BIG NEWS: Elements 3.0 is out of beta! 🎉

Announcements
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Hi Weavers,

RapidWeaver Elements 3.0 is officially out of beta, and it’s our biggest update yet. Seriously, it’s HUGE!

We still have a lot of marketing work to do, but we wanted to get this out and into everyone’s hands as soon as possible. So here it, Elements 3.0!

Elements 3.0 is a FREE update for everyone with an active Elements licence :tada:

There’s a new AI Assistant, more design tools, eight new starter projects, and improvements to everything from editing and saving to galleries, tables and the CMS.

Thank you to everyone who tested the beta, reported bugs and shared their projects with us. Your feedback has helped us get this release ready.

The new assistant works directly in your project. Ask it to build a layout, write content or create a custom component, then see the results live in the editor. You can make changes visually or ask it to refine the design.

The AI features remain in beta. We’re continuing to improve the results, so please review the assistant’s changes before publishing. Please read the AI Docs for details about adding your own API or connecting a desktop client via MCP.

Download Elements 3.0

In order to run Elements you will need to meet the minimum requirements:

  • Requires macOS 13 Ventura or newer.
  • Apple Silicon or Intel based Mac.

The trial mode in Elements has the following limitations:

  • No publishing: You can’t upload or publish sites in trial mode.
  • No export: Exporting project files is disabled.
  • Maximum of 3 pages: You can only add up to three pages per project.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Download Elements for macOS

Save 45% for the launch

To celebrate the release of Elements 3.0, you can currently save 45% on Elements.

If you’re still building with RapidWeaver Classic and Stacks, now’s a good time to move across. The new AI Assistant can help you rebuild your existing site in Elements, from putting together layouts to bringing across your content.

Moving to Elements means rebuilding your site, so your Classic themes and Stacks won’t transfer directly. But with the assistant to help and 45% off for the launch, there’s never been a better time to get started.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Buy Elements Today and Save 45%
Use coupon code crossgrade at checkout.

What’s new in Elements 3.0

Here’s a closer look at some of the major changes.

AI Assistant (Beta)

  • Build layouts and pages using components and templates, write or update content, and create custom components with the assistant.
  • Get help with SEO checks, page titles, metadata and CMS blogs. The assistant can also troubleshoot your project, update settings and publish your site.
  • Connect your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key, or use the new Elements MCP server with compatible AI apps. Settings now show which features each provider supports and link to setup guides.
  • AI Memory keeps track of each project’s styles, design guidelines and changes.
  • Generate images through OpenAI, with automatic conversion to JPEG for the web. The assistant can also create Markdown and CSV files and search the web for information and resources.

Design tools and starter projects

  • Updated all built-in themes to Tailwind CSS 4.3.2, with revised shadows and corner radii, plus new Mauve, Olive, Mist and Taupe colour palettes.
  • Added Mask, 3D Transforms and Shapes components, including support for text that flows around custom shapes.
  • Added radial and conical gradients, shadow colour and opacity controls, and more hover and mirrored scaling options.
  • Added eight starter projects: Waitlist, Burger Co, Astra, Kinetic, Profile, Yonder, Wellness and Consultant.
  • Refreshed existing starter projects with updated content, previews and fixes. Projects are now sorted alphabetically, and Asterra’s Three.js effects run in the editor.
  • Improved styling consistency across components, including quote styles, dark mode links, corner radii, shadows and background overlays. A legacy option restores Tailwind 3 tap-to-hover behaviour on touch devices.

Editing your website

  • Opening projects, switching pages and working with Globals are faster. The canvas now previews Three.js and other ES modules directly.
  • Added Markdown Preview, plus separate Hide in Editor and Do Not Publish options for components.
  • Create pages, files and folders from the Pages + button. Rename custom components from their context menu, with automatic numbering to prevent duplicate names.
  • Pasting text now preserves links, formatting and line breaks, including content copied from RapidWeaver Classic.
  • Improved image imports and editing: more reliable drag and drop, preserved WebP and AVIF transparency, and a Reveal Resource action to locate images quickly.
  • Made Inspector labels and settings clearer, improved scrolling, and fixed disappearing toolbar text, image update issues and incorrect resource links.
  • Fixed small-screen header layouts, iPhone menu scrolling, menus staying open and active navigation states. Accordions now support full keyboard operation, and modal anchor links work correctly on Android Chrome.

