Last Updated on April 17, 2020
Happy New Year everyone! We’re starting the New Year with an update all about providing a better block editing experience. Update to version 2.1.0 to try out the new features.
Help Video Snippets
Stackable blocks provide a lot of options. And I mean a lot – some blocks have over a hundred options. This makes every Stackable block very robust and you can customize and mold them into whatever you want them to look like.
These options range from simple like “Title Color” or “Background Color” and are quite self-explanatory.
However, there are also advanced ones like “Column Content Vertical Alignment” or “Maximum Block Width”. These options are mostly found in the advanced tab.
These advanced options unlock the true potential of the block. Unfortunately, based solely on their names, what these options do aren’t quite obvious if you haven’t played around with them before.
To make things less intimidating and easier for new users, we’ve added in help video snippets tooltips on almost every block option. These tooltips are meant to quickly explain what the option does with a short video and description.
Try hovering your mouse over the labels of the different block options a bit to make the help videos appear.
In total, we’ve added over 120 of these help videos which cover almost all options that Stackable has to offer.
Double-Click to Auto-Expand Settings
If you’ve tried editing a Stackable block before, you’ll notice that almost every aspect of a Stackable block can be customized. Titles, descriptions, buttons, images, can all be customized independently from each other.
While this flexibility is amazing, the problem is that in order to get a block to look exactly how you want it to look like, you’d have to jump from setting to setting, opening and closing multiple panels in order to modify every block component.
All this jumping and clicking around makes for an unpleasant editing experience.
Now to address this, we’ve added the capability to double-click on any text on your block to auto-expand the settings for that block component.
This new double-click action makes customizing blocks a much more pleasing and smoother experience.
Now you can quickly access text color options by simply double-clicking on titles. This saves you around 1 or 2 mouse clicks when navigating through the block inspector.
The new auto-expand feature isn’t just limited to text, this also works for:
- Buttons
- Containers (great for easily changing container backgrounds)
- Block backgrounds (if you have them turned on)
- Top and bottom separators
Auto-Scroll to Opened Inspector Panels
Unlike other block plugins, we have arranged our Inspector options into 3-tabs: Layout, Style and Advanced.
We’ve also made it a point to have only a single expanding settings panel open at a time – when you open a settings panel, any currently open one gets closed. We specifically made it this way to make navigating through the numerous options less tricky.
When closing and opening different settings panels however, you might have experienced times when the scrollbar suddenly moved to an unwanted place in the inspector. This quirk happened because the size of the inspector kept changing because of different sized settings panels, and the scroll location in the browser couldn’t keep up with it.
Well in this update, we’ve made sure to keep the current settings panel you’re opening on the center of your view. So you won’t have that lost feeling anymore when navigating through our different settings.
Here it is in action:
Become a Stackable Affiliate
After updating, you may notice also that there’s a new sub-menu entry under Stackable’s menu: Affiliation.
Now you can sign up to be a Stackable Affiliate, and earn by promoting Stackable!
If you love Stackable and building sites with the Block Editor as much as we do, and you have a PayPal account, you’re all set to go.
Head over to the Affiliate Program page to know more about the details and mechanics.
Conclusion
Version 2.1.0 focused a lot on improving the user-experience.
Let us know in the comments below what you think about the new features or any other suggestions you have for further enhancing the block editing experience.
