WordPress 5.5 is Coming – Faster and Richer

   Amir

Discussions

July 9, 2020
22

WordPress 5.5 is approaching quickly, currently scheduled for August/2020. Each release of WordPress, since version 5.0 has made it closer to being fully-usable as a convenient page builder. Now, it looks like more people are making Gutenberg their go-to editor for new sites.

Here is a nice video from Adam Preiser (WPCrafter):

In this video, Adam focuses on three main points:

  • The speed and efficiency of the WordPress Block editor (editing and front-end)
  • The design capabilities with blocks
  • The convenience of learning one tool for everything (Gutenberg)

Adam presents the Kadence Blocks plugin, which adds “page builder” capabilities to WordPress. Toolset has its own set of blocks for a very similar purpose.

Of course, Toolset is fully compatible with every release of WordPress. By the time WordPress 5.5 will be out, Toolset Blocks 1.3 will be live (about 2 weeks from now). We’ll cover what’s new in Blocks 1.3 in the next post.

What’s your impression using Gutenberg? Are you using only Toolset blocks, or do you combine Toolset-based sites with blocks from other plugins? Leave your comments and we’ll get back to you.

 

Comments 22 Responses

  1. I like using Gutenberg, I just wish that I could use it on the header and footer of the website. It would add some cool possibilities.

    I do use a couple of other Gutenberg block plugins. Mostly to add to the page building capabilities.

    • Thanks for your feedback. Can you tell us what blocks and from which plugins you’re using a lot?

      • Mostly ones that other people have mentioned below: Accordion and Tabs.

        Other ones that I didn’t see listed:
        1. Business Hours block, since a lot of people use Toolset to create directories having an easy way to add and edit business hours/office hours would be ideal

        2. An Inline Notice block that could receive dynamic content and be dismissible

        3. Being able to select a parent in the fields & text block

        4. Having a page on your website that has demonstrations of each type of block (at least I couldn’t find it)

        Overall though I think y’all are doing a great job with Toolset.

        • Thanks for feedback. I think that we’ll do a tutorial on how to create a Business Hours block with a Repeating Fields Group and a View. Dismissable notices are also a great idea.

          Full support for post-relationship is coming in Blocks 1.3. This includes the ability to choose the post parent in the single-field, text and conditional blocks.

          We don’t have a page with demo of all blocks, but we keep updating Toolset reference sites with examples of how to use the different blocks in practical sites. Have you seen it?
          https://discover-wp.com/site-templates/

          The next site we’re adding will be for WooCommerce. It goes with Blocks 1.3, which will include all blocks you’ll need for dynamic WooCommerce sites.

          • I was just here on Toolset.com looking to see what the woocommerce support is like… looks a bit dated. Glad to see you’re about to release woocommerce blocks! It’s been a couple weeks, will you have a post about Blocks 1.3 soon? I’ll be building my first woocommerce site in about 6 weeks and I’m trying to figure out if I should stick with Divi or if I can go more light weight with something like GeneratePress + Toolset.

            • The upcoming beta this week will still not include the new WooCommerce blocks. This will be ready in a week from now (beta). The new production release of Blocks 1.3 (including WooCommerce support) will be well on time for your next project. I think that it’s better to wait a little for it, rather than use the old code.

  2. Dear Amir,

    Actuality I was asking myself when you will have a new post regarding the new WordPress 5.5 update,but I was surprised and for the first time that you do marketing for Adam GOOD for him!!!.

    As we can see that your transformation to natively integrate with Gutenberg was a successful strategic move and now we are begin to reap its fruits.

    Without a doubt, you and your team have worked hard to get there,but the Toolset still needs more effort to be END2END solution as I would like to see in Gutenberg+Toolset Blocks the following:

    1.Create a row and resize columns using mouse drag to achieve the desired layout.

    2.Create responsive designs to control the entire responsiveness by defining the breakpoint for small screens also hide blocks on different devices.

