Toolset Blocks 1.5 Beta – Test the Upcoming WooCommerce Features

   Dario

Announcements

April 7, 2021
33

Help us test Toolset Blocks 1.5 beta! It brings great new features for WooCommerce sites. This includes assigning templates and archives conditionally, creating archives for specific taxonomy terms, new Stock Management block, Kadence blocks compatibility, and more.

Assign Content Templates Conditionally

You can now set conditions under which Content Templates display for certain content.

Let’s say you sell shoes and you have product categories for “Trainers” and “Heels”. You can now have a completely different template for displaying single trainer shoes and another one for heels shoes.

Template for displaying shoes in the “Trainer” category

Template for displaying shoes in the “Heels” category

When editing a new or existing template you will see a new Set conditions link next to the post types. Click on it and a dialog box will appear for setting the conditions.

Dialog for setting up a conditional display for a Content Template

You can select conditions based on the available fields and taxonomies for the given post type.

Sometimes, you might conditionally assign multiple templates to the same content. In this case, you can use the Template Priority field to set the desired priority for the conditional template.

Assign Archives to Specific Taxonomy Terms

So far, you were able to assign archives to a whole taxonomy. Now, you can assign them to specific taxonomy terms.

Assigning an archive to specific taxonomy terms

This is especially important for WooCommerce sites because you can now have different product archives for different categories of products.

WooCommerce Features

Besides the two big features listed above, here are the other ones we’re introducing in this release.

Search Fields for On-Sale Status or Price

There are two new search fields you can now use in custom searches for products:

  • Filter products by their price
  • Filter product by their on-sale status

This is pretty awesome because you can now use a price range filter in custom searches.

Custom search with a WooCommerce price range filter

Easier Assigning of Templates and Archives to Products

Now, when you create an archive or a template, it’s applied. If there is no template or an archive for a particular item, the default WooCommerce templates are used instead.

There is no need to set any additional options on the Toolset → WooCommerce Blocks settings page anymore. Actually, that page became redundant so we removed it.

New Stock Status Block

You can now easily display the stock status of your products. Simply insert the new Toolset Stock Status block.

The new Toolset Stock Status block for WooCommerce

As with all Toolset blocks, you can fine-tune the styling and colors of the block’s output.

Please note that to see the number of items in the stock for a product, it needs to have its stock management option turned on.

Use WooCommerce fields in templates, Views, archives and forms

WooCommerce adds a number of custom fields related to Products. Until now, to be able to use these fields in Toolset Forms and Views, you had to register them manually.

Now, all these fields are automatically registered by Toolset and you can simply use them in your front-end forms and Views.

You can even see all the fields and their options just like any other group of custom fields. Simply go to the Toolset → Custom Fields page and click the group named WooCommerce.

WooCommerce Pagination and Sorting Options for Archives

WooCommerce provides its own custom pagination and sorting filter on product listing pages. Both of these features are disabled by default but you can turn them on if needed.

When editing a WordPress Archive assigned to a product archive, expand the WooCommerce section in the right sidebar and toggle the needed option.

WooCommerce pagination and sorting controls when editing an archive

Compatibility with Kadence Blocks and Theme

This release brings full compatibility with both Kadence Blocks plugin and Kadence theme.

To test integration with Kadence, you must use the latest versions of Kadence:

  • Kadence Blocks Free 1.10.7+
  • Kadence Blocks Pro 1.4.28+
  • Kadence Theme 1.0.18+

Kadence Blocks Integration

All Kadence blocks (where it makes sense) feature Toolset’s Dynamic Sources options. This means your arsenal of design tools just got one of the best collections of WordPress blocks – and they’re dynamic.

Using Toolset’s Dynamic Sources in the Kadence Info Box block

Kadence Theme Integration

You now have theme options for archives and single-post templates, as well as for WooCommerce.

Kadence Theme options when editing a single-post template

Please note that the Kadence theme allows you to set all its theme options per post type. To avoid confusion and duplicating the same options, we omitted those theme options from the template and archive editors.

Performance Improvements

You probably heard that in May, Google will start ranking sites by speed.

We’ve done a lot of work to optimize how Toolset loads resources on the front-end. This optimization is already present in this beta and keeps Toolset’s impact on your site’s speed to a bare minimum.

We’ll publish a separate, in-depth article about this whole topic right after the official Toolset 1.5 release.

Other Improvements

As always, we added a number of other improvements across the board.

Improvements to Inline Fields

We greatly improved the Inline Fields feature adding a lot of new options:

  • Backend preview now changes the Inline Field values when you switch the template preview to another post
  • More output options for Date, Taxonomy, and Excerpt fields
  • Display “Post title with a link” and “Author Archive Link”

Wizard for easy creation of WordPress Archives

When you go to the Toolset → WordPress Archives page and click to create a new archive, you will see a wizard for setting it up. It’s very similar to the View-creation wizard. 

