • Statistics: visitors, pages, referrers, devices and countries — counted on your own server, without a cookie or a third party.
  • Security: a firewall in front of every request, a counted sign-in, two-factor authentication with a passkey or an app, hardening, a file scan and a log.
  • Spam protection: five checks under every form, comment and sign-up — a hidden field, a signed clock, a brake per address, a limit on links and a word list of your own. No captcha, nothing from Google, no cookie.
  • Speed: finished pages kept as files, images in WebP and AVIF, fonts from your own site. No caching plugin to configure.
  • Tasks and reminders: what has to be done, with a day and a time, and a notice in the client area when it is due.
  • Redirects and 404 list: rules from an old address to a new one, and what visitors asked for and did not get, one click from becoming a rule.
  • Maintenance mode: a switch that closes the site behind a page you designed, while anybody who may edit still sees it.
  • Accessibility: a button visitors use to set the page up for their own eyes — larger text, more contrast, no motion.
  • Shop [Pro]: products with variants and stock, cart, checkout, orders, invoices — Stripe, Payrexx with TWINT, PayPal or on invoice.
  • Memberships and courses [Pro]: sell access monthly, yearly or once; lock a page, a category, a block or a file; courses with a quiz and points.
  • Appointments [Pro]: visitors take a free time themselves — services with a duration, people with their own hours, confirmation and cancellation by email.
  • Events [Pro]: dates many people come to, with places, a price and a waiting list that moves up by itself.
  • Jobs [Pro]: adverts with the details Google Jobs asks for, and the application next to them.
  • Downloads [Pro]: files in groups, under an address that survives replacing the file, counted per day.
  • Reviews [Pro]: the site asks once after an order or an appointment, and you decide what shows.
  • Legal pages: an imprint and a privacy policy written from what the site actually does. GDPR for the EU and the EEA.
  • Newsletter [Pro]: written with the same blocks as a page, sent from the site itself, with lists, double opt-in, opens and clicks.
  • Thirty languages [Pro]: /fr/contact is a real page — translated on first view, then stored, with hreflang. Corrections by hand survive.
  • Custom fields [Pro]: sets of fields per kind of post, written into a template by a block.
  • AI assistance [Pro]: a section, a whole page, a blog post or a picture from a description — with your own key.
  • AI tools over MCP [Pro]: Claude, Cursor or Codex build pages here as real blocks, through one key you hand out and take back.
  • Backups: the whole site in one file, on a plan, checked after every run, restored with one click.
  • Snippets [Pro]: CSS, JavaScript or HTML with a name, a place and a condition, instead of another plugin.
  • Early firewall [Pro]: the rules load before WordPress does, for every file of the site.
  • Country blocking: whole countries allowed or turned away.

The 55 free blocks

Layout: Page, Section, Grid, Column, Flex row, Group, Spacer, Divider, Off canvas, Loop carousel.

Text and buttons: Heading, Text, List, Quote, Button, Icon, Icon card, Shortcode.

Media: Image, Gallery, Video, Slider, Slide, Flip box, Before and after.

People and proof: Team, Person, Reviews, Review, Portfolio, Share buttons, Profiles, PayPal button.

The site around the page: Site name, Logo, Menu, Menu entry, Link list, Breadcrumbs, Sitemap, Search, Results, Light and dark, Currency switch, Contents, Opening hours, Locations, One location.

Blog: Post title, Post image, Post details, Post content, Post list.

Forms: Form, Field.

Pro features

Pro is a separate plugin for professional, multilingual and commercial websites. It adds thirteen modules and 45 blocks to the same editor.

