I don’t see an option to stop checking for updates. I get a “New Version” available every time I boot Elements. Please add a don’t check for updates option to Elements 2.4.4. Please don’t get me wrong, I think Elements is great, I just don’t need to upgrade to v 3.
ok. that’s crazy.
Did I miss something? Is going from v2 to v3 free? If so, then great. But it sure looks to me like I would need to buy a new license, and like I said, I don’t need that.
I am sitting on V2 at the moment. I don’t use CMS and am not interested in AI so am happy with what I have. I will renew my subscription and update at some point in the future when I see something I need or an OS update breaks it.
If you go to Settings > Updates you can untick the box to automatically check for updates.
Elements is a yearly subscription. As long as you have a current subscription, updates are free, and you’d be wise to keep them coming. Elements was just updated for the latest version of macOS Golden Gate, for instance. If you let your subscription lapse, Elements will still work, but you won’t get updates any more.
If you click on Skip This Version that should work, at least until a new version is released. Not sure if that is what I did but I don’t get that message on start up.
We’ll get this fixed in the next build of Elements, however, this won’t fix it for older builds.
I really would recommend upgrading to the latest version of Elements, so much has been fixed and added. There’s tonnes of new features, projects, and components, here’s a condensed list of what’s new in Elements 3.0 and onwards:
- Built-in AI Assistant: Build and refine pages, layouts and custom components directly inside your project. Initially released in beta.
- Bring your own AI API keys: Connect OpenAI or Anthropic, with API-key support available on every Elements plan.
- MCP integration: Allow compatible external AI applications to work with your Elements projects, including advanced HTML ID and CSS-class settings.
- Shared AI Memory: Preserve project context, design decisions and styles across the built-in assistant and connected MCP clients, with persistent conversation state and improved memory efficiency.
- AI content and project assistance: Write and revise content, improve SEO, update page titles and metadata, work on CMS blogs, troubleshoot problems, change settings and publish.
- AI image generation: Generate images using OpenAI, with automatic JPEG conversion.
- AI file creation and research: Create Markdown and CSV files, and search the web for information and resources.
- Expanded AI model selection: Updated OpenAI and Claude options, including lower-cost models, plus clearer provider capabilities and setup guidance.
- Tailwind CSS 4.3.2: Updated built-in themes, border-radius and shadow tokens, opacity handling, and cleaner spacing classes from Global controls.
- New Mask component: Add masking effects to your designs.
- New 3D Transforms component: Apply three-dimensional transformations to your layouts.
- New Shapes component: Create custom shapes, including layouts where text flows around them.
- Four additional colour palettes: Mauve, Olive, Mist and Taupe.
- More gradient options: Support for radial and conical gradients.
- Expanded shadow controls: Set shadow colour and opacity.
- Custom HTML attributes: Add custom attributes to Containers.
- More transformation options: Additional hover variants and mirrored scaling, plus an option to restore Tailwind 3-style tap-to-hover behaviour on touch devices.
- More consistent styling: Improvements to theme values, shadows, corner radii and background overlays, with better CSS isolation inside the editor.
- Markdown Preview: Preview Markdown directly within the editor.
- Separate visibility and publishing controls: Hide components while editing independently of whether they are included in the published website.
- Expanded Pages menu: Create pages, files and folders from the main Pages + button.
- Improved custom-component naming: Rename components from the context menu, with automatic numbering to prevent duplicate names.
- Live Three.js previews: View Three.js effects and other supported ES modules directly on the editing canvas.
- Better rich-text copying and pasting: Preserve formatting, links, line breaks and spaces more reliably, including content copied from RapidWeaver Classic.
- Improved image workflows: Reveal an image in Resources directly from its Inspector entry, preserve WebP and AVIF transparency in the editor, and handle image imports and updates more reliably.
- Clearer Inspector controls: Wider labels, improved descriptions and layout refinements.
- Enhanced Galleries: Lightbox captions and author information, remote-folder image sources, optional thumbnail resizing, lazy loading for larger galleries, and improved video playback and audio handling.
- More Table data sources: Populate tables from Google Sheets or local and remote CSV files, with automatic delimiter detection.
- Improved Table layouts and navigation: Drop Zone support, optional first/last-page buttons, translatable pagination labels, clearer Inspector sections and improved sorting.
- More flexible Content Sliders: A freely scrolling card-row layout with part of the next card visible, improved responsive previews and sizing, interaction-aware autoplay, and navigation arrows that can sit below the slider.
- Expanded Audio controls: Volume adjustment, an optional elapsed-time display and looping, plus improved seeking and progress-control alignment.
- Improved Video controls and playback: Preload settings for self-hosted MP4s; better handling of mute, controls, looping and start times; independent state for multiple videos; custom and CMS thumbnails; corrected poster-image output; and more reliable local MP4 and Vimeo playback.
- Improved CMS Online Editor: A better mobile interface, a resizable metadata sidebar, configurable upload limits and more resilient handling of malformed metadata.
- Better CMS content preservation: Support for alt text on custom CMS image resources, improved preservation of inline colours and spaces, and consistent metadata serialisation across the Online Editor, MCP and API.
- Faster, more capable CMS collections: Faster content scanning, author and tag links populated from page templates, date-field fallback when publication dates are missing, improved collection paths and more reliable Load More behaviour.
- RSS feed controls: Choose how many items appear in a feed.
- Eight additional starter projects: Waitlist, Burger Co, Asterra, Kinetic, Profile, Yonder, Wellness and Consultant.
- Refreshed existing starter projects: Updated content, previews and fixes, plus alphabetical project ordering.
- Faster everyday workflows: Improvements to project opening, page switching, saving, previewing and exporting.
- Improved Globals: Better performance, smaller published pages and more reliable preservation of Global values when undoing or redoing conversion actions.
- AI-readable website output: Optional Markdown counterparts for pages and a root
llms.txtfile. Markdown output is enabled by default in new projects, with cleaner filenames and CMS PHP/template source excluded from generated Markdown. - Smarter asset publishing: Automatically refresh pack assets when their source files are newer, and correctly trigger publishing when only shared assets have changed.
- Better publishing diagnostics: DNS-resolution and TCP-connection timings to help investigate connection problems.
- Improved FTP and S3 publishing: Consistent upload-speed limits, region-aware S3 uploads, better retention of keys and endpoints, more reliable publishing-password persistence, and clearer FTPES naming.
- Elements Hosting shortcut: Access Elements Hosting from the publishing-destination creation screen.
- PHP-aware components: Components can declare PHP requirements using
requiresPhp, prompting users to change the page extension when necessary. - More control over resource selection: Developer APIs can restrict resource selection using accepted or excluded MIME types.
- Refreshed application interface: Updated application icon and glass appearance, improved light-mode contrast and outline-icon visibility, refined visibility switches, and revised toolbar, tab-bar and component-editor controls.
- Improved Classic and font importing: More reliable Classic project importing and font importing, plus Google Fonts retries and clearer error messages.
- Better keyboard and mobile navigation: Full keyboard control for accordions and fixes for mobile navigation and Android anchor links.
- Expanded diagnostics: Recent-action and undo history, plus improved project-loading diagnostics.
- Security and stability improvements: CMS template and search-index security fixes, updated CMS and Forms dependencies, improved PHP 8.5 licence handling, and fixes affecting page markup, CMS post creation, YouTube embeds, component updates, AI operations, document handling and crashes.
Source: Elements Release Notes