You can select the archive’s main options like pagination, search, and output layout. And in the second step, you can select the content to which you want to assign this archive.

Improved text-alignment controls

Before, Toolset blocks didn’t allow you to disable an already selected text-align option. Now, you can do this and simply disable any text alignment. In this case, the alignment will use the browser defaults. This is especially useful for right-to-left languages.

More specific CSS selectors on the front-end

Sometimes, your theme’s styling can override the styling settings you set in Toolset blocks. There’s now a new option which when enabled adds an ID to the body tag for use by Blocks CSS selectors. If the body tag already has an ID, it uses that one.

New Toolset demo sites

Finally, we also released three completely new Toolset reference sites.

How to Install this Beta Version

You should use this beta for testing purposes and not on production sites. 

All Toolset plugins got this beta so download the ones whose features you want to test:

  • Toolset Types 3.4.8 Beta
  • Toolset Blocks 1.5 Beta
  • Toolset WooCommerce Blocks 3.0 Beta
  • Toolset Forms 2.6.7 Beta
  • Toolset Forms Commerce 1.8.4
  • Toolset Maps 2.0.7 Beta
  • Toolset Access 2.8.11 Beta

Go to the Downloads section on your Toolset Account page. in the Choose Channel dropdown select Beta. A list of available beta plugins appears and you can download them. 

Alternatively, you could switch to beta versions directly from the WordPress admin. Go to the Plugins → Add New page and click the Commercial tab. In the Toolset section, click the Check for updates button and you should see the option to get the available beta versions.

Share Your Feedback

Last, but definitely not least, please let us know how it goes!

If you find a bug or have a usability suggestion, let us know in the comments and we’ll reply!

 

Comments 33 Responses

  1. Hi Dario
    We are still using the Views with Beaver Builder. Will you ever update that plugin? I see it’s under Legacy plugins now.

    I’ve not used Blocks, but can I use your Blocks with BB to get the new functionality?

    • Hi, Kristian! Actually, Views gets updates like bug fixes and patches but we don’t develop new features for it. This includes features in this 1.5 release. That’s why it’s under Legacy plugins. We support it, we make sure it works, but there are no new features.

      You can use Blocks alongside Beaver Builder, but it has no integration with it. Meaning, they will work fine side-by-side but you have to use them separately. In other words, you cannot use BB to design templates and archives for Toolset. There are currently no plans to do this integration between Blocks and BB.

      • You’re positioning toolset as the anti-friendly tool for any WP that uses a page builder (elementor, divi, beaver, etc). It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to work with toolset in this environment of having to mix design tools because of this. I don’t want my designers to be having to learn toolset, gutenblah on top of elementor.

        Will you think about possibly forking toolset into designer tool specific versions, or it may even be better if you left the design tools to the people who are already doing that and focus making toolset’s core features better. Start with fixing all the css issues with blocking other files and then making the import/export of cpt/fields work without having to pull out and edit a csv file.

        Every release this past year has just been a new reason to look for alternatives. Everytime i look at support articles for the issues, the responses are basically. “We’re not going to change that because it works well enough/fast enough”.

        • We have so many ideas for great developments. The reason we’re not building everything right away is because we have limited resources. So, for each release, we’re choosing some things and we’re not choosing others.

          In this release we focused on the features that make it easy to build custom e-commerce sites. You probably know that there’s a huge increase in demand for e-commerce sites and many of our clients have expressed this need to.

          We wanted to include a better Elementor widget in this release, but it didn’t make it into the sprint, due to time and capacity constraints.

          We know that you’re waiting for it and we’re doing our best to build what our clients expect of us. Forking Toolset into 3 different projects would be possible if we had 3x the development capacity.

  2. Hi Dario,

    Good addition with the template by category option. Was looking for this recently on a project. Fortunately I use Divi so was able to do this with its template system. Any chance it Is available when working in the traditional html/css views as well?

    As usual loads of other additions as well!

    • Hi, Stephen, thanks for the comment! No, new features are only available in Blocks. As you probably know, we continue supporting Views and having bug-fixes for it when necessary but there are no new features planned for it anymore.

      • Does that mean that the old views may be deprecated at some stage in the future? Would be a pity because it is useful fro some use cases and often a lighter build.

        • Hi, Stephen! No, there are no plans for deprecating the legacy Views plugin. We keep supporting it. 🙂

          • We can’t use blocks on our site because of issues with it and designing with elementor.

            If there are going to be no more updates, means we’re either forced to move to wordpress blocks editor and drop elementor (or mix editors) or never get any new features/improvements.

            Is that correct or am I missing something? Should elementor users look for other alternatives or is there work being done to make toolset work with elementor?