Pro modules

  • Shop: products, variants, stock, categories, CSV import, cart, checkout, orders, six customer emails with a designer, invoices and credit notes — Stripe, Payrexx (TWINT) or PayPal.
  • Memberships and courses: plans with a price and a rhythm, free plans, trials, renewals that run by themselves, content locked per page, category, block or file, courses with a quiz and points.
  • Appointments: services with a duration and a break, people with their own hours and days off, free slots or a request per service, and a confirmation carrying a cancel link.
  • Events: places, a price, sign-up in one step without an account. The last place goes out under a lock, so two sign-ups in the same second do not both get it; whoever is late lands on a waiting list that moves up by itself — the first who fits. Confirmations carry a calendar file and a link that cancels.
  • Jobs: adverts with the fields Google Jobs asks for, and a screen that says which one is still missing. Categories a job seeker would pick, the workload as two figures so it can be filtered, and applications whose papers sit behind an address that asks first.
  • Downloads: files in groups, under an address of the plugin instead of a link into the uploads folder. It survives replacing the file, so every page, newsletter and bookmark still leads to the current one. Counted per file and per day, and lockable to members.
  • Reviews: the site asks a few days after an order or an appointment — once, with a link that needs no account. Five stars and two lines, and everything waits until you let it through.
  • Newsletter: lists, double opt-in, sending in batches at a time you choose, opens and clicks, header, footer and content templates.
  • Thirty languages: every language its own address, translated on first view and then stored, with hreflang and corrections that survive a retranslation.
  • Custom fields: sets of fields per kind of post, filled in by whoever writes, written into a template by a block.
  • AI: sections, whole pages, blog posts and pictures from a description, with your own key — nothing runs without it.
  • Connections (MCP): one key per AI tool, reading or writing, no access to users, orders, settings or files, every change undoable.
  • Snippets: CSS, JavaScript and HTML with a name, a place and a condition, where an error stays with the snippet instead of taking the page down.

Pro blocks

  • Content: Carousel, Popup, Table, Figure, Accordion, Accordion entry, Tabs, Tab, HTML, Price, Price switch, Countdown, Timeline, Station.
  • Media: Google Maps, Facebook embed, Video playlist, Video in the list, Image hotspots, Point.
  • Shop: Products, Product, Cart, Cart button, Checkout, Account.
  • Memberships and courses: Memberships, Members only, Course, Courses, Learning points, Save it, Saved and seen.
  • Modules: Appointment, Events, One event, Event calendar, Jobs, One job, Downloads, Download button, Newsletter, Unsubscribe, Custom field, Languages.

Build the whole website

One editor covers everything a visitor sees, down to the reusable parts used on many pages at once. Sections, groups and columns can end in a shape instead of a straight line — a wave, a slant, a triangle, mountains — drawn in the page, so nothing is loaded and nothing is blurry.

Start with a complete demo website

Thirty-five finished websites come free: a bakery, a hotel, a restaurant, a photographer, a law firm, an architect, a yoga studio, a wedding planner and more — each one a different trade and a different look. One click installs a demo with its pages, templates, menus and pictures; another click removes it completely.

Free and Pro

Pro adds the thirteen modules and 45 blocks listed above. It is bought once, per number of websites, with a year of updates and support included.

Pro is a separate plugin: nothing here is locked or waits for a key.

External services

The plugin talks to the services below. Each one is called only in the situation described, never in the background.

Demo catalogue (amberathemebuilder.com)
Opening the demo screen fetches the list from https://amberathemebuilder.com/katalog/demos.json; installing a demo downloads its zip from the same host. No personal data and no site information is sent. Run by the plugin author, ambera GmbH; terms, privacy policy.

Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com)
Typing a font name under Settings Fonts and pressing “Fetch and store it” makes your server download the font once and keep it in your uploads folder. Only the font name is sent, by your server. Visitors’ browsers never contact Google. Terms, privacy policy.

Pixabay (pixabay.com)
The media manager can search stock photos, but only after you enter your own Pixabay API key under Settings; without a key nothing is sent. A search sends the search words and your key to https://pixabay.com/api/; picking a photo downloads it into your media library. Terms, privacy policy.

Country lookup (api.country.is)
Off by default: the statistics module reads the country from a header your CDN sets and asks nothing outside. Switched on under Settings Statistics, the visitor’s IP address is sent to https://api.country.is/ and only the two-letter country code is stored. Privacy policy.

Video embeds (YouTube, Vimeo)
The video block shows a poster image and loads the player from youtube-nocookie.com or player.vimeo.com only after the visitor clicks. YouTube terms, Vimeo privacy.

