Off topic: Private Elements Library

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#1

Sorry for moving away from the main topic here.

A few years ago I proposed a solution where we could host part of the Design cloud on our own server, and pull our own elements from there into our designs. A year later, one of the competing builders did exactly that.

I still think this would be a tremendous productivity boost. I have tried to build my own libraries of common elements, but it is always unproductive and cumbersome.

For example, I am currently building a new Blog layout and I wanted to save time by dropping the prefabbed Terms list into the layout and redesigning it. To make it inline with some other text, I thought I’d drop it into a div and set its Flexbox layout to Row.

It centers the Tag list and pushes the rest to the right, instead of staying on the far left. This element, and a few others, contain a great deal of native design decisions that aren’t universally working, so we have to investigate what is going on. For that reason I’d like to have my own radially available elements.

In essence, this would mean having two Pro installations, where one is turned into a Custom user library. Perhaps on a subdomain of the agency. Site key is provided once the site has been set up. On the installation where we are building a new site, we go to settings and turn on Custom libraries. The site key is entered, and the connection is established. With that, Cornerstone could show templates hosted on a different website.

Wouldn’t that be great! :slight_smile:

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#2

Hi @Misho,

I definitely understand the workflow motivations here, and how this would be ideal for managing things on multiple sites. Regretfully, I don’t see this being a priority in the near future. For the Theme Options reboot we will be taking time to go back to the drawing board for the onboarding experience of the theme, which could mean developing new tech for managing how we get assets into users sites. Once that has settled we could revisit this.

This is very provisional so don’t hold me to it, but we’ve been discussing internally some strategies for making “global elements”, We really want a solution for the Theme Options reboot where you can update an element once and they change everywhere. The idea evolved into a way to create elements in your own element library and determine what controls show in the Inspector. It’s like being able to make your own prefabs (multiple nested elements) but with the benefit of only exposing certain controls. I’d really like the end result to be a replacement for the PHP API of making custom elements which has always required heavy amounts of custom development. With this new approach, you could make reusable elements visually by combining existing elements together and mapping some controls. I bring this up just to say there are some opportunities coming for custom elements, and I’ll be keeping in mind ways we can make them more portable.

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