Check out this blog post to see everything that’s new in version 3.0.0 of Loops & Logic and Tangible Blocks
Here’s a quick tl;dr including links to the relevant section of the post:
Plugin restructure. Both Loops & Logic and Tangible Blocks have been restructured to pave the way for new features and faster collaboration. This doesn’t impact L&L users much, but this has important implications for Tangible Blocks beta users. The Templates, Styles, Scripts, and Layouts menu items will no longer be visible unless you have Loops & Logic installed alongside Tangible Blocks. See the post for details.
New documentation. The new docs can be found at docs.loopsandlogic.com and include much better content for beginners as well as more examples and explanations throughout. Many users have posted on the forums asking for more beginner-centric docs, but a special shout-out to @avanti, @RichardC, and @lkgg for applying the pressure to make this happen.
Conditionally add boolean attributes to tags using the tag-attributes attribute. For example, in the template below, the audio file will only autoplay and loop if the user visiting the page is logged in. <audio src="music.mp3" tag-attributes="{If user}autoplay loop{/If}"></audio>
When the user is logged in, the HTML output would be: <audio controls src="music.mp3" autoplay loop></audio>
See the blog post for a more detailed example inspired by a forum post by @markofapproval
Thanks to everyone in the L&L community for your feedback—we’re excited to continue making this plugin even better with your support. We hope to be releasing updates more regularly now that the major restructuring has been completed with this release. As always, if you encounter any issues with the plugin, make a post about it here on the forum and we’ll be sure to address it promptly. And if you’ve been enjoying the plugin, consider writing a review! Positive reviews on the WordPress plugin repo go a long way in helping us share the word about this plugin.
What new feature are you most excited about in this release? What kind of content or examples should we add next to the new documentation site? Share your thoughts below!
Very exciting. I recently stopped using beaver builder posts modules and have replaced them entirely with L&L Templates.
Frankly, I’m wondering if I can do away with Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer completely. I don’t use Archive templates as I’ve found it easier to just set up a page. I do use Singular templates, but they are populated by L&L templates anyway.
I wonder what I’m missing thinking about being Beaver free. I’d probably keep the Beaver Theme since it’s basically a blank slate and I don’t like looking for stuff in the theme anyway.
FWIW, I think Beaver Builder is well done, but I find myself using very few modules, and I wonder about the overhead.
It’s great to see this plugin evolving; well done.
@RichardC I did the same thing except with Elementor plus L&L. I’ve slowly replaced all the front-end content modules with L&L to the point where I am only using Elementor to manage the theme and primary navigation. It was a big job because I had a myriad of plugins performing various functions.
I’ve also considered what the point of Elementor is when L&L provides all the content, but for me, it still plays an essential role in providing and managing the foundation of the website. I am not a developer, and I don’t have time to code an entire website.
If you are a developer or want to be one, you should code the entire website because that’s your vocation. However, for people who just want an efficiently built WordPress website with minimal plugins, there is still a need for a theme manager.
The tricky part for newbies will be figuring out when to use the page builder versus L&L, but the simple answer is that you use the page builder as little as possible and build the rest with L&L. At least, this is my approach, and it has worked out well.
Of course, page builders add some code bloat, but what really kills WordPress sites is the never-ending plugins people add over time to solve different problems. I managed a complex eCommerce website with over 80 plugins for two years, and I would never do that again because far too much effort went into configuring and fixing them.
I think that L&L provides a way to quickly build scalable features while keeping plugins to a minimum, which I doubt any other WordPress plugin can claim. I think I’ve tried most of them at this point.
@Rips and @RichardC having worked with the tool on internal projects since its inception mid-2019 this is exactly what I’ve discovered. I’m realizing the place for page builders (usually Beaver Builder) in my workflow is now for visually complex landing pages that don’t conform to my theme styles, or where I need clients to feel comfortable making changes on their own (which largely depends on the nature of the project).
My builds have gotten so lean, it’s really gratifying! I’m happy to hear your experiences have been similar
This is really interesting, I totally agree. I think the questions you’re asking yourself are right in line with the way we’re thinking about the future of Loops & Logic and Tangible Blocks. We really want to make them the “in-between tools” for any workflow. Given that they’re pretty builder-agnostic (particularly since you can even use L&L’s shortcodes with builders that aren’t officially supported) it’s easy to gradually modify/evolve your plugin stack. As @julia mentioned, our agency used to rely pretty heavily on Beaver Builder to give our clients the ability to easily manage their site but on a lot of recent projects we’ve been able to ditch that in favour of just using Gutenberg (with custom blocks for the client to use built with Tangible Blocks, of course) and we’ve seen a great improvement in the efficiency and simplicity of our build process.
