Toolset Blocks 1.2 is Live – Masonry, Collage, YouTube and More!

   Amir

Announcements

May 5, 2020
23

It’s ready and running on our own sites and now available for all Toolset clients. Toolset Blocks offers new image blocks and new ways to display Views and Archives.

New Image Blocks – Slider and Gallery with Grid, Masonry and Collage

Toolset Blocks now has two blocks, which allow you to display images in beautiful way:

  • Gallery (supports image grids, masonry and collage)
  • Slider

You can use these new blocks with static content or with dynamic content. What does this mean? If you create a page and want to show some images as a gallery, insert the new Gallery block and add images to it. That’s a “static gallery”. If you’re creating a real estate site and what to display a gallery of images on each property, you’ll add the Gallery block to the template for properties. That’s a dynamic gallery.

Text+Video Tutorials

Galleries of Static Images

Sliders of Static Images

Dynamic Galleries and Sliders for Templates

The new image blocks replace (and greatly extends) functionality that was previously in the Repeating Fields block. Now, the Repeating Fields block only handles text fields. If you have designs that have galleries as Repeating Field blocks, Toolset will auto-update your content to use the new Gallery and Slider blocks.

Grid, Masonry and Collage Layouts in Views and Archives

We’ve added the new Masonry and Collage layouts also to Views and Archives. When you create Views and Archives with Blocks 1.2, you will be able to choose Masonry and Collage layouts (among the many other layout options that Views and Archives offer).

A Toolset YouTube Block, Supporting Dynamic Videos

Toolset Blocks 1.2 offers a new YouTube block. This block offers all the settings that YouTube offers and allows to choose dynamic videos. This means that you’ll be able to create templates that show a video set by a custom field.

Download and Update

As always, the easiest way to get updates to Toolset plugins is to register your site and update automatically.

We push out new releases gradually. If your site is registered and you’re still not seeing this new version, follow this:

  1. In the WordPress admin, go to the Plugins → Add New page
  2. Click the Commercial tab
  3. Click Check for updates.
  4. This will force the installation of the recent Toolset plugins.

Feedback?

How is this update of Toolset working for you? Leave your comments and we’ll get back to you.

 

Comments 23 Responses

  1. These are really great advances and frankly we have been able to replace Elementor with toolset blocks with a number of sites so thank you.

    I would like to know if the ability to assign Toolset Blocks Filter search results to a different page has been implemented yet and if not is there an ETA?

    The combination of Toolset Blocks and Kadence Blocks is so much more powerful than I ever imagined.

    Thanks and keep it up!

    • Thanks for the feedback. We will be adding the Filter features in Blocks 1.4. The next release focuses mainly on post relationships. We’ll complete the support in Blocks for displaying fields of related posts. Now there’s basic support, but a lot is missing. We’re planning to do the same for custom searches in the following release.

      Great to hear that you’re using Toolset with other block plugins. For us, that’s one of the major appeals in moving to Gutenberg. You can mix and combine different blocks from different authors and they all work together. Can you tell us what you’re combining between Toolset and Kadence?

      • Hi Amir,

        We are using the tabs block from Kadence so we can input tabbed content in the site mixed with toolset blocks.

        Thank you for the update on when the separation of filters from results page in blocks will go live.

        A feature I requested long ago and think it is still needed to this day is the ability to duplicate a post along with all of its Repeating Field Group values and Nested Repeating Field Group values.

        Meaning when a post is duplicated it is not just the top level of the post but truly the entire post as the client sees it with all data as well.

        This will make Toolset more amenable to enterprise type applications.

  2. How to implement the automated image sliding into the new Gallery Slider in Content Template?

    • Hello Francesco,
      currently, it’s not possible but we already have a ticket to add this feature so it will be possible. Thanks for asking. It will help us prioritize this ticket.

  3. To be clear, the auto-conversion you mention is repeating field block to gallery block, right? The underlying fields aren’t converted, hopefully. We’ve got several clients with custom galleries loosely based on the old, pre-blocks way of doing that with repeating fields but done with our own custom code and CSS that we extended from your example. We add titles and captions via attributes our lightbox recognizes.

    • Exactly. The postmeta (fields) don’t change. Only the block in Gutenberg editor changes from “repeating field” to either slider or gallery. Your custom implementation will not get affected by this change.

  4. How about the similarity and difference in features of Blocks and Views right now?
    Months ago I preferred the old Views because it had features that Blocks hadn’t, at least that time.

    • The “shortcodes” Views still can do things that Blocks don’t have (like nested Views). However, Blocks now offer features that the shortcodes views doesn’t (like masonry output). In each version of Toolset Blocks we are adding some features. These include features that are already available in the shortcodes Views and completely new features. Does this help?

