E360 Newsletter Issue 22

In this issue: Lots of Elementor News, some security alerts, theme and plugin updates, and a couple of reviews.

Elementor360 Reviews

Exclusive Addons Review

I reviewed the Exclusive addons plugin. The plugin seemed pretty solid. If you need a general purpose set of widgets then it might be worth taking a look.

Marmot Theme Review

This one surprised me. While I don’t think it is for everyone, I expect it fills a niche and will be of interest to some people. It features the only free theme builder for Elementor.

Theme News

The Hello Theme

The Hello Theme has been a very minimalistic lightweight theme with few options.  This was great for Elementor Pro users with access to the theme builder, but didn’t work well for Elementor free users.  The Elementor team has now released a beta of the theme that allows users to create a header and footer for the theme using the free version of Elementor.  This will broaden the Hello Theme’s appeal.

Astra

Astra Pro has long had the ability to create Custom Layouts and place them in various locations using theme hooks.  Version 3.2 of Astra Pro now lets you place Custom Layout interspersed with Gutenberg content.  They have added hook locations so that you can specify the placement after a certain number of blocks or headings.  This is a feature that Kadence Pro and Blocksy Pro have.

Plugin News

Dynamic Content for Elementor Adds Payment Options to Elementor Pro Forms

The Dynamic Content for Elementor team added the option to collect online payments with a PayPal and a Stripe extension to the form builder.  This provides a simple payment option without needing the overhead of WooCommerce.

Essential Addons Joins the 1 Million Active Installs Club

In early March the free version of Essential Addons hit a million active installs.  It is the first Elementor addon to do so.  Congrats to the Essential Addons team.

JetEngine 2.7.4 Adds Glossary Feature

The Crocoblock team has added a new glossary feature to the JetEngine plugin.  A glossary is a list of label / value pairs that you can use multiple times to populate select boxes, check box lists, and radio button lists.  When creating custom field groups, there is a new field option for select, checkbox, and radio buttons called Glossary that will auto populate those with terms from the Glossary list.

Master Addons New Features

Master Addons has a new Advanced Image widget, a new MA Duplicator extension, and a while label option for their developer package.

Templates

Templately Is On a Roll

Templately, from WPDeveloper, offers predesigned templates for Elementor and Gutenberg, and it also allows sharing your own templates cross-site or with team mates.  The free version of the plugin recently passed the 50,000 active install milepost.  They have also been steadily releasing new templates, includes those for lawyer, web design agency, move studio, personal finance, business consultancy, conference, and marketer portfolio websites.  They currently have a sale going.

Security Issues

The Plus Addons Vulnerability

The login and register widgets of Plus Addons Pro had a vulnerability where attackers could take over a site running an unpatched version.  It took a few days for the full issue to be understood and fixed.  The Plus Addons team shared information about the issue and provided help for users.

Elementor Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerabilities

Several cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in Elementor were patched.  The possible exploits would require user access to the Elementor editor and the Elementor team said they did not know of any compromised sites.

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