Support portal (portal.amberathemebuilder.com)
“Support ticket” and “Feature request” on the Help screen are links that open the author’s portal in a new tab. The link carries your host name and a short technical summary (plugin, WordPress and PHP version, site language) to prefill the form. Nothing is sent unless you click, and nothing is submitted until you send the form there. The plugin itself never calls the portal. Run by ambera GmbH; terms, privacy policy.

Help videos (YouTube)
A tile on the Help screen shows only the title; the player from youtube-nocookie.com is loaded when you press play, and only then. YouTube terms, Google privacy policy.

PayPal button (paypal.com)
The PayPal block renders a plain form leading to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr when a visitor clicks. Only then, and only what you entered in the block, is sent: your PayPal e-mail address, item name, amount, currency and the return address. The plugin itself never calls PayPal. User agreement, privacy statement.

Share links (Facebook, X, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, Pinterest)
The share block is a row of ordinary links. A click opens the network with the address and title of the page; no script is loaded and nothing is sent before the click. Meta privacy, X privacy, LinkedIn privacy, WhatsApp privacy, Telegram privacy, Pinterest privacy.

Interpol (interpol.int)
With the firewall set to “harsh”, a blocked address that keeps coming back is answered with a redirect to Interpol’s public cybercrime page instead of an error page. It is a plain redirect of the blocked visitor; the plugin sends nothing to Interpol.

Images in imported HTML
Importing pasted HTML copies images that point to another server into your media library, so the page does not load from there on every visit. Your server fetches only the image addresses in the HTML you pasted.

Screenshots

Installation

  1. Upload the plugin to /wp-content/plugins/ or install it from the plugin directory.
  2. Activate it under Plugins.
  3. Open ambera in the admin menu. The dashboard walks you through the first steps: pick a demo or start blank, set your colours and fonts, edit the header and footer.
  4. Set up the client area if someone else will run the website.

The plugin brings its own theme layer. If you keep another theme active, ambera renders the pages you assign to it and leaves the rest to the theme.

FAQ

Is ambera Theme Builder free?

Yes. This plugin is free and complete: the builder, the theme layer, the client area, forms, media, SEO, statistics, redirects, security, spam protection, tasks and thirty-five demo websites. There is no key, no account and no trial period.

What is the difference between Free and Pro?

Free builds and runs a whole website — including legal pages, backups and country blocking. Pro adds what a commercial or multilingual site needs: shop, memberships and courses, appointments, events, jobs, downloads, reviews, newsletter, thirty languages, custom fields, AI, editable templates for posts and archives, more blocks. See the feature comparison.

Do I need Elementor, Divi or another page builder?

No. ambera has its own visual builder for pages and for the theme around them. It is not an add-on for another builder.

Do I still need a theme?

No. ambera renders header, footer and every template itself. A block theme can stay installed — WordPress needs one to be active, and ambera works with any.

Can I use ambera for client websites?

Yes, and that is what it is built for. The client area gives the people who run the site a back end of their own, and you decide what they may change.

Can clients manage their website without wp-admin?

Yes. Pages, blog, messages, media, forms, statistics and users are in the client area, in plain words. The WordPress dashboard stays with you.

Can I import a complete website?

Yes. Thirty-five demo websites install with one click, with pages, templates, menus and pictures, and can be removed just as easily.

Does it work with the block editor (Gutenberg)?

Yes. Posts written in the block editor are shown inside the templates you build. Pages can be built with either editor; ambera’s editor is used for the layout of the site itself.

Does the plugin send anything home?

Nothing without your action. There is no tracking and no licence check — this plugin has no key, no account and no licence server; updates come from wordpress.org through WordPress’ own update check. The demo catalogue, Google Fonts and the stock-photo search are loaded only when you open those screens or press those buttons; see “External services”.

Is the statistics module GDPR-friendly?

It counts on your server, sets no cookie and stores no IP address. The visitor’s country comes from your CDN’s header if there is one; the optional lookup at an external service is off by default.

Reviews

There are no reviews for this plugin.

Contributors & Developers

“ambera Theme Builder” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“ambera Theme Builder” has been translated into 1 locale. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “ambera Theme Builder” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

The full history is in changelog.txt.

