Toolset Blocks 1.5.2 – New Theme Integrations and Even Better Performance and Compatibility

   Dario

Announcements

May 17, 2021
41

We’re introducing three new theme integrations, faster images, compatibility with new WooCommerce add-ons, and improved compatibility with other themes and plugins.

New theme integrations

Toolset 1.5.2 brings integration with three new beautiful themes to give you even more design options when building your websites. Themes integrated with Toolset allow you to control their design and layout options when creating your single-post templates and archive pages.

Blocksy theme

Blocksy is a fast and lightweight WordPress theme that’s rapidly gaining popularity, for a reason. Best of all, it is free. It provides you with a huge number of optimization options so you can create the exact site you want.

Blocksy theme options when editing a Content Template

Gyms & Trainers demo site using the Blocksy theme

Sydney Pro theme

Sydney Pro is a premium version of the immensely popular free Sydney theme. It expands on the free version with a range of additional options and allows you to easily create a beautiful site for any business.

Sydney Pro theme options when editing a Content Template

Dog Walkers demo site using the Sydney Pro theme

Total Theme

Total is a premium theme that offers a huge set of features, allowing you to build literally any type of site you need. From customization options to full WooCommerce support, it allows you to tweak every aspect of your site.

Total theme options when editing a WordPress Archive

Archive page of “Speakers” on a demo site using the Total theme

Improved image handling for fast performance

We already wrote to you about performance improvements in Toolset 1.5 and why having fast sites is more important than ever. In this release, Toolset makes images load a lot faster.

Your site needs to serve images of appropriate sizes. For example, it doesn’t make sense to load and display images in full size if you’re displaying them in a View where their actual size is never bigger than say, 300 pixels in width.

We optimized multiple aspects of how Toolset displays images. All images now have the following:

  • Exact width and height values
  • An attribute called “lazyload”, which allows images to load only when visitors are about to see them
  • An attribute called “srcset”, which allows browser to load the smallest image according to the device

This is true for all Toolset image blocks including the Image, Gallery, Slider, and WooCommerce Product Image block.

For more information, check out the new lesson about displaying images with Toolset.

The best news is you don’t have to do anything for your images to be optimized – simply update Toolset Blocks to 1.5.2.

Here is the new option for selecting the size of the Toolset Product Image block.

Setting the size of the product image in the Toolset Product Image block

The full list of improvements for image blocks includes:

  • Responsive attributes in Toolset Image, Toolset Gallery, and Toolset Slider blocks
  • Responsive core Image block inside Views and WordPress Archive loops
  • Option for selecting the image size in the WooCommerce Product Image block
  • The default image size in the Toolset Gallery block is now “large” instead of “full

Compatibility with new WooCommerce extensions

For Toolset 1.5.2, we tested and confirmed compatibility with three new WooCommerce extensions:

These extensions could be a great addition to your tools for building great WooCommerce stores. 

We also just published a full tutorial to show you how to build wholesale WooCommerce sites.

An example of a wholesale store built with Toolset and WooCommerce Wholesale Pro

Improved compatibility with Elementor

We fixed some important issues with the Toolset View and Toolset Form widgets in Elementor:

  • The Toolset View widget now again allows you to select to display the Search Box, Search Results, or both. We also fixed the preview and rendering of Views created using the block editor.
  • The Toolset Form widget now again allows you to select the post or user to edit when using an editing form.

Please note that there is currently an issue where Toolset custom fields are not working properly inside Elementor modules that offer dynamic sources for the content. This bug was already fixed by the Elementor team and will be available in their first next release.

Other fixes and improvements

As always, we fixed and improved a number of other issues:

  • Improved integration with the Hestia theme so that WooCommerce archive pages look good with this theme.
  • Performance review and improvement for search filters, both in the editor and on the front-end.
  • Fixed an issue where user fields created with Types were not included in REST API calls.
  • Fixed an issue with the visibility of intermediary post types on the backend.
  • Fixed an issue with sorting a View or WordPress Archive that lists products by a custom field.
  • Fixed an issue when using Layouts and WooCommerce Blocks together.

Download and Update

As we send out the update notifications in batches not everyone will see the update notice at once.

To get this update now, in the WordPress admin go to Plugins → Add New and click the Commercial tab. There, click the Check for updates button in the Toolset section.

What do you think?

Are you excited to see new themes and plugin integrations with Toolset? Any thoughts or suggestions?

Let us know in the comments and we’ll reply!

 

Comments 41 Responses

  1. I love Toolset. I have been using it since it was only Types. Recently I have been having issues integrating it with Genesis. The issue is primarily in the way the archive loop is being wrapped. It offsets it to the left. It always needs some extra CSS work to recenter center it. This was never an issue before the Blocks component was released. It worked flawlessly with layouts. Is this something that might get addressed for those of us who rely on the Genesis Framework?