            • We’re doing our very best to keep up with the environment around us. Many of our clients today start with Gutenberg. Many clients start with Divi and many start with Elementor. There are also clients who prefer Oxygen builder and some Beaver Builder.

              With our limited capacity, we’re always going to give priority to what comes from WordPress itself. Then, we’re trying to keep up with the ever changing interfaces of other page builders.

              We work together with Elementor team on compatibility. Sometimes we manage to complete everything that we want, but not always.

  3. There are lots of nice things in this beta.

    I was excited about the performance improvements. I loaded the beta on a test site and with no Toolset Views, Content Templates, etc created there was a Toolset CSS file and a Toolset JS file loaded on the home page. I was surprised to see that as the best practice is to only load assets on pages where they are used, and then only load the assets needed. Were the performance enhancements not in this beta?

    • Hi, David! Actually, we’re aware of this but honestly, the impact is negligible for what it would require (a Views refactoring for the reason to have 1 less CSS file loaded on the frontend). Also it could become problematic if any kind of a post content shortcode is included on a page and in that post content a View shortcode is used… Because this can happen even due to any third-party implementation. And to predict things like that, we would need to fetch any content / sidebar and do a full resolve of it BEFORE WP is doing it anyway.

      We’ll have a separate post about this whole topic once the 1.5 officially goes out and we’ll touch upon this topic more. However, Toolset performance footprint is really optimized now. We do need to polish some things still, like images, but generally, Toolset will not slow down your site.

  4. I am a bit concerned about the following:

    “Now, when you create an archive or a template, it’s applied. If there is no template or an archive for a particular item, the default WooCommerce templates are used instead.

    There is no need to set any additional options on the Toolset → WooCommerce Blocks settings page anymore. Actually, that page became redundant so we removed it.”

    From what I can remember I only install the WooCommerce block plug-in so that I can use the woo price field shortcode and possibly other woo related fields. In many instances I am using Divi for layout and templates and from what I can t’embête you need to visit the settings page for WooCommerce blocks to prevent the defaults overriding my Divi design?

      • Hi, Stephen, thanks a lot for bringing this up! We would need some extra information here. Could you please tell us exactly what you usually do to “prevent the defaults overriding your Divi designs”?

        Also, we would definitely recommend you to try this beta and see if these changes affect your workflow, and how. I didn’t understand what you meant by “Just checked some backups. All ok.” Does this mean you already tested a site backup with the new beta and everything is working as you expect/need it to? Let us know, we want to provide solutions if needed. 🙂

        • Hi Dario,

          What used to happen, if you were troubleshooting with plugins off, and then activated them again, is that the WooCommerce Views/Blocks would jump to its own template and override any Divi plugin you might be using. You had to be aware of this and head over to the Settings page for this and reset to the setting you wanted to use. These would be:

          • WooCommerce Plugin Default Templates
          • WooCommerce Plugin Default Archive Templates

          I never had to use any of the Divi options for this by the way.

          So I have a number of backups of sites on MAMP using this configuration and I updated last night to the Betas and all seems alright, even if access to the old WooCommerce Blocks settings page is gone now.

          I did one more test just now. I disabled WooCommerce Blocks and reactivated it with no adverse effects.

          And I see now I actually don’t need the WooCommerce Blocks activated to see the WooPrice in my traditional HTML/CSS views. I’m seeing this with the non Beta version on the live site as well? So did something change there already with a more recent update? Can you confirm that I don’t need WooCommerce Blocks anymore to use the [wpv-woo-product-price] shortcode?

          Just to clarify. I was experiencing this issue more last year, where re-activating WooCommerce Blocks was overriding my views and templates.

          • Thanks for more details.

            1. Before, we used to enforce the usage of our templates so, for example, if you wanted to use your theme for the archive and our template for single products, you needed to head to the settings every time. With this new version, usage of our PHP template is in sync with whether you have a Content Template or an Archive assigned to the single or archive page for Products. In other words, now, there are no extra setting needed, and nothing will be automatically overriding your previous selection.

            2. Honestly, I’m not sure what’s up with the wpv-woo-product-price shortcode because it should still be a part of the WooCommerce Blocks plugin and not just Blocks. Could you please create a ticket for this in our support with exact steps of what you’re doing so we can replicate and raise it with our development team?

            Thank you!

            • Thanks Dario,

              I will open a ticket on the price shortcode. Seems some sort of aggressive caching somewhere is giving me the impression that the shorcode is operational with the plugin off.

  5. Looks like in Edit conditions i just could choose plain single custom fields. Would be nice if i could use select fields too for the conditions.

    • Hi, Mario, thanks for the comment! Seems like the beta contains the possibility to use radio fields but not select fields. Our developers are already looking into it and the final release will allow you to use select fields as well. 🙂

  6. Any news on some basic Toolset Blocks features, like a taxonomy block, adding CPT fields to a template that isn’t set as the default for that CPT, Editing descriptions, etc?

