Toolset Blocks 1.3 – WooCommerce, Post Relationships, WPML and More!

   Amir

Announcements

September 15, 2020
15

We just released Toolset Blocks 1.3, which may be the biggest leap forward since we started the Blocks project. Blocks 1.3 makes it easy to build beautiful sites, including WooCommerce ones, with post relationships and in any language.

WooCommerce Blocks for Toolset

Toolset finally gets a complete set of design blocks for WooCommerce. You’ll be able to easily create custom WooCommerce sites without programming and without compromise on design.

All the new blocks for WooCommerce come with styling controls. Blocks appear on the front-end just like they look in the editor, so you can design without having to preview every 2 seconds.

Native / Toolset Styling for WooCommerce Blocks

Our new WooCommerce blocks have two “output modes”. One, is the native WooCommerce output (template). In this mode, the theme and other plugins can modify the look of blocks. This means that you enjoy customization for blocks on the front-end, but you don’t exactly see what you’re designing in the editor.

Our new Toolset-native output uses our own custom markup for WooCommerce blocks. It’s super simple markup, which you can easily style from the editor. This markup doesn’t go through the Woo filters, so it’s a complete WYSIWYG experience. The block will appear in the front-end exactly like it appears in the editor.

Which one to choose? This depends on your theme and preference. Give it a try!

Views for Related Products, Up-Sells and Cross-Sells

WooCommerce has built-in functionality to display related products, up-sells and cross-sells. While this is great, styling these related products is a bit tricky. Instead, we propose that you use simple View blocks to load related products. Since it’s a View that you’re creating, it can include any field and styling that you choose. Want to create a slider with related products? You already know how to do it!

When you’re creating a View for WooCommerce products, you’ll see additional filtering options:

Try it in our new WooCommerce Course

A new course on creating custom WooCommerce sites will help you learn how to use it.

Post Relationships

One of the most powerful features in Toolset is its ability to connect between different posts. Blocks 1.3 makes it super easy to both set-up related content and display it.

Selecting Related Content in Views

Let’s say that you’re editing a template for “real estate agents” and you want to display all the properties that this agent is handling. You can create either a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship between agents and properties (depending on how your business is set up, if agents have exclusivity).

When you’re editing the “agent” template, you’ll create a View to show this agent’s properties.

When you select to display “properties”, Blocks casually asks if you want to show all properties or properties belonging to this agent. That’s it. You just created a View for related content. No need to craft query filters to select the correct items. It’s happening automatically for you, no matter what kind of relationship you’re targeting.

Displaying Fields of Related Content

When you’re designing a View, template or archive, you can now easily access fields of related posts. Let’s continue with our example of realtors and properties and design a template for properties. The property template needs to link back to the agent who’s managing it, so that prospects can get in touch with the right person.

Setting up the related Agent when editing the template for the Property post type

Blocks 1.3 makes this simple. I’ll add a Toolset Button block, enable Dynamic Sources and choose the related agent post. You can select fields of related posts to display and to control conditional display.

You can select fields of related posts in all Toolset blocks, including the Conditional display block (see the “Post Source” selection):

Setting up a condition with fields of related posts
Using the Conditional block to display a female avatar if the parent post doesn’t have and an image

Under the hood, there’s a lot of magic going on to make this happen but we made sure that it looks straight forward in the GUI.

Amazingly Simple WPML Integration

Building custom multilingual sites just became trivial. There are no instructions to follow. Create whatever you need in Toolset and click to translate.

Please note that the new translation workflow requires WPML 4.4 (or later). We released this version of WPML at the same time as Toolset. If you’re updating Toolset, but didn’t yet receive the notification to update WPML, go to Plugins → Add New, click on the Commercial tab and then click on Check for updates.

We prepared detailed lessons on translating directory, membership, and business sites.

Translating Views, templates and archives

When you’re designing a template, an archive or a page with a View, just click on the + icon to send it to translation. Of course, you can pick content for translation in WPML’s Translation Dashboard.

Page with the View block in the block editor (English)
Translating the View’s texts using WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor
Translated page with the View block on the front-end (German)

Translating forms

Go to WPML → Translation Dashboard and you’ll see a new filter for Toolset Forms. Choose it and you’ll see the forms in your site, ready to translate.

Note: You’ll need to save existing forms once before they appear in the Translation Dashboard. If you’re building a new site, install WPML first and then create the forms. This way, forms will be available for translation without re-saving them.

Translating Toolset Forms in WPML’s Translation Dashboard

Multilingual Sites with Post Relationships

If you’re building listing and directory sites, you’re going to love this new feature. Now, you can create content in any language and not only in the site’s default language. Of course, you can translate everything to any other language. This means that you can build truly multilingual sites with user-submitted content. Each user will create content in his/her language. You can translate that content or leave it to be visible only to people browsing in that language.