Images, media and content

  • Galleries now support lightbox captions and author details, remote image folders, and optional thumbnail resizing and lazy loading for large collections.
  • Tables can use Google Sheets or local and remote CSV files, automatically detect CSV delimiters, and include Drop Zones. Search, sorting, pagination and editor previews are more reliable, with optional First and Last buttons and translatable pagination text.
  • Audio players now offer volume controls and elapsed time, with a fix for the progress scrubber.
  • Video lightboxes now respect playback settings and work independently. Improved Vimeo muting, custom and CMS thumbnails, and poster images in previews and published pages.
  • Improved the Online CMS Editor on mobile, added a wider resizable metadata sidebar, and made content handling more reliable when metadata contains errors.
  • Fixed CMS post creation and YouTube embeds, improved image alt text support, and made metadata consistent across the Online Editor and connected tools.
  • Added configurable upload limits for the Online Editor and MCP server, and control over the number of items in RSS feeds.

Publishing and reliability

  • Saving and exporting are faster, especially when pages are unchanged. Published pages are smaller, with more reliable generation of styles.
  • Added optional Markdown copies of your pages and a root llms.txt file to help AI tools read your site. Markdown copies are enabled by default for new projects.
  • Components that need PHP now prompt you to change the page extension. Containers also support custom HTML attributes.
  • Fixed FTP publishing crashes, occasional page markup corruption and shared asset changes failing to trigger publishing.
  • Fixed several editing crashes, a rare blank login screen and inconsistent component updates. Diagnostic reports now include recent actions and undo history to help investigate problems.
  • Google Fonts now retry loading and show clearer errors. Updated CMS and Forms dependencies to address security vulnerabilities, and fixed a PHP 8.5 issue affecting licence data.
  • Component developers can now declare PHP requirements and restrict accepted resource file types.

Give Elements 3.0 a try and let us know how you get on. We’d love to see what you build with the new components and the assistant, so please share your sites below.

Cheers,

Dan & Team Elements

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I recorded two quick (and very basic) videos to show you how you can use the built-in AI assistant, and an external AI app like Claude to work with Elements. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll be back with some detailed videos later in the week. If you can’t wait you can watch some older dev-diary videos on using AI in the manual too..

:backhand_index_pointing_right: AI setup details can be found in the manual

One piece of advice I would give is… Using your own API key can be more expensive than connecting through MCP when your AI client already includes model usage in a paid subscription. if you’re using Fable inside of Elements, the cost can rack up quickly, so do keep an eye on your spending.

Oh, and do remember to have fun with it, and if you have any questions just ask :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Looks like Elements 4.0 - great work.

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The Anthropic/Claude model, Fable 5.1, or GPT Astra-6 for that matter.

CleanShot 2026-09-15 at 7.40.36 PM@2x
CleanShot 2026-09-15 at 7.40.36 PM@2x824Ă—640 116 KB

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Nice! What model and reasoning level do you recommend for Open AI?

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Nice update :clap:t2:

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Depends on the level of work, text and small changes you can just use Luna, but the more complex things you’re doing you might want to just use a higher level model.

If I was designing a fancy page section (and I had a reference image I wanted to copy), I’d use one of the higher level models. It’s a bit of trial and error to be honest, but you’ll soon get used to using different models for different things :slight_smile:

I hope everyone will share feedback on what they are finding works well for them for different tasks in Elements over the coming days and weeks :crossed_fingers:

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Great :+1: JOB!

Excited to try this out…

Should be fun!

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Confirmed. Building out a reasonable size initial project chewed through US$50 worth of API credits and left a lot of work still to be done. MCP seems the better choice, but not as integrated.

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One other note. Duplicate your Project before running AI against it. Otherwise you’ll very quickly find that Undo is no longer useful ;~).

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Yes, always save before letting AI loose on your project!

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Thought I’d give you Claude’s summary after running MCP on making an existing site more consistent (I knew there were inconsistencies in it, but I was busy working on other projects):slight_smile:

Done. Here’s what changed across the six pages, all using your theme’s existing tokens:

Headings. Each page now has exactly one h1. The duplicated “Filmbodies” title in the nav is a span everywhere (it stays visually identical — the tag carried the styling, not the other way around). Home’s hero remains the h1; “Latest Posts” on News/Views was promoted from h3 to h1 at 4xl to match the hero scale; and Learn, Gallery, Cameras, and Books each gained a page-title h1 styled like the News/Views header, since they had no page heading at all. Card semantics are now uniform: eyebrow labels are span, card titles are h2, and blurbs are p set in your body font (Cardo) instead of the heading font — this is the one visibly different text change, and it brings the Learn/Cameras cards in line with how News/Views already renders its excerpts.