0.4.14

  • The legal pages are free now: an imprint and a privacy policy read from what the site actually does — which modules are on, which services have a key — as two drafts you edit like any other page. GDPR for the EU and the EEA; Switzerland, Germany and Austria add the duties of their own.
  • The backups are free now: the whole site in one file, now or on a plan, full or only what has changed, checked after every run, back with one click. It runs on the site itself, without a cron service.
  • Country blocking is free now. The early firewall — the rules that load before WordPress does — stays with Pro.
  • Nothing is locked or greyed out as a result. The three simply moved across the line.
  • The page cache emptied itself on nearly every visit. The stylesheet for the spacing and size words is kept in a setting, and the fingerprint that decides whether it still fits included the labels — which are translated. A visit in another language produced another fingerprint, the stylesheet was written again, and writing one of the plugin’s own settings throws the page cache away. Measured after filling the cache with 624 addresses: one file left. The fingerprint now covers only what reaches the stylesheet, and the generated stylesheet no longer empties the cache.
  • A dash in a page title reached Google as a raw HTML entity — seven characters of code instead of the dash itself. WordPress writes it that way when it prepares a title, which is right for HTML, because the browser draws the dash; but the structured data a search engine reads is not HTML, and there the code stood as it was. The SEO screen showed it too, and counted it as seven characters, so “the title is longer than a search result shows” arrived six characters early for every dash in the line. The title is now handed on as the text a person reads wherever it does not become HTML.

0.4.13

  • “Build the page cache” counted a page as kept even where the server answered with an error — four requests at a time bring a small host to a stop now and then. Each page is tried a second time now, and what still does not answer is named as a number instead of counted in.
  • The unsubscribe page spoke English on every site: its three sentences reached the translation function through a variable, which the tool that collects texts for translation cannot see. They are collected now, and the page speaks the language of the website.
  • Statistics: a city with an accent in its name lost it — Zürich was counted as “Zrich”. The CDN sends the name percent-encoded, and the cleaning step removed the percent sequences before the decoding step could read them.
  • The menu of the client area is sorted into six areas — Content, Communication, Website, Business, Design, Administration — and each one folds away. It was three heaps with two lines between them, which at twenty entries is not an order but a long list. What you fold shut stays folded in your own browser; the area holding the screen you are on always opens.
  • Four new blocks. Opening hours: the seven lines of the week as “08:00-12:00, 13:30-17:00”, today marked, and a badge saying whether you are open right now and until when — worked out in the browser, because a cached page must not answer that from an hour ago.
  • Contents: a table of contents built from the headings of the page. You pick the levels; headings without an anchor get one from their own text, so a copied link still lands in the same place later. A page without headings shows no box at all.
  • Before and after: two pictures with a slider between them. Mouse, finger and arrow keys, and the handle announces itself to a screen reader.
  • Locations: several addresses with one map beside them that jumps to whichever is picked — name, address, telephone, email and one more line. The map loads on the first click and not before, like the Google Maps block.
  • Writing straight into an empty block stored the editor’s own placeholder with the text, which showed up as a grey box above the heading in the editor. It is now removed wherever a block is saved or drawn.
  • A description meant only for a screen reader was taking up 26 pixels of the page: the class WordPress uses to hide it is defined in the back end only, and the theme had never defined it for the front. Under the right-hand picture of a before-and-after that showed as a white strip, with the two pictures out of line. It affects every block that describes a picture that way, the language switcher included.
  • Deleting the plugin now really removes it. There was no clean-up routine at all: WordPress removed the files and nothing else. On a site that had only ever been switched on, six settings and the statistics table stayed behind; on a site that had been worked on, over fifty settings, five tables, two roles, a permission on the administrator and three scheduled jobs. All of it goes now — settings, transients, locks, the plugin’s own tables, its roles, the permission, the scheduled jobs, the generated files and the rule it wrote into the .htaccess of the uploads folder.
  • Nobody is locked out by it: whoever had the role “Website owner” becomes an editor, whoever was a customer becomes a subscriber. A role that no longer exists would leave them signed in with no way to anywhere.
  • New, under Settings › General: a choice for what goes when the plugin is deleted. Off — the way it comes — the backups of the site, the files only members can download and what is recorded about each person are kept, because there is no second copy of them. Your pages, templates, forms, products, orders and courses always stay: they are ordinary WordPress content and they are all back if you install the plugin again.
  • What goes is recognised by its beginning and not read from a list — every setting starts with “ambera_”, every table with the table prefix and “ambera_” — so what a later version adds is cleaned up too. And a check that stays: it installs the plugin on a site of its own, opens every screen, deletes it again and then looks into the database and the uploads folder.

