Dev Diary Ep69 - Huge Update

Hello again,

We’ve been hard at work (as always), and have a huge Element update we plan to release later in the week. It brings some exciting new features and significant improvements…

One of the biggest additions is the new Form Components. There’s also a new Background Component, perfect for adding fixed image backgrounds and angled banners to your projects. Plus, an Image Slider, providing a smooth way to showcase multiple images (we’ll demo this later in the week).

Performance-wise, the editor has received major optimisations, making text editing faster and smoother. A pesky issue where the editor would turn grey has been fixed, and text-based components now fully support IDs and anchors. The update also brings support for Magic FTP Links, an upgraded PHP version (8.4.4), and refinements to built-in themes.

Tailwind support has been expanded with new 950 colour shades, default Brand, Accent, Surface, and Text colours, and a fix ensuring custom hex values display correctly, not to mention a bunch of other smaller enhancements and bug fixes :sweat_smile:

This update will be available later this week. In the meantime, here’s a this week DevDairy that highlights just some of the recent work we’ve been doing.

Get Elements for macOS

Elements is currently in Early Access. You can visit the elementsapp.io website to purchase a license today.

Thanks for Your Feedback

As always, keep the feedback coming. Your input has made all the difference so far.

Thank you!

See you soon,
Dan & Team Realmac.

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Looking Fantastic @dan

Looking forward to getting this week’s update!!

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Later this week? :scream: … that might be still 5 days …

:rofl: … can’t wait for it. REALLY looking forward to those changes. Thanks for the great work.

I noticed in the video the color names. Which once will you go with now?

Those in the video? … Or the once in the documentation?

Was looking up a lot of design documentation these days for some inspirations. I think with what you are having even a Google M3 design should be possible to achieve. But yeah I still prefer primary, secondary and tertiary over brand and accent

The one’s in the DevDiary video were correct… and the docs have now been updated :grimacing:

Can we have the tailwind numbers e.g. 500, 700, 950 displayed in addition to or as an (optional) alternate to the hex values? I think that might be quite helpful. :slight_smile:

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:sleepy_face:

Was hoping for the later. I will be able to arrange myself with that so lets move one.

But yeah for me a brand color and a primary are having a significant difference in the way its used and I will know already now the discussions with clients to explain them what the difference is and that we have now a logo color and that their brand color is not what is used here. Have been their before.

:rofl:

So I guess with clients I will stick with their wording for the colors and for Marketplace themes I stick with RapidWeaver :clinking_beer_mugs:

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It’s on the list, I found myself wanting that too!

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Sorry, we wanted to keep simpler to start with. I tried building themes with those extra colours and they just seemed redundant. We can always revisit and expand later if we need too.

You can use whatever extra named colours you want in a custom themes for you clients… hopefully that will work for you…

@dan This is really looking fantastic. It is going to be painful waiting for this update to arrive as there looks like a fair bit of tweaking that will need to be made to the sites I am building with Elements.

I’m most curious what the impact will be to these existing sites to the changes to the color palettes. I have custom BRAND, SECONDARY, and SURFACE palettes. Will these need to be manually tweaked to the new names, or will it be as simple as just changing the names of my custom palettes. It looks like the SECONDARY is the only one that would need to be updated in my case. My concern is what the impact will be on the places where I’m using these colors. It would be a real pain if I had to go back and tweak them to select the colors from the new palettes.

Good catch, if you’re using the “secondary” colour from a theme you’ll need to create a new custom colour named “secondary”, like this…

However, if you’ve already created a custom colour for “Secondary” your site will look just the same with no changes needed.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Excellent.

I’m assuming that I would need to change my “secondary” palette to “accent” if I wanted to gain the benefits of theme switching, correct?

:smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Yes, you’d need to go through your project and change the colour from “Secondary” to “Accent” - but that’s only if you wanted to see your entire project change colours as you switched themes :blush:

Update looks great, I wish I had more time to play with Elements, been busy lately with clients, but I guess that’s a good thing…lol. Can we start building Live Sites yet or are we still considered Beta?

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in the typography settings it says ‘body’ but when you use it in the editor it says’ paragraph’? just wondered why

Great updates this round, especially the new Background component. This makes creating slants soo easy and even easier to use than most Stacks in RWC created for such effects.

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Just an oversight, we’ll get that fixed so it matches.

You can… but remember, Elements is still in development, so it does have some rough edges (as you know).

If you do hit an issue that’s affecting a client, let us know and we’ll try to prioritise it :blush:

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Look great :clap:t2::clap:t2::clap:t2:

I love this background component and the handle angle.

:triangular_ruler: I wish we could write angle ex 90% or 180%

Themes colors :tada: fantastic use to style project fast :dashing_away:

Thanks for your hard work :folded_hands:t2: @dan

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How in heck do i got one exstra licence on my acount

Med hilsen
Stig Solheim.
Sent on the fly – please excuse typos