Status
Report

October 29, 2021

Native Sliders are now available in Cornerstone (Release Notes), and boy have they been a hit! These are not your Grandmother’s sliders, and some of the implementations we’ve seen thus far are absolutely incredible.

The best place get started is to review the Slider Documentation as well as the following video that walks you through the entire Element front to back. This Slider Element is free for all X and Pro customers!

This is such a powerhouse of an Element that we have also created an entire course and expansion pack called Modern Sliders.

Modern Sliders will help redefine what you think of as a “slider” with 15 custom examples ranging from pricing tables to product comparisons + hours of expert training from Themeco lead developer Kory Wakefield.

In addition to getting 15 custom sliders, you’ll learn invaluable tips and tricks that will supercharge your slide building powers from one of the most talented front-end devs on the market today.

We’ve been blown away at the response to Modern Sliders. As a matter of fact, some Modern Sliders customers are replacing whole 3rd party plugins! Check out just one of the comments we received...

"You're nuts. When you announced the new slider element, I was expecting some sort of 'Soliloquy slider' on steroids… but you’ve just blown my mind when I was seeing all the beautiful sliders I’m now able to use and configure for what I needed to use clumsy and sometimes even expensive 3rd party plugins. Great work!”
@mircotripoczky / October 28, 2021

If you are even remotely interested in learning how Sliders can become your site building superpower, you owe it to yourself to check out Modern Sliders.

THEME OPTIONS REBOOT

We expect to be through the launch cycle for this latest release by next week, then it is on to our Theme Options reboot. There are several exciting aspects to this cycle, and I wanted to briefly explain a few of the highlights.

For years (literally) we’ve been working towards this cycle. This could arguably be the most consequential update since our initial release, and it is the culmination of a significant amount of development work and planning.

Put simply, we are streamlining the experience with a ground up overhaul of base styles. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, rather lean into the patterns and technical infrastructure you’ve begun to see over the past several cycles.

To do this, we’re building several new features under the hood that will allow us to bring the vision to life. Chief among them is something called the Rivet API. I’m going to keep this top secret for now, but it’s a fundamental building block to this exciting update and the future of our products.

In addition to the Rivet API, there are two other important words you should get to know: Variables and Globals.

VARIABLES

We are working on a way to allow custom variables to be defined at the Element level. Our goal is to let you create your own Inspector control structure on a base Element and allow hiding the original Inspector controls.

This will open up many possibilities for creating custom Elements in the builder without needing to write custom PHP. Combined with the Rivet API, you'll be able to design rich custom Elements that are simple for anyone to use.

GLOBALS

Taking Variables a step farther, it will be possible to define things like Colors, Fonts, Dimensions, bits of text, links — you name it — in a site-wide “Global” Variable that can be sent into any Element. When you change the Global, it will update everywhere on your site.

These are some of the fundamental building blocks of the Theme Options Reboot, and we’re excited to see them come to life.

This is a two to three month project, however there may be opportunities along the way to break off certain pieces and do a release. It’s too early to tell, but we’ll certainly keep you updated along the way.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There are other features and improvements as part of this reboot, and we are confident you are going to LOVE what you see. There are also a few other things being worked on deep in the Themeco Lab including an exciting new partnership that will be announced in 2022. Stay tuned!

We’re hiring! If you or someone you know is interested to work with us, check out our Careers page. While it is not easy to make it through our application process, don’t let that scare you. If you’ve got the goods, we want to hear from you.

Thank-you again to our incredible beta testers who faithfully help us test each cycle. We hope all of our customers enjoy the powerful new Slider Element and look forward to seeing it in your builds soon! In the meantime, be sure pick up your copy of Modern Sliders.

Until the task is done,
Kyle