0.4.12

  • Translations updated.
  • The rest of this version is Pro.

0.4.11

  • An update that cannot succeed is refused before anything is deleted. WordPress clears the old plugin folder first and only notices halfway through when it is not allowed to — what is left is a folder without its main file, which WordPress no longer recognises as a plugin: it drops out of the list, switches off, and the site stands there without its theme. The plugin now looks over its own folders first and stops the update with a message naming the one in the way, so the running version stays and the site keeps working.
  • A plugin folder that is only a link to somewhere else is refused as well. Updating it would rewrite the files it points at — where several sites share one folder, that takes down the sites nobody touched.

0.4.10

  • Help now has a chapter for every part of the plugin, the ones that come with Pro included — so the screen tells you what a thing does before you have to decide whether you need it. Each chapter has its own films where one exists.
  • The rest of this version happens in Pro; the free plugin keeps step with it.

0.4.9

  • Support without an account. “Support ticket” and “Feature request” on the Help screen used to open a sign-in page — the free plugin has no account there. They now lead to an open form: you write your question, the answer comes by email, and you answer by replying to it. Version, WordPress, PHP and the site are filled in before you arrive, and screenshots may come along.
  • A header template can stay at the top while the page scrolls, so the menu and the search stay within reach on a long page. The switch sits on the template, beside “Lies over the content”.

0.4.8

  • Tasks are part of the free plugin now: what has to be done, with a day and a time, and a reminder in the client area when it is due.
  • The post list can carry filter buttons — one for each category among the posts shown — and filters without loading the page again.
  • The search block can suggest matching pages while a visitor types.
  • The Security screen has tabs instead of seven sections under one another; one button still saves the whole screen.
  • The builder is set in Open Sans. The font ships with the plugin; nothing is fetched from Google.
  • Fixed: “No programs in the uploads folder” took a file written by an earlier version for a stranger’s and asked the owner to edit the .htaccess by hand.
  • Fixed: where that file really belongs to somebody else, the rule now goes in as its own block between two marker lines, the way WordPress writes its own.

0.4.7

  • Spam protection under every form, every comment and every sign-up: a hidden field, a signed clock, a brake per address, a limit on links and a word list of your own. No captcha, nothing from Google, no cookie.
  • Sections, groups, columns and grids can end in a shape instead of a straight line — a wave, a slant, a triangle, mountains — drawn in the page, so nothing is loaded and nothing is blurry.

0.4.6

  • The date a page was last changed follows its layout, which is what search engines and caches read.

0.4.4 – 0.4.5

  • Compatibility improvements and internal hooks.

0.4.3

  • Compatibility improvements and internal hooks.

0.4.2

  • Two-factor sign-in keeps “Remember me”: the tick on the first form now survives the code on the second.

0.4.0 – 0.4.1

  • Compatibility improvements and internal hooks.

0.3.7

  • A button can lead to a file from the media library (a download).

0.3.5 – 0.3.6, 0.3.8 – 0.3.9

  • Compatibility improvements and internal hooks.

0.3.4

  • The early firewall (loader in the site root) is a Pro file; the free plugin writes nothing outside the uploads folder.
  • The residual stylesheet of an HTML import is kept only with its checker, which is Pro; the free plugin drops it.
  • External services: PayPal button, share links and the Interpol redirect are documented.

0.3.3

  • Login hiding is off on a fresh installation; switch it on under Security.
  • The finished page goes through wp_kses with an allow-list of what the blocks output before it is printed.
  • Drawings and icons are escaped; an uploaded demo package is checked file by file.

0.3.0 – 0.3.2

  • Security: a firewall, a login lock and two-factor sign-in with a passkey or a code.
  • Support and update notices point to the right place for the free plugin.

0.2.9

  • First release on wordpress.org.