Quickly Edit Templates for Visitors and Registered Users

When you’re building membership and listing sites, you often want to create different templates for different people. Toolset Access allows you choose which template to use for people without full read-permission. Now, this information is clearly visible on Toolset Dashboard.

Toolset Dashboard with Access Templates

From here, you can see which templates your site uses for different people and you can quickly edit them.

Download and Update

Like all other Toolset releases, this release is backward compatible with previous versions. However, it’s always a good idea to backup your site before applying major updates (such as this one).

The easiest way to receive updates is via the WordPress Dashboard. We send out the update notifications with a bit of delay, so that not all clients update at once. If you’re itching to get this update for existing sites, go to the WordPress admin and then Plugins → Add New page, click the Commercial tab, and then click Check for updates in the Toolset box.

Feedback?

We’d love to get your feedback on these new features and we’re also very happy to hear your general impression, needs and desires for what’s next in Toolset.

We know that there are more features that you’re probably waiting for (sometimes for a long time). We’re eager to get to everything too! 🙂

 

Comments 15 Responses

  1. Hi Amir. Sorry to ask about a separate subject. But as we haven’t heard anything for a while, is there any update on the Toolset Calendar please?

    • You’re right Alan. We promised the Calendar functionality, before we knew how much work we have on other things. It’s not in Blocks 1.3 and we’re not going to have it ready in the next two releases too. I should have checked better what our other commitments are before I promised the calendar functionality, a long time ago.

  2. Totally understandable with WP changing its whole system. I’m sure it’s a daily task just trying to keep up with it at the moment. I look forward to seeing it at some stage in the future.

  3. Can we get an update on Recaptcha v3? This is becoming an increasing priority for us. Recaptcha v2 isn’t cutting it and v3 has been out for TWO YEARS! I’ve tried wedging v3 into existing forms with custom JS using Google’s documentation. So far I haven’t had positive results, and I don’t want to spend more time on it if your upgrade is well underway. Please give us a timeline or some other useful info.

    • It’s on our list. The problem is, ReCaptcha V3 is not that straight forward to use. It doesn’t give you a yet/no verdict, but rather assign a risk level to visits. Then, you need to apply your own logic to this risk level to determine what to do next. So, it’s not a few lines of JS, but rather an entire logic, including space for your own code, to determine what to do with the output.

  4. Thanks for the great update 🙂

    There is one option I think that could be very useful and valuable: Something similar like the Quick View they have for products in Astra Pro and OceanWP Pro

    https://websitedemos.net/store-04/shop/
    https://bakery.oceanwp.org/shop/

    Also have the possibility not only for products but also for regular listing views created with Toolset blocks.

    So we could design a Content Template that shows exactly what we want to show with a Quick View without the user having the need to leave the listing.

    I think this would be very useful for any kind of directory, shop, real estate site, classified site and more.

  5. Any update for v3 of Recaptcha for Toolset Forms? Google released it two years ago this month. v2 isn’t doing enough to prevent spam posts.

  6. Does this allow custom layouts for different categories of WooCommerce products or even individual items (so shoes one layout, socks a different layout, one particular shoe had its own unique layout)? Thanks

    • Not yet, but it will come in the next major release. We’re adding logic that will allow you to assign templates according to taxonomy terms and custom fields. So you could have different templates for men and women shows and for “men shoes on sale”.

  7. Great update! Moving closer to my being able to use Blocks most of the time and Classic Views and Templates less often!

    Your agent / listings example sort of highlights a missing capability we users have wanted for a while: the ability to relate users and posts. For membership sites, classified sites, etc., it’d be really nice to be able to use the user object directly instead of having to create a parallel profile post type to use in relationships, directories, etc. I know there are limits in the WP architecture to what can and can’t be done with user queries compared to post queries but since relationships are now stored in Toolset’s own tables it seems like you should be able to do more with users if not everything that can be done with posts.

    And, of course, relationships between like post types would be helpful too.

    To make blocks really useful for many of my uses, a one-click “output as Boostrap 4 Card” option in Views would be really, really useful. If I could check a box to get that and then use block settings to designate what is the card heading, card body, card footer and what inside those is card title, card image, etc. and turn on or off things like shadow, you’d save me a lot of redundant work / copying and pasting and using classic views.

    Keep up the great work. I’m really looking forward to trying out WooCommerce Blocks.

    • I agree Scott with all this. In particular I would really like to see relationships between like post types (ie. related posts of the same post type)

    • Scott, our next major features for Types will be allowing to create multiple m2m relationships between the same items and then relationships between items of the same type.

      Each of these is a pretty large project, because it affects many places. This includes the GUI, relationships schema, queries, custom search, dynamic sources, etc.

      So, these features are coming, they only need a bit of time, as they are major projects.

      • Hi Amir, thenks for looking into this. Relationships between the same items sounds great and is one of the BIG missing features in Toolset Types and there would be many use cases where this feature would be really helpful.
        Hopefully we will get this in the next few years 🙂