SNEAK PREVIEW: Glazed 2.4 and Glazed Builder 1.0 – Biggest Sooperthemes Update Ever
Later this week I will write a full blog post, with an overview of new features, new options and entirely new capabilities in the Sooperthemes product line. For now: just a sneak preview. During the last 2 month fo 2015 we made a huge effort to produce the biggest update ever for our premium Drupal themes. As with any big software adventure, we had a quick and productive start, then some setbacks on difficult components, and then some setbacks on small details that turned out to be –not so small–
Over the coming 2 weeks we will publish more content, covering the new capabilities in detail and with illustration. For now just a sneak preview and a list of changes that I will scrape from the commit log. Happy 2016 from sooperthemes!
Our free open source variant also got a huge upgrade and a new free version of the premium theme.
Introducing Glazed Builder 1.0
The success of glazed theme was as much in its design components as in the integration with our partner's drag and drop builder: Azexo Composer. Unfortunately this project is not maintained anymore and the owner is now fully focussed on developing wordpress themes. This forced us to continue its development internally. The result is Glazed Builder: A page builder that looks like it's predeccessor but is different mostly in that it's not buggy and has been streamlined and refactored for greater usability and performance.
[[{"fid":"842","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"2":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":""}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-default","data-delta":"1"}}]]
Inline editing, Views integration and fixing bugs
One component that we knew was going to be tough is inline editing. It took Drupal core some years to get this right. We planned to integrate it in our drag and drop builder in a 3 week code sprint. CKEditor Inline is basically pretty straightforward to integrate but you need to look out for edge cases. Our text elements are editable in the standard modal window, on the node edit page, and now also in the inline editor. There is content coming in from multiple angles. Besides being editable, our text elements are also clonable, draggable, templatable, and deletable. We also use CKEditor in some ways it's not intended to be used: for managing single text strings rather than complete web pages. Glazed Builder fields can easily have over a dozen inline editors and these need to be managed so that their contents and behavior play nice with all other features of the drag and drop editor. This was a tough but finally the result is worth the trouble.
We also spent time on advancing our views integration. Most importantly we now support setting contextual filters on views displays right in the drag and drop interface. This means you can build complex magazine homepage, portals and dashboard pages simply by dragging and dropping the same views displays and setting the contextual filter. Right in the frontend!
While exploring and expanding the codebase of the drag and drop builder, we also fixed numerous bugs. Certain components were unfinished or simply not working at all. In our 1.0 release all components are tested to work, without exception.
You can now try an admin demo!
Changes
As an appetizer for richer coverage of our new product line, here is a list of changes that I'm scraping from 300 git commits:
- Cleaning and refactoring code
- Coding standards
- Fix blockquote
- Fixed image height rendering
- Restoring web tab for media browser
- Add support for empty elements in Glazed Builder drag and drop snippets
- Added onBeforeUnload message if unsaved content
- Added views integration Contextual Filters
- Added views integration Exposed Filters
- Added views integration Exposed Sorting
- Added Glazed Builder branding
- Removed Impress.js presentation element
- Removed JParallax
- update 3rd party libraries
- Removed site export/management related code
- Updated and simplified animation engine
- Fixed youtube background
- Support responsive layout in video element
- Disabled form component, can be added back if it's more reliable and useful
- Refactor loader JS system for managing JS init and Just-In-time configuration code
- Split views and blocks in tabs
- Added views tag filter
- Removed linkit
- Fixed backward compatibility with azexo composer
- Add Glazed Theme color palette to Iris color picker default palette
- Add inline editing
- Tweak tune and debug inline editing
- Added new button styles
- Added color overlay utility classes
- New form styling
- Social links element
- Refactored icons element(s)
- Refactored asset management for sidebar elements (now Carbide Snippets)
- Refactoring row element and controls
- Initiating row element with 1/2 + 1/2 layout
- Refactor parent/child integrated control buttons
- update jumbotron styling
- Fixed major clusterfuck with lots of components by simply updating from jQuery 1.9 to 1.10
- Add build scripts for trysooperthemes.com
- Add hook_enable code for backwards compatibility
- Improve help texts
- ...
- Lots and lots of UX improvements
- Lots of bug fixes