Hi!
I have tried to create a brand new page and tested the “Clone Existing” feature. It responds with the “Awesome…” message, but nothing changes on the page. The welcome screen still stays.
While on the topic, will this bring in the page CSS as well?
Thanks! Fixed for the next patch. Presently it doesn’t bring over any settings because the “Clone Existing” action takes place after the content is created. We could potentially bring over the CSS/JS. Would you expect it to overwrite the existing CSS/JS or be appended to anything that may have already been input?
Oh? Ok, I didn’t think about it that way. I was thinking that, with those three options on the welcome screen we are starting from the blank canvas, so there would be nothing to override.
I guess in that case, appending would be the safest rout to take. Perhaps with some comment line that shows where the appended part is starting.
Inability to bring custom page CSS with templates is kind of a pain point for a while. I have tried to solve it by placing the page CSS into the first section without $el, but that turned out to be unstable. That CSS was not working every time.
Storing page CSS externally is the only way for now, but that reduces usability of the otherwise fantastic Template Manager. Though, much less custom CSS is needed than before native Flexbox was introduced. Right now Media queries are making most of it.
I already see that the new Div element will further reduce it, because it allows different alignments within a single Column. That’s fantastic! I know that the Row element offered the same, but it was adding additional layer of complexity for such tasks, because the element we need would be at the second level, having both the row and the column, out of which one was redundant.
I am looking forward to individual CSS controls for each of the breakpoints, and for the draggable content width preview. I think that once those are in place, Pro’s foundations are solid and very competitive!
Btw, the Div element’s approach with adding Child elements is really greatly solved. I guess you will upgrade other elements with this ability, like Accordions and Tabs as well? My old wish, a shortcode wrapper could be solved practically in the same way. 
Many who build Membership websites would greet such an element.
All in all, fantastic job. Sorry for stealing the thread a bit. 
I guess in that case, appending would be the safest rout to take. Perhaps with some comment line that shows where the appended part is starting.
Ok, we’ll go with that. I’ll just make sure if there was content from before, it adds a few line breaks. I imagine 99% of the time using Clone Existing will be on a brand new page, but there’s always the possibility that a user just deleted all their sections so we have to account for it.
Inability to bring custom page CSS with templates is kind of a pain point for a while. I have tried to solve it by placing the page CSS into the first section without
$el,but that turned out to be unstable. That CSS was not working every time.
Gotcha, yeah those element CSS items are meant to target actual elements and it actually isn’t real CSS per-say, but a custom concoction we’ve put together. It’s probably getting treated as irrelevant by the parser and being discarded since there’s no $el to associate with.
Really glad to hear you like the new Div element and are finding ways to use it! The nice thing about the Div is you can keep nesting them to add styling contexts as needed.
Quick word on the “shortcode wrapper” idea, I think we’re going to solve these concerns a slightly different way. I’m not very keen on adding custom markup before/after a element displayed in the preview because if the HTML gets malformed the whole preview breaks, and live preview for many elements depends on the top level DOM node being a certain form. So while it’s possible, it introduces a whole new class of edge cases to solve. But there’s another way we can handle things…
You know the “Assignment” control under Settings when working with a Header/Footer/Layout? We’re going to find a way to add that control to every element. This would let you control whether or not an element (and it’s tree of children) get output on the page. I could see adding rules that check like “String contains” and that text string could be sourced from shortcodes or dynamic content. Even without that, it’d be easy to setup very simple membership sites based on user roles (or simply being logged in) since we already have logic to detect that.
Love it. Am I safe in assuming that’ll be a future Pro release – and not part of this particular 4.0 release?
Should be apparent already but wanted to followup here for posterity to note we got it in for this release after all.