However, wouldn’t allowing the ON/OFF option (and defaulting to OFF of course) would theoretically ensure no breakages? Wouldn’t that be the point of an ON/OFF option?
True, but only if it stays OFF forever. Think about inspecting an existing Row and turning it ON only to see your layout break. This leaves a bad first impression of the new feature.
It comes across here as though there has been more consideration placed on users who Custom Style the Pro framework, rather than users who stick to the functionality and requirements of Pro, and avoid Custom Styling as much as possible.
I led off with custom styling, but there are still other subtle differences that would creep in. The spacing/alignment could shift, and think about starting with a Marginless Columns Row - when you turn this feature ON the gaps appear and you’d need to reduce them to zero.
Theoretically, this should be okay as well (I notice there are controls that are hidden/shown quite easily even in the current Beta.
It’s technically possible yes. I feel like it would confusing to have very fundamental controls come and go. Usually turning something on reveals a new feature set you are opting into. Under this situation it would alternate between two sets of base controls, including how columns are managed. Like I was saying before, Columns are where it gets really messy. The new Row allows unlimited Column children that continuously wrap and fill out the Column Layout. The previous generations had a max of 6 children. They also use different controls that would need to swap out based on the hypothetical ON/OFF toggle.
TL;DR; It’s a combination of these small things that add up and make it feel broken when you enable a new feature. I’d much rather give people a new first impression of a brand new element without having old paradigms in the way.
Ie. I’ve currently got about 10+ client sites that have a mixture of V1/Classic (from pre-Pro days) and V2 elements/sections (upgraded to Pro), and over time as we move through changes I have to spend time to “upgrade” the Classic sections into V2, as this was the way forward (and Classic elements were breaking using V2 Sections). Now I’ll have to factor in V1, V2, and V3 sections…
Even if it was an ON/OFF switch, would you go through every row on your sites, turning it ON and fixing the little discrepancies? If that was true, then either way there’s going to be some maintenance work involved. Our recommendation would be just leaving it alone because the site works and the old elements are always going to be supported.
Our intention is that nobody would need to make any changes. This is how we evolve a tool like Pro while keeping things backwards compatible. As new features come out, the previous generation is more or less “unaware” of the changes, but the new features are placed more prominently. There are still sites out there that use Visual Composer, or even handcoded shortcodes from the early days. Another example is Classic Elements. As of this release they are turned off by default in the Element Library (enable again via settings) because we have feature parity now and they’re less useful.
All that being said, I definitely agree with you that the naming of these elements is painful to think about and understand. We were definitely anticipating some confusion and more dialog about this. Regardless of which direction we went, there would be some level of disconnect. This direction is what we felt was the best solution long term, mainly because there is minimal confusion if any for new users, and nothing breaks for existing users.
I certainly did as you can probably tell… haha