      • Thank you, it helps, but generally saying it would be great to have an always up-to-date comparison table with the specific different features.
        I tested Blocks months ago, it didn’t have a feature I needed so I switched back to Views and I keep using that.
        Maybe others are in similar situation…

        • Hey Vane, could you please share a few examples of what you tried to implement using blocks and that was not possible? Nested Views are not possible and you would need to use a workaround. Anything else? If it’s already possible I will share some tips on how to proceed, if not, I will discuss these features with our developers. Thanks in advance!

    • Hi Umberto, thanks for your nice comment! Yes, the slider will swipe on mobile, moreover, using the responsive features (phone/tablet/desktop icons) you can set up a different number of slides for each, for example, one might want to choose just one slide for phones. Hope it helps!

  7. Nice update, however, I would like to see more styling options in the gallery and sliders. For example, an option to have a caption displays on hover over the images and caption displays in a lightbox too.

    Also, I would like to see an option to style a hover state over the images, for example, overlay color, image shrink or grow … etc.

    • You can only choose one image as “featured image”, so you can’t use that as the source of a slider. If you want to create a slider that will show the featured images of several posts, you can create a slider with Views. We show how to do it here:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Jtp3nFPfM

  9. Wich Lightboxes Solution was used – because i see a problem that for single image block direct from gutenberg you need a lightbox Plugin and your solutions bring theyr own.
    Was it not possible to use one solution for all image relateds blocks?

  10. Hello Toolset people,

    Just working with Toolset Block on my first project and really enjoying the polish that is coming with each new update.

    With some of the recent update in Divi, my favourite unsanctioned “composition” approach is now working smoothly. I can now create the outer template with the Divi Builder in Theme Builder based template. You can now access the Toolset generated custom fields trough Divi’s module based dynamic content system which is a big plus. In this instance I have the template built for a custom post type. the post header is created with the Divi builder and down the bottom I have an enquiry form using the Divi contact form module. The content is then pulled from each post using the Post Content module. Each post is then getting its main content laid out in a Toolset content template built with blocks.

    There is more fun to be had though!

    The content is set up with repeatable field groups where the first is nested in the main content and then nesting within that first set for the second set of repeating fields. I did experience the issue where at the moment secondary field nesting with a view is not possible in the blocks set up. As this secondary set of fields was quite basic I constructed with a traditional html/css/js view and was able to get it to appear with the view block within another block based view.

    So everything is nice and flexible.

    Small things like updating the css and js panels at the Document level of the block based templates where they will function like those in the View block would be good. The View block version allows you to open the css and js panels in a more user friendly overlay.

    The newer versions of the block editor that we will get later this year also comes with better versions of the html editor, both for direct in block editing and the full document view where the html is colour coded, so you can now more easily identify where block begin and end. This is great for daredevil stuff where you can drop block code in trivial amounts and dump it into the Divi Code module and see it render properly on the front end.

    • I’m very glad to hear that this setup is working. The reason it’s “unsanctioned” is that we cannot take responsibility for integration into a workflow where we have no say. With Gutenberg, all coming changes are communicated and we adjust on time (and it’s still not a walk in the park). We’ll have nested Views directly in blocks soon. It will not happen in the coming release (Blocks 1.3), but we’re planning it for the one right after. Blocks 1.3 will focus on complete support for related content in blocks, without having to resort to shortcode attributes.

      • Does ‘related content in blocks’ implement the same post type relationship? I have an existing site in Views that is waiting for that update (I migrated it from Drupal where self-relationships were possible ). I would really be excited to be able to set up a relationship for the same post type!

  11. I have a complex site (icasc.ca) with multiple post types, several views and various content templates. How difficult is it to switch it over from views to blocks so as to take advantage of some of these new features like masonry?

  12. Maybe a bit late feedback – but couldn’t resist it.

    First a big congratulation for Toolset Blocks which adds so much, that the WP Block editor is starting to become useful.

    After experimenting a bit and building a Test Site Toolset, Oxygen and the Oxygen Gutenberg Block Builder, there is not much missing to build complete, highly functional and appealing sites without any other additional plugins or blocks.

    Except in cases where I needed an Accordion and content in tabs I got stuck and had to resort to add a different plugin. But none of the plugins I tried allowed to use dynamic content.

    So it would be probably welcome by many Toolset users if there are blocks available for Tabs and Accordions with the possibility to be populated with dynamic content.

    Also one feature I was missing was the option to add a link to an entire Container Block

    Else all I can say so far Toolset Blocks have come a long way and are nearly there to completely replace Toolset Views.

    Looking forward to the enhancements in next releases and see what are the next goodies you are presenting us. 🙂