Feb 2, 2024 Feature Roundup
Current Theme Version: 5.22.01
Current Blocks Version: 4.7.47
Hello again. It’s been a while, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy.
We’ve been hard at work the past few months bringing a lot of enhancements and new features to both the theme and the blocks. Here’s a little overview.
New Block: Tabs
While we generally don’t recommend hiding content behind interactive UX, we’ve gotten a lot of requests for tabs over the years. There are specific scenarios where employing tabs is both effective and necessary.
Introducing a block that does just that: Tabs.
The content area of each tab can hold anything, and you can have as many tabs as you’d like. The state you save the tabs is the state in which the tabs will display on the front-end of your website. For example, if you save the Tabs block with the second tab selected, this is the tab that will be open when you user visits your page.
The tabs themselves can be aligned Left, Center, or Right. Design choices include Tags (which respect your site’s tag stylings), Inset, Pills, Underlined, or Tabs as illustrated below.
In addition, content can given the Default style, which is seamless with its background, or Outlined or placed within a Well.
Updated Block: Jump Links
We’ve added some new styles to Jump Links and have allowed it to be displayed both horizontally and vertically. When combined with columns, some magical things are possible. New styles include
WooCommerce Updates
Block-Based Cart and Checkout
If your site isn’t using any plugins that have yet to be updated to support the new and improved block-based Cart and Checkout pages, you can opt into these now as they are fully supported by our theme. These new pages are better in every way: faster, cleaner, and more extensible.
These new templates provide easier ways for plugins to hook in and add their own content. There is also native local pickup options, which might negate the need for a separate plugin. Lastly, since these are block-based, it means that we can attach the styling to the block itself, which only loads on pages that need it, making your site more lightweight.
Block-Based Mini Cart
We’ve ventured further into incorporating more of the block-ified WooCommerce core into our theme. You might have noticed on your store that the mini-cart is now the block-based version.
This new version is way more cache-friendly, and because there’s less custom templating happening, it should be more future-proof as well.
New Bookings Views
You can now view your daily bookings and add url arguments to view any day you’d like… yesterday, tomorrow, next week, whenever. There’s also a weekly view that you can do the same with, but it shows all your bookings per week. You can find these views by navigating to your dashboard and then, from the sidebar, Bookings → Today’s Bookings or Bookings → Weekly Bookings.
Misc Enhancements
Goodbye, jQuery
We’ve updated all our blocks to use native JavaScript instead of relying on jQuery, including our sliders and jump links. Combined with some smarter jQuery loading introduced in the WordPress core, you might not see jQuery loading on the front-end at all of your site!
New Lightbox
With our quest to rid our theme of unnecessary jQuery, we’ve rewritten our lightbox in native JS. Because we control every aspect of the lightbox now, we have also been able to add lightbox themes. You can change your theme to Dark or Light from the dashboard by navigating to Appearance → Customize → Settings → General → Lightbox Theme.
New Checkboxes and Radio Buttons
We’ve updated checkboxes and radio buttons throughout our sites to better match your chosen styles.
Deferred Stylesheets
We’ve changed a number of non-critical css styles to load in a new ‘deferred’ stylesheet, which means that it loads after your page does. This should speed up your website even more!
Form Submission Limits
You can now set the maximum amount of form submissions allowed in an hour for Gravity Forms. This is useful for preventing spam. The default is 5, and is calculated by user IP address globally across the site. This means that if a user submits 5 forms in an hour, they will be blocked from submitting any more forms for an hour. This is a global setting, and cannot be set on a per-form basis. You can change the number of form submissions allowed by navigating to your dashboard and going to Appearance → Customize → Settings → General → Form Submission Limit.
Updated Block: Structured List
Items in a structured list can now have a link. This link will cover the entire card.
Updated Block: Grid
Grids now have two more link options, Tabs and Minimal. You can see these in action on the new demo page. You can also choose image aspect ratios for your cards! Choose from Default (1.618), None (un-cropped), 1:1 (square), 1:2, 2:1, 4:3, 9:16, or 16:9.
Dirigible Plugin Updates
Dirigible Blocks Extended
- New Block: Logo Carousel
- New Block: Breakout Grid
- New Block: Header Banner
Dirigible Events & Dirigible Locations
Did somebody say SYNERGY?!?
Now, if both the locations and events plugins are active, the locations can act as venues for events. This means that you can assign events to venues. Instead of writing the same venue information each time, the event will pull in stuff like the map, socials, contact info, images, etc, from the location that’s assigned to it.
Even better? The locations now list all the events that are being held at it, including past events. Get that SEO juice.
There’s some new blocks in the Events plugin that leverage this interactivity, like the Events By Location block. Very nifty.
Dirigible Mega-Menu
The Mega Menu is now way less janky to use. The default template is just a Section block, so you should be able to edit it more like you would the rest of your site.
