21st Issue of the E360 Newsletter

Lots of Elementor News, theme and plugin updates, and a look at ElementsPlus!

E360 Review: ElementsPlus!

The free ElementsPlus! addon has some nice features. I really liked the AJAX search widget, the sticky video extension, and the audio player and playlist widget.

Elementor – News From the Mothership

Elementor 3.1: There were several interesting changes signaled with the release of Elementor 3.1.  First, the Elementor team continued their performance initiative by removing more DIVs from the rendered page.  That is good news for people who are concerned that the front-end page is too heavy and slow.  This version also introduced the notion of “experiments” which you can enable or disable.  This was a feature from the “developer” edition of Elementor.  It seems this gives the team the change to have people test out changes with an easy way to back-out, if needed.  Finally, Elementor added a new “landing page” admin menu item so that you can have your landing pages segmented together.

Adjustment to how licenses are counted: Elementor has change the way that licenses are counted so as to no longer count staging sites.  You can use a handful of top level domains or subdomain names without having that site count against your license total.  Top level domains, such as *.dev, *.local, *.staging, *.test, *.example, and *.invalid are usually used on your local machine.  Subdomains, using the same values, for example “dev.mydomain.com” are usually used for online staging. This change makes sense given the strong suggestion that people test updates before applying them to live sites.

New pricing plans: Elementor announced new pricing plans that go into effect on March 9th.  If you already have an active subscription then nothing changes.  However, for new purchasers, the current 1,000 site plan at $199 changes to only be 25 sites.  They are adding a 100 site plan for $499 and a 1,000 site plan at $999.  The two new higher plans will include the option for team members and have priority support.  People can purchase a current 1,000 site plan now to lock in a lower price.  It will also be possible for a short time to upgrade at 50% off to one of the newer plans if you need team members or priority support.

Themes: Astra 3.0 Released

Responding to Kadence and Blocksy, which support header and footer builders, the Astra team also added their own header and footer builder.  I’ve heard that there are still some rough areas when, for example, loading an old starter site.  Astra 3 also has some speed improvements on the front-end and when working in the Customizer.

Plugin News

Dynamic Content for Elementor Expands Help Docs for Dynamic Tokens

Dynamic Content for Elementor has a dynamic token feature that exposes a large number of variables (or tokens) for use. It is one of the strong pillars of the plugin. The team recently expanded the documentation of this to include more than 60 examples (and they are adding more). A nice resource if you use this addon.

TutorLMS Gets Free Elementor Addon

TutorLMS now has a free Elementor addon with 25 widgets for designing your course pages.  It allows you to create course templates using Elementor free or Pro.

Ultimate Addons for Elementor Adds New Mini Cart Widget

The Ultimate Addons team added a new WooCommerce Mini Cart widget. The Woo – Mini Cart widget allows you to insert a Mini-Cart for your store that can display a summary of cart details in several ways.

PowerPack Elements and Instagram

Did you know that Instagram has finally released their API allowing 3rd parties direct integration?  The PowerPack team updated their Instagram widget to use the new API. Expect to see other addon vendors update their widgets also.

Templates: Templately Continues to Add Premium Template Packs

Templately is a plugin that provides templates, and also allows you to save templates to the Templately cloud and then reuse them on other sites.  The Templately team continues to release new template packs, adding ones for photographers, podcasting, and for portfolio sites.

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