Spacing. The wide Concise Guide card on Home now uses the same padding-5 as its three sibling cards, and its stray bottom margin is gone. Learn and Cameras grids now share the same gap rhythm (10 on mobile, 5 from small screens up), and Cameras got two real fixes: its 3-column layout only existed on a disabled breakpoint, so it was stuck at 2 columns on wide screens — it now goes to 3 at 1024px like Learn — and its section padding at that width now matches Learn’s.

CTAs. Per your choice, the per-card gradient colors stayed. Both button tiers were already internally consistent in size, padding, weight, and radius, so nothing else needed touching there.

I also populated the previously empty design-system guides with everything derived from the pages (palette, type scale, card anatomy, both button tiers, heading rules), so future edits — yours or an AI session’s — follow the same conventions. One caveat worth knowing: your theme has the md (768px) and lg (1024px) breakpoints disabled, and several older nodes carry dead overrides targeting them that the API can’t clear; they’re harmless, but avoid @md/@lg when styling and use sm/xl/2xl instead.

Worth previewing Home and Cameras first — the body-font blurbs and the new 3-column Cameras grid are the most visible shifts. If the new page-title headings on Learn/Gallery/Cameras/Books aren’t wanted, they’re single text nodes and easy to remove.

It took Claude about seven minutes to do this work. It would have taken my a couple of hours to go through and find all those small things.

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And after reviewing what Claude did, I found one last inconsistency, and here’s the back and forth on that:

image
image1508Ă—946 125 KB

Just putting this here because some of you haven’t been working with AI and need to see why many of us were waiting for it to appear within Elements. It’s working really nice so far.

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Could you share the prompt? Did you say:

“Look for spacing inconsistencies and fix”

Or other?

Thanx
-m

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@dan Congratulations on the release.

I have, however, run into a few issues with the new AI panel. When the panel is activated, it pushes the size of the window below and behind the dock at the bottom of the screen. There is no way to get at the button at the bottom of the AI panel. When I click on a different panel the window resizes to the correct size, but when returning to the AI panel the size is again pushed out.

I’m testing this issue on a MacBook Air, as we do not currently have power due to the hurricane that went through our island recently. So I’m uncertain if the problem is screen size related or something else.

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My original prompt was: “Review the Home and other top level pages, then make their headings, spacing, and calls to action consistent with the existing design system.”

It would also help if you had an .MD file that had design choices in it (fonts, spacing, card animations, etc.).

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Doh! We’ll get this fixed asap, it’s late here, so you can expect a new build tomorrow (Wednesday). I the mean time, I recommend using the MCP connection :slightly_smiling_face:

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Another example for you:

Can you examine the SEO data and make sure each page is fully filled out. Also, what do I put in Social tags, and can you do that?

Filling out SEO metadata and social tags for each page.

Filling out SEO metadata and social tags for each page.

Let me pull up each page’s current SEO properties and check what social-tag fields Elements supports.

Used RapidWeaver Elements integration, loaded tools

All set. Here’s the summary of what I found and did:

Already complete on all six pages: browser titles (each unique and descriptive), meta descriptions, menu descriptions, and keywords. Robots directives were fully permissive everywhere — index, follow, snippets, archiving, image indexing all on.

What I changed: filled the empty Open Graph title and description on all six pages, and enabled robots meta tags on Home, which was the lone page with them switched off. The social copy is headline-style rather than keyword-style — for example, Books now shares as “Books on Nikon Film SLRs — Filmbodies” with “Thom Hogan’s Complete Guides to the Nikon F100, F5, and F6 — plus a free Concise Instructions book covering seven classic bodies.”

One thing worth knowing: alongside title and description, the third piece of a good social card is the share image (og:image — ideally around 1200×630px). Elements doesn’t expose a per-page image field through the properties I can set, so that’s likely handled at the site level or falls back to whatever the crawler finds on the page. If you have a Filmbodies banner graphic (the filmbodies-header.png in your resources could work if it’s near that shape), check Site Settings in Elements for a social/share image slot. After publishing, you can verify how links render with LinkedIn’s Post Inspector or the social platforms’ card debuggers — if the image comes up wrong or missing, let me know and I’ll dig into where Elements sets it.

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Same issue

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Just discovered the Request/Response ack/naks in the MCP. Very nicely done guys. The fact that I can drill down and see what was being done gives me great confidence in what’s being done.