Toolset 1.6.16 – Essential Updates for WordPress 6.6 and Better Workflow

   Kathy Banach

Announcements

July 9, 2024
6

Toolset 1.6.16 is here to boost your site with full compatibility for WordPress 6.6. This update brings enhanced query filters, a smoother visual design process for dynamic content templates, and other improvements to make your site more engaging and user-friendly.

Compatibility with WordPress 6.6

WordPress 6.6, set for release on July 16th, will bring features that focus on user experience, including:

  • Better usability and data views in the Site Editor
  • A unified editing experience across the block editor and Site Editor
  • Developer enhancements and under-the-hood tweaks

We’ve been closely following the WordPress 6.6 development cycle and testing Toolset with all the beta versions and release candidates.

The updates to Toolset Views 3.6.16 and Toolset Blocks 1.6.16 ensure you can use the sidebar selector without a hitch when managing query filters in a View block. 

Create and manage custom queries effortlessly, all while enjoying the new features in WordPress 6.6.

Create Dynamic Content Templates with Ease

Toolset Views 3.6.16 and Toolset Blocks 1.6.16 make it easy to work with dynamic sources in your templates, removing glitches that showed blank placeholders instead of post fields.

Now, Toolset automatically sets a post in the View with section, and dynamic sources display the post content correctly without manual intervention.

With an intuitive experience that shows real data as you design, you can make quicker, more precise adjustments and fully enjoy the content creation process.

Improved Compatibility with Astra Theme

Astra stands out as one of the most popular WordPress themes for good reason. It’s widely used for building sites with Toolset, which is why we wanted to make sure that the two products work together smoothly.

Astra theme’s Slide In Cart feature enhances the overall shopping experience by letting customers view and manage products in the cart via a flyout panel.

Toolset WooCommerce Blocks 3.1.6 makes sure this feature works well with Toolset-created templates for WooCommerce products. Your customers can easily adjust quantities, remove items, and proceed to checkout without any interruptions. 

This user-friendly behavior reduces users’ back-and-forth time and optimizes the buying journey, leading to higher customer satisfaction and increased sales.

Other Improvements

To contribute to a great site-building experience, Toolset 1.6.16 also includes other updates:

Toolset Blocks 1.6.16 and Toolset Views 3.6.16 make navigation easier by fixing missing pagination dots in legacy Views.

Toolset Blocks 1.6.16 and Toolset Views 3.6.16 reduce disruptions and improve performance by addressing console deprecation notices and fixing PHP deprecation notices.

Toolset Forms 2.6.22 resolves compatibility issues with the Enhanced Media Library plugin, giving sites using both plugins a trouble-free experience.

See the changelogs to dive deeper into what’s included in this release: 

Toolset Blocks 1.6.16

See the changelog

Toolset Views 3.6.16

See the changelog

Toolset Forms 2.6.22

See the changelog

Toolset WooCommerce Blocks 3.1.6

See the changelog

Update to Toolset 1.6.16

As with all of our new versions, we are releasing Toolset 1.6.16 gradually. Once it reaches your site, try out these new updates and enjoy a smoother, more reliable Toolset experience. 

Remember to use the comments section below to share any thoughts or questions you may have – we’re here to listen and help!

 

Comments 6 Responses

  1. I appreciate a lot your continued efforts to keep improving and debugging Toolset and especially improving its integration with Astra (Pro), which has been my favorite theme for building new websites for about two years now.

    A while ago I posted a support ticket about extremely long load times for a content template I built for displaying products. All Toolset content templates built into the block editor have long load times, but with this one they were extremely long, exceeding maximum execution time limits (causing 503s), until I increased them to 600 seconds, at which point loading the content template caused Request Timeouts until I (temporarily) placed a noabort noconnectiontimeout line in .htaccess. The content template then loaded in just over 3 minutes (180-200 sec)!

    The support ticket did not yield anything, because Toolset Support obviously wanted to look into the back end of the site, which is a development site that I cannot now open to third parties, and a copy with a duplicator means that the issue is reproduced in a different environment.

    I provide the hosting myself on a lightning-fast Litespeed server with 4GB of internal memory on this account, on which the rest of the site runs like clockwork. It is really Toolset’s content templates that load extremely slowly.

    The content template in question contained two conditionals, and I suspect that these caused an additional delay. I have now removed one of the two, and the Content Template loads slightly less slowly.

    Once a Content Template has been loaded, it can be worked with reasonably well. The loading and saving times remain quite long, but that applies to the entire Gutenberg editor.

    I hope that you will take another look at this in the future and make improvements here as well. I found a workaround with increasing the limits, and I remain a big fan of Toolset for building all the possible dynamic templates I can think of.

    In addition to the combination with Astra Pro, I also recommend everyone to use the Spectra blocks, from the same supplier Brainstorm Force. Their flexbox container in particular is invaluable for front end design.

    • Hi Erik

      Thanks for the kind words about Toolset.

      I found the ticket where you reported the problem with the Content Template loading times. Unfortunately, without access to the site it’s very difficult to do anything other than speculate about what the cause might be. You think it relates to a Conditional block. Did you verify that by removing any Conditional blocks? What is the condition testing? If it’s testing a custom field value, how big is your site, and your wp_postmeta table in particular. If you have a particularly large wp_postmeta table you might benefit from a plugin like Index WP MySQL for Speed which adds indexes to the table to improve post meta queries. If it *is* a problem with a Conditional block, one thing you might try—and not sure it would work but you could try—is to create an unassigned template and add your Conditional block and its content to it, and then replace the Conditional block in your original template with this unassigned template.

      As I say, this is speculative. If you need more help we should do that in a support forum thread, but I think we really would need access to your site. If you make a new thread request that I handle it, and I will take a look.

    • Hi Dan,

      Thanks for your enquiry. Are there any specific issues you’re experiencing with using Toolset together with Divi, and have you opened a support ticket for them? This will let our team look into the issues and find solutions to them.

      • Yes, I opened a ticket on Divi where they explained to me that on their side the custom fields work, so much so that we did a test using ACF.
        the problem only occurs when I use toolset, it would perhaps be the case, given that you will not be releasing new features in this period, to fix these really annoying bugs. make divi and toolset much more communicative, since you only focused on gutemberg.
        Furthermore, it would be desirable to improve the UX which turns out to be old, cumbersome and not very usable. toolset is a versatile and truly powerful tool, but it has many flaws at the graphic level (old interfaces now out of use), cumbersomeness in creating views, and not full interoperability compatibility with all systems and themes.

        • Hi Dan,
          Thank you for your detailed feedback. Regarding the issue you’re encountering with Toolset, I would recommend also opening a ticket with Toolset support. Given that the problem seems to be specific to Toolset, our team would be best equipped to investigate any issues. Your ticket can hep our team identify and resolve the bugs more efficiently.
          As for your feedback on the UX, thank you for sharing your thoughts. I will pass this along to our development team.