    3.full control over the typography so we can choose the font, apply font weight, font transform, set font size, line height, letter spacing in px, em, and percentage on the basis of the devices.

    4.Apply padding and margin to columns and set column background with single color, image, and gradient. Give column border, apply border-radius, and animate columns.

    5.Share blocks across websites with design library feature or the default Import/Export tool in WordPress, which we can re-use Toolset blocks across other websites.

    6.Custom CSS and Built-in animation.

    7.Blocks for Client Area with Woocommerce or without.

    8.Multilingual Blocks with WPML.

    9.Integration with CartFlows (Adam product).

    With this focus and efforts you have my respect for you and your team not only for the instant support but for walking the extra mile for your clients and WordPress
    ecosystem.

    Thanks,

    • Thanks for your feedback. The upcoming release of Blocks 1.3 includes some of the features that you’ve listed. I’ll have an announcement post for it in about 2 weeks.

  3. Hi Amir

    I just started playing around with Toolset Blocks on a Test Site and the performance improvement convinced me immediately 🙂

    Thanks to your effort, that Gutenberg editor finally starts to make sense. 🙂

    Though there are some things I wished would be possible:

    1. Adding a dynamic /static link to a container so that the full container could be clickable. It’s something I can do in Toolset Views.

    2. A Block for dynamic / static Tabs, so the Tabs and content could be generated for example from a Repeatable Group

    3. Ditto for Accordion Block

    4. Nice to have: An option to display a View Loop as a time line.

    Using oxygenbuilder builder with Gutenberg Block Builder add-on I can easy build and design most blocks I needed so far and also use blocks designed in oxygen to design the single templates.

    This means, with Toolset Blocks and oxygen I can custom build nearly everything without using any other plugins. On top of this, the performance of this combo is stunning.

    Looking forward to the goodies you dish up in Blocks 1.3 🙂

    • Thanks Peter. I’m glad to hear that Gutenberg + Toolset are giving you good performance.

      In Blocks 1.3 we’re going to include several other features, but we have requests for almost everything that you asked for. You’ll be getting these features in the coming releases.

      • Hi Amir

        Thats great to hear and I will look forward to the next releases. Something else that crossed my mind in the meantime is an option to display a view in calendar format with an option for the users to switch from daily to weekly and monthly views.

        Also it would be great to have the possibility to have simple charts like bar-, line-, circle- and doughnut charts which can get the values from custom fields or repeatable groups.

        I also guess that one of the future steps will be the transition from Woocommerce Views to Woocommerce Blocks?
        If so it would be great if it would have a Quick View similar to Astra, OceanWP, Crocoblock to mention some examples that already have it.
        https://onestore.oceanwp.org/shop/
        https://bakery.oceanwp.org/shop/
        https://websitedemos.net/jewellery-04/store/
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25_2zUQzxgA

        Also a mini cart with a counter, which updates via ajax, would be a great benefit. Examples can be seen in the menu bar of the above mentioned sites.

        • You’re right. We’ve been meaning to add calendar display for Views for a long time, and we’re not there yet. Priorities…

          The upcoming release of Toolset will include a very major update for WooCommerce. We’ll include a full set of WooCommerce blocks, with styling options for everything on any block. There’s another set of blocks that we intend to create for WooCommerce, for the account system, but this will not make it into the upcoming release.

  4. Hi,

    There are few blocks which can be added in Toolset eg., 1. Accordion 2. Icon block…

    Can be expect the same in Toolset blocks 1.3

    Thanks

    • Yes, tabs and accordion are pretty high on our wishlist for blocks. They will not arrive yet in Blocks 1.3, but we’ll try to have them soon after. In the meanwhile, you can use tabs and accordions from other Block plugins and they will work smoothly with Toolset. Indeed, it means having another plugin active, but this doesn’t influence the site’s performance in a way that you’ll even notice.