    • Hi, Cristian! It’s really hard saying why this happens without further investigation. There could be something in the Genesis theme causing this, or some CSS clash with Toolset. Could you please report this to our Support so our supporters can take a closer look? Thanks!

    • Hi, Ridge! I presume you mean the Oxygen page builder? Can you specify a bit more what you mean and what you are lacking? How do you combine Toolset and Oxygen when building sites?

  3. Hi Toolset team,

    Can you please give us a little more detailed information about the core changes that you did to the image handling part?

    I’ve spent weeks trying to prevent my Toolset based web portal from generating images generated by Toolset plugins, it has been a pain that hurts the INODE count limit on my server, because for every upload I got like at least 5 extra files that Toolset generates.
    In order for my platform to scale I had to disable all extra image generation from Toolset and have an extra module that ensures WP will not generate extra images too. The tricky part is that in order to stop Toolset from generating images I had to use some parameters in my code. Has this changed, or I’ll have to deal with the issue from the start after I decide to update?

    Also since you’re mentioning speeds and performance – how about an option to auto-encode image uploads with the .webp format as an addition?

    I have currently reduced the number of images being generated on my platform – for every image the user uploads I got three files – the original, the compressed .jpg, and the compressed .webp (some browsers still don’t support .webp, so we’re delivering the .jpg.

    Three INODES per upload is as much as I’d like to get.

    Also, another important question that I’ve risen some time ago, but got no answer: – Have you considered reducing Toolset’s INODES footprint? Right now the amounts are crazy. Toolset is responsible for 17000 out of 22000 INODES on a fresh project. These numbers are very inconvenient and lead us to having to purchase extra hosting plan, just so that there are enough INODES to run those projects, and most of them are small and light.

    • Hi, Diyan! Before I go into the specifics of your questions, do you really have so many files on your server that you need to worry about the INODE count limit? That should only come into play if you have a very large site with a very large number of files. And if you are not near that limit, there would be no special performance gain in optimizing your site for it. For example, I have a super cheap personal hosting plan and it gets me the limit of 150,000 files, which I am not even near.

      1. Toolset doesn’t automatically generate “at least 5 extra files” when you upload an image to your site (given that you are doing that through one of our blocks). It is only supposed to generate the ones that are needed. If you think it generates files that shouldn’t be generated, please create a ticket in our support and we’ll investigate and see what this is all about.

      2. About what we did to improve image loading speed is what I wrote in the announcement:
      – Every image now has an exact width and height values
      – Every image now has the “lazyload” attribute
      – Every image now has the “srcset” attribute

      These improvements make your pages with images load faster and achieve better Core Web Vital scores with Google.

      3. There is no plan to add an option to auto-encode image uploads with the .webp format. There are probably specialized plugins that allow you to do this, so I would suggest trying one of them.

      4. You said you raised the issues of Toolset’s INODES footprint but got no answer… Can you please share the URL of this ticket? How did you raise this issue? Because, I don’t remember ever hearing about this issue. If you are really concerned with this, you should even open a new ticket and share here so I can follow-up.

      Thanks!

    • Hi, Eryk! Could you please specify a bit more about what you are missing and what you would like us to extend? Also, do you mean only the Kadence theme or blocks as well? The more details you provide, the better. 🙂

  5. New image options are nice. How long until we see similar options for background images?

    • Hi, Peter! It’s on our list, but I have no ETA at the moment. If possible, we’ll try to put it into the next major release (1.6), but I cannot promise anything. 🙂

  7. Dario, thanks for your reply.

    Yes Toolset, did generate unnecessary thumbnails when it handled user uploads via CRED forms and when using the gallery block. If it was not the case I would not have written about this, and would not have spent weeks trying to prevent this from happening. You can even see my tickets: https://toolset.com/forums/topic/prevent-wpcf_-images-from-being-generated-on-new-gallery-block/

    INODES:
    I did rise the question about INODES via the “feature request” form some time ago (as far as I remember).

    I am hosting a number of personal projects on my hosting plan. And as I said, the only bottle-neck I am facing is the INODES count. All is good in terms of traffic, disk space, cpu usage, memory usage, but the INODES are killing us. So if you actually reduce the amount of INODES by 50% I will be able to host at least 30% more projects on my server without having to purchase another plan. Sometimes I even hold myself from installing Toolset on some pet projects and do them the “dumb way” just so that they can stay around 5000 INODES and not 20 000!

    Thanks!
    D.

    • Thank you for sharing that ticket Diyan. I see that Shane updated it when Toolset 1.3 was released with a fix that should have solved the issue you reported in that ticket. If this is not so, please create a new ticket and we will re-investigate this issue.

  8. Hi Dario,

    Great new features. I especially like the Blocksy integration.

