Dev Diary Ep44 - V2 Components Intro for Beta Testers

Hey Beta Testers!

This video is squarely aimed at current beta testers, it’s here to give you more of an idea of what to expect when we ship the next beta… and yes, we’re aiming to ship it this week — Stay tuned!

Thanks as always!

We’re listening to all your feedback and working super hard to make Elements the perfect website builder.

See you next soon :wave:

Thanks,

Dan & Team Realmac.

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I noticed no Image Gallery…is that still under construction?

No Paragraph either? Do you intend Header to be used for all text, if so, any chance you could rename it to Text to be more generic/intuitive (and provide a way to specify the tag used; p, h1, h2, etc?

This is looking great @dan. I think the decision to really lean on Tailwind and rethink the property inspector has paid off. Also I love the thought you’ve put into the file QuickLook preview.

Are you planning on organizing the inspector further as it’s not entirely clear the order of the property groups, and some of them even have different names. ie: background, and color and background. I’m not sure whether it’s better to sort them alphabetically, by most likely to be used, or perhaps (post v1) user preference?

One other thing with all of these property groups is the when they’re all collapsed it’s impossible to see which properties might have breakpoint overrides, which in turn, requires the user toggling them all open/closed to find the overridden properties.

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This looks good! Waiting for this to ripen.

This very briefly shows the link tool, I was curious if you will be able to access links like a regular web browser? I’m not sure if one of the previous videos has shown that yet.

Would it be possible to see a list of the planned v2 components so we can get a better understanding. This will also help not having us ask questions about something that is already planned an just not yet included.

For example, what is the plan for ANCHORS, this is something that I use all the time but I don’t think it has been mentioned in any of these videos, but I could be wrong.

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I vote for either order of frequently used or same as in Tailwind Docs. More of the leaning into Tailwind.

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Dan, I have been asking about the ability to flow text into columns but had no answer yet. Will Elements have this ability?

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Yes, we’re working on it!

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The current plan is to have two text components, one for rich text and one for plain text.

Thank you!

I’m not sure to be honest, at the moment we order them the same as the Tailwind manual, hah. But perhaps this is not correct.

We might organize them based on most used :thinking:

Maybe we need to add a top level blue dot, so it’s easy to tell what sections have a breakpoint setting applied.

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You can link to any page on the Internet using the link panel…

No, not yet, but I think it would be possible to do — Is this something a lot of people would want? :thinking:

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We’ve not actually discussed this internally, how would you like it to work?

In its most simple form, a component with an anchor icon that gets put on the page, and you can link to it just like you can link to a page, resource or URL.

Helpful on long pages, where you can link and go to a specific spot on the page.

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How about adding another property alongside the link property in a Component. So it could be enabled and the anchor name added?

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I wonder if anchors are something that should be another property that is available for any component, so that it’s possible to set-up links directly to various sections of the page (headers, feature sections, galleries, etc)?

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Flowing CSS text columns always sounded like a great idea in CSS, but the reality is they never really work that well, especially with the wide variety of screen sizes we have today. Also, as text passages are often made of multiple elements (h1, h2, p, ul, ol, img, svg, video, etc) the built-in CSS column feature falls woefully short. It looks like this would be achievable with Tailwind using Grid Auto Flow and possibly a little Javascript to help balance the layout.

Well, may be not many would want this ability but then again most web sites are about making money. Information web sites on the other hand, most certainly would like this abilitiy. It is my hope this will be provided to us.
Otherwise I can’t use Elements.
Cheers,
Paul

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I assume we are talking about an in-page anchor: smooth scroll with an animation speed setting and respects prefers-reduced-motion.

I’m very surprised that this has not been discussed internally, it seems like one of those fundamental things you need when assembling a website.

The other replies pretty much cover what I would want. Although one thing that is important is to be able to link to anchors on other pages. I do this all the time to take people to the answers to specific details.

But I primarily use this for in page navigation where the page has links at the beginning taking the user to a specific part of the page.

Foundry 3 has an ANCHOR component that you can link to from anywhere there is a link property. The anchor of course has to have a unique name that can be used to make the link. For me something like the solution in Foundry 3 would be ideal. But there might be a better solution.

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