Remember we talked several times about our own drag-and-drop plugin? Well, last week we released a first beta of Layouts!
Layouts lets you design entire WordPress sites, from top to bottom. It’s a plugin, so you can use it with any theme, but it works best in Bootstrap-based themes.
This first beta includes a fully-featured drag-and-drop engine, a library of cells and a cells API, which lets you create your own cells. This API lets you turn your existing sites and themes into drag-able.
Layouts is several weeks from reaching 1.0 release. For this to happen, we are going to include the following:
- Complete integration with other Toolset plugins
- Layouts translation interface via WPML
- A nicer page for Layouts plugin 🙂
Where can I get Layouts?
If you have a Toolset account, you can download Layouts beta and experiment with it. Layouts is included when you buy Toolset and we will also make it available as a separate product when it reaches 1.0.
Is WPML preferring Layouts over others plugins and themes?
Absolutely not! We work very hard towards complete compatibility with themes and plugins. The new translation interface that we are building for Layouts is going to be integrated into WPML (not Layouts). It will be a new API, which lets themes and plugins translate complex texts easily.
The fun part about this API is that it puts all the hard work on WPML’s side. Theme and plugin authors will need to make a single call to register their texts. WPML will organize these texts and allow to translation them using the Translation Dashboard. This way, when you want to translate an entire Layout, instead of searching for individual strings, you can select the Layout to translate and you get all its texts together.
We will be working on integrating this API with our colleagues from Headway, Pagelines, Ultimatum, Visual Composer and other great guys. We believe that the way forward is creating convenient translation APIs, which everyone enjoys. Developers should spend very little time adding this API and users will be able to translate everything conveniently. I will write a lot more about this API as soon as we have something.
More details and your feedback
To see what’s included in this release and leave your feedback, visit the Layouts release blog post and leave your comment.
Enjoy!
Why are you making this ?
There are already so many and good pagebuilder plugins.
Visual composer for example does it awesome.
I would rather like to see you guys perfectioning WPML instead.
The UI is so outdated.
Sorry for this, it’s just my opinion.
Kind regards,
Bart
That’s a valid argument. As part of our work on our own Layouts plugin, we are also creating a better interface that will allow other plugins, like Visual Composer, to translate their complex texts. I hope that VC clients will benefit from this.