In addition to the usual changelog, here are a few highlights of some of the standout features and updates to existing elements. A huge thank you to everyone who tried the beta and shared feedback, ideas, and bug reports 🙏.
New Features
Let’s dive into some of the features..
Favorites
A main highlight of v1.5.2 is the new ‘favorites’ functionality. Most of the feedback from the beta release was centered around this. People sending in lots of ideas for potential use cases, which we spent time extending the functionality to accommodate.
Users can now save lists of individual posts to their favorites using the Favorites Button. These posts can then be displayed through the Favorites Query Loop either on a separate page or inside of an AJAX popup.
Custom lists can be created, multiple lists for each post type with the option to set maximum counts for each list (useful if you’re building a specific layout, like a comparison table, and do not want too many items in the list).
The Favorites Button has a number of interaction options to allow for triggering different things based on when items are added, removed, lists are cleared, users hit the maximum, lists reach a specific number of items.. This opens up lots of options for providing feedback as the user interacts with the element.
Example interaction – open up modal after user has saved 4 posts to their favorites list, to encourage them to open an account.
WP Menu Query Loop
It is now really easy to add dynamic menu lists for areas of your site, such as in the footer menus or inside mega menu structures, where you need a list of dynamic menu items but don’t need a fully structured menu element.
Using the WP Menu Query Loop gives you more freedom over the layout/design with everything being added with native Bricks elements and dynamic tags.
Gallery Query Loop
Galleries from custom fields (ACF Gallery, Metabox Advanced Image) can now be looped through with the Gallery Query Loop. This allows much more layout options than the native gallery element (grid/flex/sliders).
More importantly, it allows for nesting any content within the gallery items, which is ideal for displaying data for that specific attachment (captions/descriptions), adding download buttons, favorite buttons etc.
Header Search Supporting AJAX Search
The header search element is now nestable and has built-in support for using with Bricks’ search filter element to create a live search that lives neatly in the site header.
Ideal for allowing users to search through lots of content without having to leave the current page.
Data Labels for Charts
All the chart types now have the option to add data labels within the charts. This provides a much more visual way to see the values at a glance inside the charts themselves, where as previously the values were limited to displaying within the axis lines. RTL support has also been added to the charts.
Pro Slider Updates
Infinite Scroll Support – If using a query loop to populate slides for a Pro Slider, you can now enable Bricks’ infinite scroll option in the query loop to prevent all the slides from being output at once when the page loads. As the slider moves, the content will be added via AJAX and the Pro Slider will automatically adapt as the new slides are being added to the page.
Mobile-First Support – For those choosing to make the lowest breakpoint the base breakpoint, the slider options will now adapt so the lowest values are inherited upwards for number of slides, gaps between the slides etc.
Pro Slider Gallery – If linking the images to Bricks’ built-in lightbox, you can now take advantage of the captions & thumbnails options that were recently added to Bricks.
Dynamic Table Updates
Column sorting – Column sorting is no longer a global option, instead each column has the option to disable the sorting for that column.
Better support for dates – The column data can now be set to ‘is date’ meaning they can be sorted into date order regardless of which date format is being displayed.
Popover Update
There’s now a new option to ‘append to body’. This is designed for situations where the popover is trapped inside some element with overflow:hidden or similar, causing the popover to not be fully displayed.
One common example is inside of a slider, where the slide track needs to be overflow:hidden. By enabling this ‘append to body‘ setting, it ensures the popover will always be above all the other content on the page by moving it outside of any containers and to the very bottom of the page, while still being positioned correctly.
Breadcrumb CPT options
For each CPT, for the single post view, you can now choose which taxonomy the breadcrumbs will prioritize when creating the breadcrumb trail with the nested taxonomy terms. (Note that for posts with parent posts, the link to the parent post will be in the breadcrumbs)
Finer Control over Member Conditions
For both WishList Member & Restrict Content Pro users can belong to a specific membership, but have a currently inactive status. The element conditions now have more control so you can target more specifically only the users that have the selected status of that membership level.
Feature Requests
As always, make sure to send in any ideas for future elements over to feature requests. With every release, we make iterative improvements to existing features to help cover the most use cases & to make sure they’re the best they can be.