Introduction Brand New Theme Integrations

   Amir

Announcements

September 8, 2017
44

New Views and Layout betas offer tight integration with GeneratePress, allowing full control over theme elements for different custom post types.

You might remember that a few months ago we started a discussion about which themes are best to use with Toolset. Of course, a lot of people use our Toolset Starter theme, but other great alternatives came up.

We evaluated the different themes that people suggested and we saw that GeneratePress, OceanWP, Astra, Genesis and Divi indeed outperform our own theme in every aspect.

So, we switched our reference designs to these themes. Then, we started running into issues that I’m sure many clients notice when they build sites on these themes.

All of these issues were about controlling theme features for different custom types.

Today, we’ve proud to announce our solution. We taught Toolset how to control the theme settings for CPT templates and archives. This short video shows what I mean:

Dario is creating a layout, used as a template. We want the layout to control everything that appears on the page. However, GeneratePress theme sets a sidebar, title and footer. You can see how Dario controls the settings that come from GeneratePress, specifically for the template that he’s designing.

In the past, you had to resort to CSS and Javascript hacks to reach this level of control. Now, you can do it as part of your design with Toolset.

First beta with GeneratePress

We just released a beta for both Views and Layouts which offers full support for GeneratePress theme. This beta will allow you to control all of GP’s features for Layouts, Content Templates and WordPress Archives.

Themes covered in the upcoming production release

We’re aiming to release everything for ‘production’ in two weeks. By that time, we’ll have full support also for OceanWP, Astra, Genesis and Divi themes. Avada will follow soon.

More themes, lots more

Now that we’ve laid down the infrastructure in Toolset, adding more themes is quick and easy. We’ll ask theme developers to include a tiny JSON configuration file in the root directory of their themes. This configuration file tells Toolset everything that it needs to know about the theme. It details which settings the theme uses, if they work for ‘single’ or ‘archive’ pages and what values they offer. We support Customizer settings, ‘theme option’ entries and custom fields. This covers 100% of the settings used on the themes that we reviewed.

Adding this support to themes means a lot. In practice, it makes the theme ready for building sites with custom types. If you’re a theme developer, we invite you to join our Beyond Pages program.

Download, try and give us feedback

To test this with GeneratePress, go to your Toolset account, click on Downloads and switch to the Beta channel.

Then, download both Views and Layouts betas (if you’re using both). If you’re using just Views, get the Views beta.

You can use this with the current version of GeneratePress. When it’s working, you’ll see the GP settings at the bottom of the Layouts, Content Template and WP Archive editors.

This has been a long and challenging project for us and we’d love to get your feedback. Leave your comments and we’ll get back to you.

 

Comments 44 Responses

  2. I have support GP options in the Views. If I activate Layouts, the theme options are not available there, and they are no longer available in the Views. I’m using a multisite.

    • Thanks for testing. I want to see what you’re seeing. Can you create a ticket in Toolset support and put screenshots of the admin and theme options there? Please put the link of this ticket here, so I can follow-up and assign it to the right developer.

    • Hi there.

      Thanks for the feedback and for trying this out. It seems that we had a small problem with the Layouts package. I am contacting privately with you to send a proper one, and we will update the live beta as soon as possible.

    • Can you try the beta and see? We covered all the GP options that we found, but I can’t say for sure that we noticed everything. If we’ve missed something, it’s very easy to add it. In case we need to add other options that we’ve missed, please open a support ticket in Toolset forum. Put screenshots that show what we’re missing and add another comment here with the link to that ticket. I’ll follow up and assign that ticket to the right developer.

  4. Are there any particular install instructions for the beta version? Can I install this on a currently working site with Generate Press,without losing views and Layout settings?

    • Yes, but please remember that it’s a beta. I don’t recommend installing it on production sites. You can safely install this beta on development sites. The beta will not modify any of your existing data.

    • We haven’t yet tested it with the GP Premium addons. I’m adding this to our list right now, thanks for the links.

    • In this initial release we haven’t yet added the configuration for the GP Premium elements. Indeed, some of these features are good candidates for Toolset integration. We’re looking at them now.

  7. Awesome! Looking forward to when it’s fully released and works well for OceanWP. And I am also happy to see it’s working for GeneratePress. Any plans to integrate with GP Premium and also OceanWP Premium?

    • Thanks Matthias. Right now, it’s only working with GeneratePress theme. The production version with Genesis will be ready in 2 weeks from now.

  10. Dear Amir,

    Although we contact GP team, but it would be better for the integration with GP Premium if this to be coordinated between you and TOM from GeneratePress for understanding of the requirements to make the integration smoothly and quickly with GPP and have the best from the two frameworks Add-ons.

    Here is the email:
    (support@generatepress.com)

    • I completely agree. It takes a very short time to add compatibility to any theme. If the BB folks are interested, we can do it together with them. Want to check with them?

  12. Tried it out and it works great. I agree that the GP premium features, like custom headers, would be nice to include.

    I’ve run into the problem of double featured images and titles before and it required modifying the theme’s templates to remove them. This will certainly be a nicer experience. Thank you.

  14. Thanks for doing this Amir. This is much appreciated. I have been looking for something that allows me to control the header and footer, as well as some styling for the site. I’m quite happy to do the content and some css via Toolset. This is great.

    I have tried to install the beta version a number of ways on my localhost, DesktopServer. But when I try to Activate I keep getting errors. I removed all plugins except Types but still no luck. I have error messages if you want to see them.

    • Hi there, Mark

      This is Juan, Toolset team leader. Thanks for your feedback and for trying this out.

      I will be contacting privately to you to get a little more information about this, and hopefully we will solve whatever problem you are experiencing.

  15. This is very exciting and great news! I have been waiting for the full integration of Toolset and DIVI theme and builder and it will have the support soon! Thank you!

  16. Pls let us know once GP premium feature is integrated.

    Also Amir, pls look into elementor builder issue as well. Its a major setback for me now. thanks

  17. to be fair I’m little disappointed and at the same time happy with this.
    disappointed because the many -to-many-relationship not moving forward.
    happy of course of this new feature.

  18. Hi Amir – I’ll throw it out there. Why doesn’t your team just concentrate on producing your own theme that integrates naturally with all your own products? Surely, working on integrating your products with other themes – which all have their drawbacks – takes up just as much time? 😉

    • You could ask the same about WordPress. Why doesn’t WordPress itself ship with a nice theme that everyone can use and customize, instead of having so many different themes?

      We’ve learned that themes have a lot to do with design and customization features. Different themes cater to a different audience and offer different things. There are themes that are especially geared towards programmers. Other themes are built for designers. There’s no limit to the creativity that theme authors show.

      Instead of trying to cater for everyone with one “Toolset theme”, we decided that it would be better if our clients could use their favorite themes with Toolset. For that purpose, we’ve spent so much effort into this integration project. It was a large initial investment, but now it takes less than a day to fully integrate a complex theme.

      Time will tell if this investment was worth it.

  21. Wish Ultimatum theme could be integrated. I love it’s Live CSS Editor. It’s a real time saver and gives you complete control.
    Thank you and Kudos!

    • We’ll be very happy to work with Ultimatum developers. Did you contact them and invite them to join?