I was thinking this same thing. I’m not really a frontend dev myself (I just know L&L pretty well), but I saw a discussion about this on the Dynamic WordPress Facebook group yesterday and they brought up the point that using archive pages was still useful since you can automatically purge the cache for those pages when you add a new post. I think I’ve heard rumors that the devs are looking into ways to make L&L’s Cache tag able to automatically purge like that too based on the loops contained inside it, so that eventual update could negate that advantage. In any case, you can still get the best of both worlds for now by creating an L&L Layout that applies to those archive pages, but I could see how making a page into a post archive has its benefits too.
Interesting to hear how thoroughly you’re putting this plugin to use!
I’d be really curious to know what other plugins you were able to replace with L&L and what your process was for that! Sounds like it might be a bit of an undertaking to explain all that but I wonder if you’d have any insights for the L&L/WordPress community about how you approached that task to cut down the number of plugins you were using.
I replaced several plugins including Astra Theme, The Plus Addons and Custom Content Shortcode. I retained Ultimate Addons to provide menu, login and registration features. I have developed some views on how best to integrate Elementor with L&L and can share that in a post soon.
BTW using pages as a replacement for archives is something I have done as well, but it’s not the best approach for media or eCommerce sites that need to scale. You can make archives behave a lot like pages with Elementor and L&L while still getting the benefits of the archive structure.
Yeah, a landing page is a good example of when to use the page builder over L&L because it’s a one-off and does not need to scale if the website grows.
The page builders are trying to make their content more scalable with things like ‘global widgets’ but it doesn’t solve the problem of code bloat.
FWIW, I just ran a Beaver vs Non-Beaver smackdown test with mixed results.
Each page had the same html block (with L&L templates) showing posts from two different CPTs with pictures and text. I loaded them into Incognito browsers, and ran Lighthouse. They both had headers and footers created in Beaver Builder.
The only difference was in Largest Contentful Paint. Non-Beaver won in the first run, but by the third run the results flipped and the Non-Beaver got progressively worse while the Beaver got better. I know Beaver Builder has a cache, and I did not clear it between runs so maybe that made the difference.
The first run (non-cached) is the one that really matters but stock page builders probably don’t add much load time to a page. The load times increase as plugins are installed and more and more CSS/HTML/JS is running on every page often with conflicts or issues that further exasperate problems.
People went crazy over load times when it became an SEO factor for Google but how much it matters today is debatable. The best way to keep pages snappy is to minimise plugins and ensure images are of reasonable size.
At the risk of taking over this thread, I do have some proper feedback on the release
There are some great updates in this release, but given the backend enhancements, I am wondering if there is a plan to enable the creation of entire WordPress themes powered by L&L and Blocks?
The more examples the better in my view, especially for the more complex tags such as Loops and If. Examples that show how to combine tags to achieve common use cases are also very useful.
You may want to consider providing examples that align with the user’s skill level E.g. beginner, intermediate and advanced.
At times it would be helpful to see the output of the examples in the docs, perhaps you could implement something that runs the example output and even lets users try out logic from within the docs.
Thanks for the feedback about the docs, I’ll keep that in mind as we continue to add examples and structure to make the information easier to parse.
The “layouts” feature is already a pretty powerful lightweight theme building tool that allows you to build components of certain pages or even full themes with L&L markup. That being said, we’re also looking into ways of making the process even more flexible and straightforward in Tangible Blocks. I’m not sure how much we’re ready to publicly discuss this since we’re still in the product design phase for these features, but we’re keeping a close eye on the latest advancements in theme building in Gutenberg and imagining ways of making some of that workflow available regardless of the page builder you decide to work with. We’re pretty stoked about the possibilities there. Out of curiosity, what theme-building tools would you like to see added to L&L beyond what’s currently possible with layouts?
Elementor’s templating system combined with L&L does everything I need and more really.
The Layouts feature looks good but it only has one theme position with Elementor’s ‘Hello’ theme. However, I’m not a developer and prefer the visual editor for creating templates at this point in time.
Layouts seem quite powerful, but when designing a singular page from scratch, there’s a lot of background stuff to consider that Beaver Builder would have handled.
With CSS there are innumerable ways to set up a page, but I could see spending a lot of time figuring out the optimum approach.
I’d love to see an example singular page. And I’d love to see an example header with a simple hamburger link to a menu.
