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Howdy Themeco,

We’re nearing the end of the Pro 4.3, X 8.3, and Cornerstone 5.3 rollout, and if you haven’t had a chance to update now is a good time. The release notes linked to above go into greater detail about the new features and fixes including new native mega menus!

You heard that right! You can now build simple and elegant mega menus in addition to all sorts of other creative implementations. It’s great to see how quickly these new features are being put to use. The one and only @scotbaston put this registration form together using the new “buildable areas” in modals.

Responsive Styling Update

We’re continuing to make progress with our responsive styling update and are hopeful to begin beta testing before the end of the month. This is a substantial update under the hood so while there is still a good bit of engineering left, we’re moving in the right direction!

Coming Soon

In between our larger release cycles, we have smaller (but still important) features and improvements on the books. I wanted to briefly tell you about two of them, the first of which is tentatively scheduled for June.

Slider Element - We’ve had our eye on this for sometime, and we know several of you have as well. Done right, a native Element for sliders or carousels will open up all sorts of new opportunities for creatively presenting content. Add to that the composable nature of our existing Element library - think stacking or the ability to layer them together - and this will be a powerful new frontier.

Gradient Color Picker - Another feature we’re excited to introduce, our new and improved color picker will allow you to add linear and radial gradient backgrounds to Elements. There’s more we hope to explore with this, for example gradients on text, but we have to first explore what is actually feasible to do in all browsers. Thankfully IE11 is going away which beautifully leads to my final point…

More YouTube

We’ve really enjoyed putting together product videos and have more planned throughout the year, but we’re also excited to begin releasing other video formats to our channel as well. We won't be doing many of these to start (think one every month or so), and they include things like live builds, topical deep dives, and things we see across the website building industry.

To start us off, I posed a question to our intrepid lead developers. What are some of the trends you see for WordPress in 2021? The video below was their response. I encourage you to have a watch when you have a spare 6 minutes and 34 seconds, and let us know what trends you see in the coming year. Add your thoughts in the YouTube comments.

I think that's a good place to wrap it. I hope you all have a wonderful Spring, and I'll look forward to seeing you next month same time(ish), same channel!

Fight the good fight,
Kyle