  5. As a developer of custom WP themes, I am mostly using a mix of ACF blocks and Toolset, for toolset blocks I find I mostly use the heading block for the extra controls it adds, and the Container block! That has been a lifesaver getting into Gutenberg early. Some of that need we go away when WP adds block groups and margin/padding styling however what you are able to do with just that block alone is incredible so shout out for the container block! throw in a couple custom block styles or classes and you can layout half your site with just that block alone!

    I think the biggest challenge I have is styling my backend gutenberg editor. I’ve worked through quite a few bugs with your team over the past 3 builds and they have been great at getting them in the queue to be fixed. But I think as Gutenberg gets more traction people are going to need to pick an addon and stick with it. It’s really tricky to get multiple plugin blocks all working well together in the backend. You start to see issues when you nest blocks of different plugins, usually not on the frontend but your backend starts to suffer from odd nesting because of all the backend wrappers in the editor.

    I’d love to see a flex columns toolset block. I know you guys went full css grid, and no ie.11 support which I’d love to say is safe but in prod it’s just not quite as far as clients are concerned. But an additional flexbox column setup could be a great addition. I have no interest in more “flashy” blocks. for me better foundational blocks is the power of toolset blocks. If you can’t code your own accordion block you can install one of the many plugins for that. keep it lean!

    • Thanks for your feedback. We already have plans for what to include in the following release of Toolset, so we’re not going to be able to add Flex columns. However, if there are compatibility issues between Toolset and a block that you’re using from a different plugin, we’ll do our absolute best to resolve it. We want to include “everything” in Toolset, but we can’t. So, we’re focusing our efforts on core features that have no parallel in other plugins.

      Please open a support ticket about compatibility issues and add the link here. I’ll pass it to our compatibility team and they’ll see what we can do, with the cooperation of the other author.

        • We keep the list of features for the long term a bit flexible, because needs change over time (especially client needs). In the coming release (Blocks 1.3) we’ve focused on “big things”, including:

          * Post relationship
          * WPML integration
          * WooCommerce blocks

          We’re going to dedicate the next release (Blocks 1.4) to a long list of medium-small things. These are projects that are much smaller, but help design sites. For example, big usability improvements to alignment controls, checkbox fields, date fields (including filtering), styling for search controls, more love for the conditional block and dozens of other important design and usability improvements.

          For the following release, we plan to finally have nested Views and Views for taxonomy (like was possible for a long time with the shortcode Views). In the Block Editor, these are bigger projects, but we’re sure we’ll manage with them.

          And, there are many medium-large features that we want to reach.

          • Thanks! Blocks 1.4 sounds exciting. The styling for the filters will be super helpful. I’ve pulled off some very unique styling of the filters in the past and it’s never been an easy task with the way the labels and inputs are wrapped. And also glad to hear the missing assignment controls will be addressed. Thanks for the update

            • Alignment controls for images are actually not missing. They’re just very well hidden under the Advanced section. We’ll fix this usability problem in the next release.

  6. WP5.5 introduces a newer version of jQuery and now jQuery Migrate Helper warns wp-content/plugins/cred-frontend-editor/library/toolset/cred/embedded/assets/common/js/mvc.js: jQuery.browser is deprecated. Will there be an update for Cred in the near future?

    • Hi Erik

      Thanks for your feedback. This is Juan, Toolset team leader.

      Yes, we are aware of this warning but in fact it is a false positive. We evaluated all our jQuery-related code and issued an update: for Forms, it would be Forms 2.5.8.

      Regarding this specific warning, it probably should be a much more prominent one. The function it mentions, jQuery.browser, is not deprecated but removed in jQuery 1.9, and WordPress is loading 1.12.4, so using it should cause some bold problems. But Toolset Forms is including its own version of the function, covering the usage we do have for it.

      Unfortunately, the mechanism that jQuery Migrate Helper uses to log potential problems does not allow us to mark this warning as solved. In a future iteration of the plugin we plan to review the logic around it and eventually remove any reference to it.

      Hope it helps.