    It was nice to hear you present on WPML during the Page Builder Summit. I also came away from the summit with a change in my workflow. As a longtime user of Toolset and WPML, I decided to stay closer to WordPress Gutenberg following on Toolset’s commitment to enhancing Blocks rather than creating new frameworks on top of WordPress. That is why I have chosen Stackable and Blocks. They not only are committed to supporting Blocks but are also especially compatible with Toolset and WPML.

    • Hi, Anthony and thanks for the comment! Yeah, it was great to be at the Page Builder Summit, and thanks a lot for stopping by, I hope you like the upcoming features in WPML 4.5.0. 😉

      Yes, I know what you mean and from what I’m seeing on the blogs and vlogs, people are starting to steer in that direction slowly as well. Definitely interesting times ahead! 🙂

    • Hi, Tom! This feature is currently planned for the next major release (1.6). If all goes according to plan it shouldn’t be too long. 🙂

  11. I confirmed on 3 websites on different hosts performing “To get this update now, in the WordPress admin go to Plugins → Add New and click the Commercial tab. There, click the Check for updates button in the Toolset section.” does NOT find the new version yet.

    • Hi, Nicholas! Thanks a lot for reporting this issue. I just notified our developers and they are looking into this. I will update you as soon as I hear more.

    • Hi again, Nicholas! There seems to have been some caching issues and our team has fixed this now. Can you please check again and see if you get the option to download the new version now after clicking the “Check for updates” button? Thanks!

  12. Hi will the image performance features be available for sites using traditional views as well? Im just working on a site for an art gallery which is quite image intensive- So looking for any and all speed gains

    • Hi, Steve! All of this is only in Blocks. I think you could apply these same improvements to your legacy Views but you would need to do it manually.

  13. Toolset is clearly going the right way, especially with the integration of dynamic fields with other blocks plugins, which opens up a lot of possibilities and solves some performance shortcomings of blocks views, however there is still an elephant in the room: CRED (forms) is clumsy, requires forms to be built in the backed and, worse of that, has no layout options unless one loads a bloatload of bootstrap in every page of the site, which is a no-no for web vitals.
    One way of going at least partially around that would be to integrate dynamic fields with the kadence forms block or maybe making the toolset form block conditionally load the required css only in the pages it’s used, rather than having to load bootstrap in the entire site.

    Another “elephant” is conditional display of search fields.
    Right now, when making a search with blocks, one can only display all the search parameters at the same time, not being able of displaying them sequentially/conditionally. This is important for making faceted searches beyond the plain vanilla “rooms/bathrooms”, for example for searching larger catalogs of services, products or documents. The competition (jet plugins) already has such a feature (they use an implementation they call glossaries) and works quite well, would like to see such feature in toolset for not having to use both plugins (or going to jet in larger projects).
    Just my five cents 🙂

    • Hi! Thank you for the comments and very nice observations. Regarding Toolset Forms, we are aware of the things you mention. While there are plans to improve Forms in general, it is not on the roadmap for the next major release.

      I discussed your comment about custom searches with the team and the Dev Team Leader agrees that this is a very nice suggestion. We created a task for this and would like to do it but I don’t have an ETA for it just now as our next major release is already full of features and has a development schedule laid out.

    • Hi, Alexander! Yes, we already have a task to improve this for the background/container images as well. At the moment, this is slated for the next major (1.6) release, so it shouldn’t be that far away. These things need to be carefully considered, researched, and adjusted in blocks which is why we’re implementing them in waves of a few releases.

    • Thanks, Joel! I cannot promise exact dates but from where we’re at currently, mid-June looks like the probable timeframe.

  18. I really wish for a way to build views within Elementor, using Elementor widgets, much in the same way as with Blocks. The English language does not adequately equip me to express how much I despise Gutenberg.

    • Hi, Jacob! While I understand what you’re saying I have to be straight – at the moment, there is no plan for any additional integration between Elementor and Toolset.

  19. Fair enough, probably doesn’t make sense for you to invest heavily into a 3rd party platform. But I also wish you weren’t putting all your eggs in the Gutenberg basket… i.e. maybe update your tutorials to include classic editor workflows as well. I hate Gutenberg so much (and I’ll bet there are many of your users who agree) I’d rather hand-code the views!

  20. So, are more recent features, such as repeating field groups, only available in a Blocks workflow? I couldn’t find coverage of that feature, for example, in these docs.

  21. Hope to see 1.6 soon and really hope it includes customizable background image sizes. Can’t launch a new site the way it is due to the large background images that get loaded. Can’t trust the client to upload properly sized images so this needs to be handled by Toolset.

    • Hi, Peter! Yes, Blocks 1.6 lands very soon indeed. However, I just checked and unfortunately, it won’t include this feature. I also cannot provide any ETA for it either.