20th Issue of the Elementor360 Newsletter and Elementor Dominates the News

In this issue, a couple of Elementor360 reviews and a roundup of Elementor news.

Elementor360 Reviews

Happy Addons: I had first reviewed Happy Addons before they even had a premium version. I noticed a large number of updates recently that reminded me it was time to revisit and review the current plugin, which has grown to be one of the top tier choices.

Dynamic Content for Elementor: A cornerstone of the DCE plugin is it’s extensive set of display conditions. One of those conditions is a “Custom Condition” where you can write your own PHP function. I produced an advanced tutorial on creating a Custom Condition, walking the user through the steps in the process.

Elementor Dominates the News

December was a quiet time for most in terms of the release of new features. With the holidays and end of the year sales, many preferred to recover from the unusual year or delay releases until after the new year. The Elementor team was one of the major exceptions.

Elementor Cloud: Elementor announced its new cloud offering. Available initially as a single website only option, the service is currently in beta. With Elementor Cloud you get a site with WordPress and Elementor Pro preinstalled. There are usage limits and they are quick to point out that this is not regular hosting, but a more locked-down experience for users who want to focus on their site and not hosting. Other page builders are not allowed and there is no c-panel like access. There are no email accounts, though there are a limited number of transactional emails allowed per month. Daily backups are taken once a day, though the terms of service explicitly says you cannot rely on them and should take your own backups(!). The FAQs say that support is available for questions large or small. The cost is $19.90 per month. This seems like an expensive option as it comes to $238.80 a year and an Elementor Pro single site license is $49 annually, but for some users this will be attractive.

Elementor Developer Edition: What makes Elementor Developer Editor different than Elementor Beta Edition? The Developer Editor of Elementor includes experimental features and changes that may or may not be included in the next version of Elementor. When you have the Developer Edition installed, there is an extra tab on the Elementor Settings Menu for Experiments. There it lists the experiments and you can enable them individually. This is an interesting way to see what the Elementor team has been working on.

Themes – Neve Integrates Global Colors

There are three legs to the “global” styles stool. The Customizer, Gutenberg, and Elementor. Styles can be set and used in all three places and I scratch my head when the Elementor team talks about Elementor global styles that only apply to Elementor content. They are not truly global. The Kadence theme was the first to integrate the Customizer with Elementor 3’s global color palette and now Neve connects the Customizer and Elementor. So far as I know, these are the only two themes to have support for the new Elementor feature that came out the end of August.

Plugin News

There were a few plugins with updates in December.

Dynamic Content for Elementor

Dynamic Content for Elementor got a big update. There is a new Dynamic Cookie widget that lets you set or unset a cookie and a new widget is an Animated Off-Canvas Menu.  The third new widget provides support for the third-party Search and Filter plugin.  Search and Filter is a popular option for providing on-screen search filters.

Happy Addons

The last few months Happy Addons has been busy releasing new features and they continued that in December. They added a new Equal Height widget extension to the free version, so you can have widgets in a row have an equal height. They added 3 new features to the Pro version: a new Modal popup and an Advanced Data Table widgets were added, along with a Particle Effects extension.

Crocoblock and Gutenberg

Did you know that Crocoblock is adding Gutenber support? Yes, you can now use JetEngine to create Post Listings and JetSmart filters work with them … in Gutenberg. Seven blocks are added to the Gutenberg editor. It is exciting to see the Crocoblock team make their tools usable outside of Elementor and this will appeal to Elementor users who also have a blog on the site.

Templates

The Elementor team released the 17th Template Kit installment, this one for a beauty salon. The kit features a pale pink, black and white color scheme that is bold and works well. A nice thing about these kits is that they are available in the Elementor library, from within the editor.

Well, that’s it for this issue. Happy Elementoring.