Hi Eric,
Thanks for shedding some more light on your workflow. Hopefully I can provide some clarification and assurance from our perspective.
I rely on the editor to include media and shortcodes for elements whilst I am in the editor and I believe that in time, X theme will depreciate the older v1 elements, leaving me with no options and an amazing amount of work to do.
We will never deprecate those elements. We’re committed to keeping old sites up and running longterm. The last thing we would ever want is to introduce an update that requires extensive work to update a site. This is true of anything we’ve built going back to version 1 of X.
You can still add images - we just moved the button into the TinyMCE toolbar to save space.
What we have been doing however, is introducing new tools and features and making them a more prominent part of the editing experience. So while the pages you’ve build over the years will continue to look the same on the front end, there have certainly been changes like removing the shortcode generator from the visual page building experience (you can still use it in the WordPress post editor if you have the Classic Editor plugin to disable Gutenburg).
I never asked for exclusive ‘drag and drop’ elements, as I prefer to copy code as one text block, then modify as part of my workflow. As I understand it, this is the problem. I am being forced to slow my activities to cater for this interrupting and slow process.
I understand that this workflow is something you’re comfortable with, but it is an increasingly rare workflow these days. The majority of our customers use the drag and drop interfaces and have continuously been asking for ways to build sites without touching any code. If you look at what’s going on in the Theme market there’s a big emphasis on visual builders.
The entire basis for V2 elements (the Cornerstone 2.0 release) was identifying that we needed to provide more customization options per element. A V2 button has 130+ values that can be adjusted using the element controls. This is because you get full styling control to make the button look exactly like you want it to without CSS. It would be incredibly unweildy to do this via shortcodes and overtime it would bloat the database.
I am at a loss to see why there is a reluctance to repair, empower and improve the text editor for those who code or simply wish to revisit their work without difficulty?
I guess I’m still not following what needs to be repaired here. The fundamental difference I’m seeing is that the shortcode generator modal is no longer available directly in the page builder. If you’re just using the Shortcode Generator, you can do this in the WordPress post editor without ever needing to fire up Cornerstone. In that regard, not much has changed since before Cornerstone was released (aside from WP core changes). If you don’t see the button, you can enable it from Cornerstone Settings.
You are more than welcome to replace the page builder with whatever alternative you like. You might even want to explore some other options like WP Bakery’s updated builder (included for free with X). Most builders these days heavily revolve around a visual interface. It might be a good idea to try out some of the latest things available. You’d be looking at a new workflow paradigm so it’d be worth considering the latest versions of Cornerstone as well.
On that note, have you seen any of our updated templating functionality? We’ve seen this to be a great way to speed up making multiple pages with a similar look and feel. In the early days this was done by copy/pasting entire shortcode layouts but the Template Manager is a more elegant solution.
Regarding ACF, the latest version is usually on automatic updates not very long after it’s released. It’s not the same day because we test the updates first to check for conflicts before pushing out an update ourselves. What you might be experiencing is a conflict that happened with older versions that made it say “Update Unavailable”. To get around this, deactivate ACF and click “Check again” on the Dashboard page. there’s almost never a conflict or incompatibility. Purchasing ACF Pro version wouldn’t make a difference because when Pro is active we disable their automatic updater - otherwise X and Pro customers would be required to enter a ACF license to get updates.