Tell us what you are trying to do?
I use Toolset 'Views' on pretty much every WordPress project I work on as it gives me the flexibility to 'fill in the gaps' of missing functionality that my page builder does not offer.
I have been concerned for some time now, since you moved Toolset Views to the 'Legacy plugins' page. Naturally a plugin that I use on a lot of sites, I want to make sure is not going to be discontinued, otherwise I am going to have a lot of rebuilding work to do.
Please can you explain what your future intentions are for Views? What the roadmap is (if any), and why it has been cast aside in this way?
Just as an extra point of note, there are 2 other designers that I speak to who use Toolset, and they also only use the Views plugin as well - so I guess this is also a request that you don't forget about your users who use Toolset in this way, as I am guessing that there must be quite a few of us?
Right now you don't have to worry about views going away permanently because it is just being rebranded as our Blocks plugin.
Views will still be supported under the name Views, however we are pushing Blocks to our new clients and the new block builder experience using the wordpress gutenburg editor.
However the main reason why you don't have to be concerned is because Blocks is a 1-1 copy of Views with only the block editor enabled by default.
What this means is that if you replace Views with Blocks all your existing code will continue to work without any issues and you can even still use the classic editor that you are familiar with.
The reason for having the block editor for views is because of our commitment to Improve the "No Coding" experience. Clients who are already familiar with views can enable the classic editor for Blocks in the Settings option.
New clients who install blocks are greeted with the Blocks experience by default which will allow them to easily setup their views without needing to have prior knowledge of HTML and CSS like with our Views classic editor.
Hi Shane, thank you very much for your detailed response, and apologies for my delay in replying.
Yes, on the whole, that does ease my concerns, however I have a couple more questions in that case regarding blocks:
- The reason I use 'Views', is because I can build my own layouts, which I can then load within my page builder (as mentioned in my original post, I use it to 'fill in the gaps' to build layouts that my page builder is unable to do), so I use it to build 'layouts within layouts' if you like .
So, if I use blocks, can I build a block as it's own separate layout (that is independent of a post type 'single.php' or archive page), and then load it via shortcode (or something else), into my page builder page (in the same way I currently can with views)?
- You used to have excellent documentation for Toolset Views, but I cannot seem to find this anymore, everything seems to be through forum searches - have the Views Docs been taken offline, or can I still find them somewhere? As to be honest I found that a better solution than using the forum and I was often able to solve my own problems without using the support forum.
I wish Toolset would be more supportive of legacy views. Moving/removing all the documentation has been detrimental to me. We have large projects running on views and views system itself could still use improvements. I just wish TS team could see the value of views to people who have a better technical understanding but don't want to take the full plunge into ACF.
