Release
Notes

Our latest round of major releases feature plenty of new improvements to both functionality and workflow including Dynamic Content, a revamped Skeleton Mode, nested rows and columns, alongside many other updates and bugfixes. Let's jump into it.

Dynamic Content Pro, Cornerstone

Without a doubt, the biggest addition to this release cycle is Dynamic Content, which fundamentally changes the way you are able to build out content throughout your site. Until now, all content added to your elements has been “hard coded” in. This means that you have to manually write in any piece of content for your page. For example, let's say you were building out a button that links to a specific product you have setup in WooCommerce:

Now let's say that you wanted to add the sale price to the first line to help incentivize someone to click on the offer:

You have always been able to handwrite these values in, but what about if you update the pricing down the road? What if you have 3 buttons on your page referencing this price? What if you have 15 buttons throughout your entire site referencing this price? Having to search down each individual button to update the price over and over again is not only tedious, but a huge waste of time. Dynamic content allows you to dynmaically pull values from your site's database to use throughout your site.

“So, how does it work?” I hear you asking. Well, let's take a look at the interface. Any input that accepts content throughout the builders now features the Dynamic Content button:

Clicking that button will reveal the Dynamic Content popup where you can see all of the types of Dynamic Content available:

At this time, the various macros available in Dynamic Content are as follows:

• Post – Includes information related to your post types such as titles, excerpts, featured images, published date and time, ID, meta, et cetera.
• Archive – Includes information related to your post type archives such as descriptions, URLs, meta, et cetera.
• User – Includes information related to users such as display names, email addresses, Gravatars, meta, et cetera.
• Global – Includes information related to your site such as the title, tagline, home URL, admin URL, current date and time, et cetera.
• ACF – Allows you to pull through meta information from the ACF plugin, which is required.
• Toolset – Allows you to pull through meta information from the Toolset plugin, which is required.
• WooCommerce – Allows you to pull through product and meta information from the WooCommerce plugin, which is required.

By default, clicking the button for a piece of Dynamic Content will output the most relevant piece of information. However, there might be times where you want to pull through a specific piece of content from a certain post, user, et cetera. To do this, clicking on the cog icon next to each item will reveal the edit pane for that piece of content:

Above, we can see that by default when using the Post Title Dynamic Content tag, it will pull through the title of the current post you're on. However, clicking into the dropdown will reveal that you can pull through other options such as the Previous Post:

Or you may wish to pull through the title from a Specific Post. In that case, an ID input will be revealed where you can specify the ID of the post you wish to pull the title from:

Each of these customization panes will look slightly different based on the item you're working on as it will reveal relevant information for that content.

Additionally, notice with all of these that the preview area next to the + updates itself to show you the actual syntax that will be placed in your inputs. As you use the tool, you may find that you remember certain pieces of syntax you use over and over, and in that case, you can simply type them directly into any input and bypass the picker completely (the picker is simply a tool to help guide users through making these selections).

Once you click the + button, the syntax shown in the preview will be appended to the input you were adding the Dynamic Content to. Some of the primary benefits of using this special syntax include:

• You can utilize multiple pieces of Dynamic Content within the same input.
• You can go back later and edit the content directly from the input without having to open the editor.
• If you use pieces of Dynamic Content over and over again and are familiar with their syntax, you can type them into an input directly without having to use the editor.

Finally, there are a few different places where you'll find the Dynamic Content button hanging out throughout the builders. The bottom right corner of the long-form text editors:

The upper right corner of the image controls:

That covers everything related to Dynamic Content. We look forward to seeing how our customers take hold of this new feature and utilize it out in the wild!

Floating Skeleton Mode Pro, Cornerstone

This release also introduces a revamp to our Skeleton Mode feature that allows for an improved workflow as well as some other builder features (which we will discuss later). Now, when clicking the Skeleton Mode button you will see a floating panel appear above your content:

This outline view differs from the previous Skeleton Mode, which depicted a visually simplified version of the page layout. For example, if you had a row with three columns it would show a stripped down view of that row with three columns side-by-side. While there were reasons for doing this initially, as the tool has grown its feature-set this has proved to be somewhat limiting in different ways. The updated Skeleton Mode allows users to more easily move content throughout longer pages:

Additionally, it unlocked the ability to drag and drop rows between sections (as well as move elements from one section to another more easily):

Furthermore, the outline view unlocked the ability for us to allow...

Nested Rows and Columns Pro, Cornerstone

That's right, you're reading things correctly...the builders now support nested rows and columns.

Sections, Rows, and Columns are still primarily managed via the Layout pane, but you can now drag in a Row Element into any Column from the Elements pane:

Additionally, Rows can be managed from within a Section's Inspector:

And Columns can be managed from within a Row's Inspector:

All of this ultimately means that there are many new workflows available to our users to be able to manage their document structure. We hope that everyone will find a lot of new opportunities to create with these opened up workflows and layouts.

New Extension: MailPoet Pro, X

This release also includes a new addition to our Extension ecosystem: MailPoet.

This incredible plugin allows you to send beautiful emails that reach inboxes every time, and create loyal subscribers. More than 300,000 websites are using MailPoet to keep in touch with their subscribers. MailPoet works seamlessly with your favorite CMS so you can start sending emails right now. Check out our demo page to see it in action!

Everything Else Pro, X, Cornerstone

In addition to all of the new features listed above, this update includes numerous updates and bugfixes, all of which can be seen in the sidebar. We are very happy to not only bring you a tremendous set of new tools and workflow enhancements, but to also round out a few rough edges and clean up some other items throughout our products. All in all, we're super pumped to finally get this round of updates out to you all and excited now that it's in your hands!

Finally, we'd like to offer up a big round of applause to our beta testers who are an invaluable resource to us with the amazing feedback they provide us while taking the time to scour through new features and find ways that things can be improved. A big Themeco “thank you” to each and every one of you for the time and energy you put into helping us put out the best versions of our products!