    Things like that are keeping my from using Toolset Blocks 100%.

    • Hi, Darryl! Could you please share a bit more info because I don’t think I understand all your points:
      1. You can already display taxonomies using the Toolset Single Field block. What would you like to achieve that you cannot with this block?
      2. I don’t understand what you mean by “adding CPT fields to a template that isn’t set as the default for that CPT”? Could you please give me an example, when/why would you need this? In general, for you to do this, there needs to be a relationship between these two post types, so that you have something to target them. If you set up a relationship, you can do this already. But there is no plan (and honestly I don’t even see an application) of displaying fields from some arbitrary CPT in a template assigned to something completely different and unrelated.
      3. Which descriptions do you want/need to edit and where do you want to edit them from?

      Thanks!

      • I can create a View of custom taxonomy terms, but there is no good way to insert it using the block editor. Sure, I can use a Fields and Text block, but I think it should be done the same way as any other View.

        If I want to display a post using a specific template that is not the default single. This could be for a simplified, expanded, printable version of the post. I run into this way more often than you’d think. A real world example that I’m building right now is a profile page that has a simple or expanded view. Another example would be a profile page that’s viewable only to the author that includes editing features that I don’t want in the publicly viewable more simple version.

        The descriptions I’m referring to are for Views and/or Template. If a site has more than a few Views (80 on the site I was working on today) haven a description as to what the template does and where it’s used comes in handy. Using the Views plugin this is done easily when editing a view. When using Toolset Blocks, I cannot for the life of me see a way to add/edit.
        https://p119.p3.n0.cdn.getcloudapp.com/items/NQuwdm5L/5ff3f1a8-e3be-40d4-8ca2-a10df15cf34c.jpeg

        • Hi Dario,

          I can’t resist to get myself on the line after I read the word ” USER PROFILE” as this feature is still not available in Toolset Blocks as required for client area.

          I know Toolset team working on the Toolset 1.6 release and part of the plan for it is to provide a way for users to have an easy way to work with users and user profiles but in my opinion this area required FULL attention to accommodate most of the websites scenarios like (membership – directory).

          Thanks
          ibnoman

          • Hi, Arabsw! I don’t understand your comment. Yes, we’re planning to have a feature that lets you work with User Profiles just like with any other post type. Does that sounds good to you? Did you want to suggest a specific feature or just give a thumbs-up for that planned feature? 🙂

        • Hi, Darryl! Thank you for the details.

          1. So, if I understood correctly, you want to have Views that list Taxonomies?

          2. I will forward your suggestions about templates as a feature request to the team. Please ask in our support about this: “Another example would be a profile page that’s viewable only to the author that includes editing features that I don’t want in the publicly viewable more simple version.” I am pretty sure you can do this already with Toolset, Access, and Blocks.

          3. I will forward your suggestion about Views and Templates descriptions to the team, sounds useful.

        • Hi again, Darryl! One more question about “using a specific template that is not the default single template”… Could you please tell me, how would you trigger displaying such a template? I mean, what would be a “variable” (i.e. application logic) that decides whether a profile page (that you mention) displays a simple or an expanded view? Thanks!

  7. Hi Dario,
    Not sure this is the exact place to post this, but I have submitted an issue to the team some months ago and would like to know if any improvement could have been integrated in Blocks (or any other module) for that.
    The detailed description of the problem is that there is is a limitation of the Forms Commerce system. When the same Form is submitted multiple times during one Order, only the most recently created post will be published when the Order is completed.
    This means that only one product could be ordered using a Cred form!
    Christian proposed a turn around, but I would prefer to have Toolset modules ready for multiple products management ordering from the beginning.
    Let me know if you need more info on this and what is the position of Toolset.
    Thanks
    Pat

    • Hi, Pat! We try to stay on-topic here, but questions are always welcome, so thank you for bringing this issue up. I checked with the development team about your issue. It was analyzed and discussed already but after reviewing, it turns out this is not actually a bug in itself but a – feature request. And it’s not a trivial one at all. So, this is on our list of things to do, but it’s not slated for any specific release which is why I cannot provide any ETA. It probably won’t happen soon as the next release (1.6) is already planned and it’s going to be a big one.

  8. Hi Dario,

    Thanks for taking care.
    I’m just surprised that this issue have not been found by lots of Toolset users (I think some have already reported it in the Toolset support).
    Customers do not want to make lots of go and return when they are in the buying process. So we need to offer them the quickest way for that.
    Having to select one product at a time is not, as you can imagine, the best solution !!!
    Nevertheless, I can understand your point but I would like to try to push hard in order to make it available in the top level subjects of the release you will work on just after the 1.6 version.
    Regards