Content Area VS. Text Element

Support
#1

Hi,

I’d like to offer some feedback regarding the deprecation of the Content Area Element.

I’ve read a few of the recent threads on this subject, where other users have been confused by the removal of hte Content Area element:



The consensus recommendation from Theme.co seems to be:

  • use a Div if you just want to wrap something (OK, sounds good)
  • use a Raw Content element if you want to add custom html (makes sense)
  • Use a Text element if you just want some body copy (err… has some major issues—read below)

Each Text element gets its own text styles, which is great in certain situations, but a problem for simple pages that have a lot of standard structured text (headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.) that should all maintain consistent site-wide styling.

The following properties are applied at a minimum for a Text element:

  • font-family
  • font-size
  • font-style
  • font-weight
  • line-height
  • letter-spacing
  • text-transform
  • color

Those values will override whatever is applied to the body element. For example, if I’m using anything other than 400 for my body font-weight, I’ll have to re apply that when creating a new text element. Same goes for the other properties listed above. Worse, if I decide to change a property at some point, I have to go edit EVERY TEXT ELEMENT on EVERY PAGE! :scream: :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

Before the Content Area element was introduced, we used Classic Text elements to avoid this effect, but they had the disadvantages of:

  • not having inline wysiwyg editing
  • not having any design attributes to adjust spacing around the element

The Content Area element solved both those issues and made it simple to fill out big blocks of body content that would always behave consistently throughout the site.

If you were to allow the Format group of settings to be disabled for Text elements, then we could safely use them for this purpose. Otherwise, Content Area is still our best bet.

One agency’s 2¢…

#2

Hey @jadeweb,

Thank you for your feedback. I’ll list “adding an option to turn off formatting for the Text element” as a feature request.

For now, the alternative that I see is using Classic Text in a Div element. There’d still be no inline editing though.

#4

Hi @jadeweb,

We appreciate you sharing your thoughts here. We definitely hear you, and these situations have been on our mind lately as we’ve been laying foundations for the Theme Options reboot (Pro 6 and X 10). Let me share a few thoughts.

  • First, let me clear up that the Content Area element was not removed entirely. If you go under Settings you can enable it again, allowing it to show in the library. I apologize for the other misinformation in the forum. The Content Area will never be removed and will always be supported. We just don’t recommend using it since there are other more useful elements. It was deprecated because it was redundant in the element library.
  • The best way to get the effect you want is using a Div with Raw Content inside. Unfortunately it will be one more layer to manage, but you’ll have more control over styling.
  • We are working on a system for Global Elements that is planned to be part of the Theme Options reboot cycle. For example, be able to make a headline once and use it in multiple places around your site. Editing the style in one place will effect all the other elements.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and experiences here. We will keep this in mind while developing new features.

#5

@christian, @alexander,

Thanks for your replies.

I’m aware of the option to include deprecated elements in the element library, and as I mentioned, we’ll keep using Content Area for now.

Thanks for the clarification on support for deprecated elements. FWIW, you’re using the term differently than it is typically used in software development—When a feature is deprecated in a particular release, it means that it will be removed in a future release.

Great to hear about what you’re calling Global Elements! That will make Pro/CS immeasurably more useful, especially when handing off editing to clients. Sounds like a wysiwyg pattern library, which should be fabulous!! If I may make one request: Implement the feature in such a way that you can edit global elements in any editor context, so folks can style elements in relation to one another.

#6

Thanks for the feedback, we will look into it.

Cheers,

#7

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