Elementor360 Newsletter – Issue 16

In this issue: a new Elementor beta, walk-throughs, Crocoblock pricing changes, and a lot of plugin and theme news.

Congratulations to the Winners!

Elementor360 ran it’s first giveaway with the generous sponsorship of Dynamic.ooo, the makers of Dynamic Content for Elementor. Three annual pro licenses and two lifetime pro licenses were awarded to the five winners. Thank you to all who participated.

Walk-Throughs and Reviews

I looked at two options for storing templates in the cloud. Both have a nice free tier. WunderWP supplies some nice pre-designed templates and widget style presets. It also lets you save your style presets and templates to the cloud.

Templately is the other option I looked at. While it doesn’t have the widget style presets, it does offer some nice templates, has an easy to use dashboard, includes team sharing (!), and also works with Gutenberg. I was impressed. If you are starting to build up a set of templates then it is worth taking a look.

I also reviewed and gave my take on the Hello Elementor Theme. The title of the post says it all: Hello Elementor Theme – Strengths, Weaknesses, and When to Use It.

News from the Mothership – Elementor 3 Beta

The Elementor team has released a beta and developer notes for Elementor 3.0.  There is a lot of news.   Elementor is continuing its move to global styles.  They are extending existing options to add named colors and typography settings and they are integrating some of the basic WordPress theme settings options into the Elementor editor.  It will be interesting to see how “global” we get, as up to now the style settings have only applied within Elementor itself.

The Elementor team is also responding to suggestions that the number of DIV wrapper elements in the code output be lessened so that the HTML source code can be more performant.  This will be a welcome improvement.  They are also dropping support for Internet Explorer 11.

One thing to note is that currently the old templates that are included with Elementor don’t take advantage of these new enhancements.  How that will work still remains to be seen.

This is the first wave of changes coming to Elementor.  More news is expected in a few weeks.

Themes

Astra Reaches 1 Million Active Installs

First released in May 2017, the free Astra theme has passed 1 million active installs.  Astra has focused on being page builder friendly as well as being a strong general purpose theme.  Congratulations to the Astra team.

Page Builder Framework Theme Adds Global and Linked Color Options

The pro version of the Page Builder Framework theme now includes linked color options.  This means you can update in the Customizer in a central place and other places in the Customizer where that color is used will get updated as well.  Also added is a global color palette, which can be set in theme settings, and then the palette appears in the theme Customizer, Elementor, and Gutenberg.

Plugins

Crocoblock Changes Offering and Pricing Structure

Crocoblock recently changed their offering structure to divide their 18 plugins into three sets: design, e-commerce, and dynamic. The idea is that each set targets a different core use.  The design set includes the plugins related to theming, design, and regular widgets.  The e-commerce set focuses on tools related to WooCommerce and building store pages.  The dynamic set focuses on the plugins for working with dynamic data.  There is overlap in the sets.  Each one has 10 plugins (of the overall 18).  There is also an “all inclusive” set that has everything.  The All Inclusive package has extra templates, including “Dynamic Templates” which presumably are tied to JetEngine features.

The pricing changes now offer a single site price and an unlimited sites price.  The blog post about the change explains that the prices have increased to reflect the value of the offerings and to support future development.  There is no argument that the number of included plugins has grown tremendously and the Crocoblock suite is the most feature rich Elementor offering.  The higher price tags, however, will impact solo site builders and small shops that rely on Crocoblock’s features.  Those who purchased the lifetime deal in the early days are feeling smug.

JetBooking Update

JetBooking 2.1, part of the Crocoblock suite, got a nice update that provides more features when working with bookings as well as greater WooCommerce integration. There is now the ability to set property rates based on length of stay and the ability for users to add bookings to their calendar.  A booking availability widget was added.  You can now add booking details to WooCommerce checkout fields and orders.

PowerPack Header and Footer Builder

Did you know that PowerPack Elements includes a header and footer builder?  This is useful for sites using the free version of Elementor.  It includes the ability to create a sticky header and one that shrinks on scroll.  The PowerPack Header and Footer Builder has been expanded now to work with all themes.

Essential Addons WooCommerce Checkout Element

Essential Addons for Elementor has added a WooCommerce element that allows you to style your checkout page.  The free version comes with one layout option and the Pro version adds multi-step and split layout options.

Piotnet Form Updates

Poitnet Addons for Elementor is frequently updated with fixes and features.  The PAFE form features have been updated to include form reset, WPML compatibility, and form abandonment options.

Templates

Unlimited Elements Adds Webinar Template Kit

The Unlimited Elements team has added a webinar template kit to the premium version of their plugin.  The templates are attractive.  This is not just a few page layouts, but a full site kit that includes 13 page templates.  This is similar to the template kits released by the Elementor team.

Elementor Releases Restaurant Template Kit

The Elementor team released their 11th template kit.  This one is designed for restaurants.  This template kit has a dark theme and a minimalist layout that helps to focus on the uniqueness of the restaurant.  Several unique and artistic elements are used in the design, include an SVG icon for the menu.  The template kit makes use of a number of Elementor elements such as popups and forms.

That’s it for this issue. Happy Elementoring.

Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. You will still pay the same amount so there is no extra cost to you.