I’m back with a bonus edition of our weekly Dev Diary this week — and it’s a big one!
Last week, we shared a sneak peek at the blogging engine we’re building directly into Elements. This week, I’m excited to show you 10 major updates we’ve made based on your feedback!
Be sure not to miss the end of the video, there’s a preview of one powerful feature that our advanced users won’t want to miss (trust me, it seriously opens up the blogging system).
Watch Dev Diary Ep77 – 10 Big Blog Updates
As we mentioned last week, our blog system is open, standards-based, and flat-file. It’s powered by Markdown and PHP. There’s no setup required in Elements: just add your posts, build your pages, and publish. That’s it.
We were blown away by the amazing feedback from last week’s preview, so let us know what you think of these latest updates!
Nice work. Lots to digest here. I’m going to have to think about it a bit, as I can see myself using the CMS two ways on my sites, and I’m not sure how I manage that yet. But in general, yes, I think you’ve covered all the points I’ve raised, and in doing so made it flexible (an Elements attribute).
For a production site (e.g. news), I hope someone (or maybe me, but I stopped coding a while ago) will build an external centralized app that can insert into an existing Elements structure so that I’m not always fiddling with the base site code.
I love the flexibility this system as a whole has. I am only speaking for myself. But usability is going to be key. This is way too much set-up and too many moving parts to be practical for daily use. For me, I will need to wait until there is an UI. The UI should allow for 100% of these adjustments and changes on a post-by-post basis. I’m excited for where this could go!
It is probably a good piece of work and many people will probably find it wonderful. But unfortunately I can’t judge it because I’m not a programmer. For my part, I would prefer to work with a slightly more user-friendly version of a blog editor, as I do with Alloy.
Because ultimately, at least for me, it’s about writing a blog post that requires my personal experience and expertise.
I would have to do additional training to become a programmer in the way presented. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that!
By the way!
The AI support in the help is really great. As it’s no problem for AIs such as ChatGBT or Gemini to translate texts into my national language at the same time, I wondered whether this wasn’t also possible here???
This is really great. This whole system is going to make it super easy to bring over all of my legacy blog posts, which are already configured to leverage this system. So I get the few dozen posts added with very little work from my end, other than setting up the post template.
I am curious if it will ever be possible to add images by simplly dragging them from the resources into a blog post. This would make it a lot simpler for those less familiar with Markdown.
I sure hope we can get our hands on this soon as I’d love to be testing and experimenting with it.
QUESTION:
Can a post component be used anywhere in Elements? I ask because I’m wondering if it could be used to write Markdown paragraphs that can be used in a layout. Of course the paragraph would be drawn from the associated markdown file. Making it possible to edit the content of the paragraph independently from Elements. I’m guessing probably not but thought I would ask as I’d love to have this support.
Me too - I’m looking for complete templates that I can plug into…
Blogs
Photos
Forms with security code
Movie headers
Splash page is somewhat back
Subtle animations (not runaway memory eaters)
Section templates (footers)
And most importantly:
A store solution
These are what I’m looking for… I’ve stopped using the software
When these become available - I’ll take another look…
No offense intended please
I have 1 ‘client’ where I do their site - they do my taxes…
The licensing $249 per year is a lot for 1 commercial client - I am an honest user…. So Probably stay on RWC for that client and port my sites over when the addons are ready…
It is an amazing program with many options! Good work Ben…
I’ve had this very same conversation. I love how much can be done. But when you just want to bang something out, starting from scratch, piece by piece is not fun or a good use of my time.
Drag and drop whole sections made a lot more sense to me. Ready made themes that I could tweak would be ideal.
Sorry for the slow reply to your question (I somehow missed it). Anyway, all of the above is (or will be) built into Elements.
You can already create photo galleries, forms, and headers with movie backgrounds, not to mention subtle animations. Templates and a blogging solution are currently being worked on, and we’re sharing our progress on a weekly basis.
Regarding the store solution, you can currently easily integrate Ecwid, and I know there are third-party developers already working to integrate other solutions into Elements.
Given everything that’s included in Elements, we believe the price is very fair, especially when compared to the cost of building a similar setup from scratch using Stacks.
If you decide to cancel your subscription, you’ll still be able to use the version of Elements you have at that point. You just won’t receive any new updates after your subscription ends.
I hope you’ll give Elements a chance, it’s moving at such a rapid pace and is really shaping up to be something special!
I think Elements is going to become the go-to website building app on the Mac
Watch Dev Diary Ep77 – 10 Big Blog Updates
