My complicated site has been built with an early beta of Elements and has accumulated a morass of problems, ranging from a bug with the wrong default character encoding (endless problems!) to slow publishing/rendering times and even memory leaks/system freezes while doing so. It’s driving me mad and I want to start afresh with v3, rebuilding the site from scratch. But I don’t want to risk carrying these problems over by creating globals.
I should be able just to copy & paste text to a brand new page, you’d think. But every time I copy text with formatting or hyperlinks (a huge portion of my site!) Elements’ copy function strips all that out. So I go to the published site and copy. But then Elements’ paste command again strips everything and pastes plaintext into the text or typography components – unlike every other Mac application which retains hyperlinks, italics and even matching styles.
(To make matters worse I press command-Z but it doesn’t undo pastes!)
Upshot is that I’d have to re-create each of the (hundreds) of hyperlinks manually to tramsger my site like this. Surely there has to be a solution for people migrating existing websites that doesn’t involve painfully recreating every hyperlink, italic and boldface? We can’t be at version 3 and still not have a functioning copy/paste/undo, right?!
A further problem: when recreating an image resource in the new site I need to find what the filename of the image is. But in the Elements Image Resource Inspector there’s nothing to show its name, nor any option to “reveal resource”. How is one to know what the filename of the resource is once it’s in the dropwell, let alone go back and edit the ALT text of that image once it’s been placed?
Hopefully I’m overlooking something very basic and all this is solvable… it’s been driving me crazy for well over a year now.
Sorry to hear about these issues. A site started in the early Elements beta still shouldn’t accumulate bugs like this. I’m happy to help you fix the current project rather than starting over if you’d like to try that first.
We’ve been working on speeding up publishing and rendering, and have made dramatic improvements so keep an eye out for this in the next release.
We’d like to know more about the character encoding issue. Can you send the project to us via Help → Upload to Support so we can take a look, and let me know the problems you’re still seeing?
We know about copy/paste stripping links and formatting from text. A future build should fix this one.
Globals themselves should be fine to copy across. If a specific global or component is misbehaving, can you let me know what’s happening?
I’m afraid there’s no easy way to which image is used in a dropwell today. I’ve filed a ticket for that.
We’re nearly ready to release the Elements AI Assistant which should help a lot either fixing the current site or building a new one.
Thanks; will do. Maybe this new site assistant can set some things straight. It’ll be a darn good test for it, doubtless! Currently my site only manages to function courtesy of a whole array of edge rules to rehabilitate encodings to UTF-8 (even though that’s been the Page Setting since Elements v1), add forward slashes after URLs, and so on, before serving pages.
Right now it’s too big to send to you (I daren’t delete unused resources without knowing what’s in use, but can’t find which version of a file is in use because of the issue I mentioned) so I will spend a bit of time trying to clean out the biggest (hopefully) unused videos to ensure it fits within the 1GB allowance, and upload it to you later this week.
We know about copy/paste stripping links and formatting from text. A future build should fix this one.
Good; I’m really hoping that future comes soon. Over 30 pages from my former Squarespace site have been offline for more than a year, waiting to be ported across because of this pretty fundamental deficiency.
There’s no 1GB allowance on Help → Upload to Support. That 1GB limit is for cloud documents on your own account. If you’re happy to upload the large file, that’s fine.
I’ve added a right-click → Reveal Resource on dropwells, which shows the resource in the Project Resources. This will be in the next Elements 3 beta .
You shouldn’t need to worry about encodings and forward slashes on URLs etc, it really sounds like the project is in a bit of a muddle. It would be a great test to see if the AI can repair it.
More good news. I’ve added copy and paste that retains formatting, and it can convert from HTML as well while retaining links and some formatting like bold etc. This will be in the next Elements 3 beta .
Thanks for uploading the project, I’ve taken a look.
The folder and filename settings were in a bit of a muddle: some pages that need PHP were set to HTML (gallery and form pages), some were stored under one folder but pointing somewhere else, and there were inconsistent slashes. The 404 looks like it might be right for your CDN, just unusual compared with the rest of the site, and the archived pages still had old paths.
I asked the AI to check those and then tidy them up, and it did a really good job. That’s exactly the kind of repair this should be good at.
We’re aiming to get a first preview of the Elements AI Assistant out next week.
You’ll be able to use Claude Pro account via the Elements MCP, or add your own Anthropic/Claude API Key into Elements. We’re keeping things open and flexible!
Hello Tom, both features work a treat! Thanks again for your quick and efficient work on this. Makes copying content across from my old website a breeze.
And yes, my project is indeed pretty muddled but good to hear the AI fixer-upper has made some headway.
v3.0.10 didn’t change anything for me with the 8-28 second lags I’m experiencing between making a change and seeing it in the Chrome preview (+ the other issues I mention) but rather than continue that here I’ll email support since they have my project now.
.
that’s bloody brilliant, 
