Earlier today we went over what 2016 was like for us here at Elegant Themes. In this post, and this episode of Divi Nation, I’m sharing what we plan to do in 2017. It’s going to be a massive year! Take a look!
2017: Fostering The Most Empowered Community on the Web – Divi Nation Short
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Summary
Our primary goal, when 2017 is all said and done, is to have fostered what believe can become “The Most Empowered Community on the Web”.
Here’s what we plan to do in pursuit of that goal.
1. The Divi Developer Release
This project has been something we’ve been talking about for a while but the developmental follow-up tasks to launching Divi 3.0—such as squashing bugs and resolving various compatibility issues has delayed it. But rest assured, our next big dev project is the Developer Release.
This release will come with loads of improvements to the underlying code of the Divi framework as well as provide all new developer documentation that will make the jobs of third party Divi developers much easier.
2. Core Product Updates
As I hope all of our members know, we have developed core “family” of products built around Divi. There is the Divi Theme itself; Extra, our magazine theme built on the Divi Framework; the Divi Builder Plugin; and our two complimentary plugins: Bloom and Monarch. Bloom being our email optin plugin and Monarch, our social sharing plugin.
If you’re not using them, you should, because they’re awesome.
Now we, of course, keep all of these products up to date with regular minor releases. But it’s been a while since we did across the board code cleanup and feature updates. Getting that done is a big goal we’ve set for 2017.
Which brings us to what is probably our biggest item on the 2017 agenda.
3. The Divi Marketplace (Or whatever we end up calling it)
This one is huge. And it’s central to our goal of fostering the most empowered community on the web.
With Divi, we’ve seen so many people design websites who never thought of themselves as web designers or developers. And some of them, felt so confident in their new abilities that they went and started businesses selling their services as Divi web designers and developers!
It’s been amazing to watch and to cheer them on with new tips, tutorials, and resources that help them master there craft.
And I’m not the only one who think’s so!
Over the last year and a half we’ve seen another group. Smaller but growing rapidly. And they’re people creating Divi Child Themes, Divi Layout Packs, and Divi Plugins that the rest of the community can use to extend the awesomeness of Divi beyond what we’ve done here at Elegant Themes.
We hope that by creating a centralized marketplace that lends our reach to third party Divi developers we’ll be supercharging the Divi economy. Resulting in a whole new kind of career opportunity for Divi users.
4. Meetups
2016 was full of fantastic in-person community experiences. Through WordCamps we got to meet and become closer with around 80 passionate community members. But I have a feeling that it was just a hint of what is to come next.
In 2017 our goal is to create Meetup resources for local hosts all over the world to throw Divi Nation Meetup events. We want to make it possible for all 385,000+ Elegant Themes members to have the kind of special in-person experiences that roughly 80 of us got to have this year.
5. Free Daily Divi Resources
Finally, 2017 will be our first full year of creating and giving away free divi resources every day.
If all goes well that will mean 365 new, free divi resources come December 31st, 2017. If that sounds good to you, then simply stay tuned to our blog, YouTube, and social channels.
Particularly Facebook where we not only post everything but also plan to do more live Divi training and events—which we dabbled in a bit here at the end of 2016.
Let’s Do 2017 Together!
As you can see, we’re really excited about 2017 and we hope you are too. We’re really looking forward to sharing another great year with the entire community.
Be sure to subscribe to our email newsletter and YouTube channel so that you never miss a big announcement, useful tip, or Divi freebie!
Hello,
I am a member of Elegant Themes community for 2 years now, and my overall rating for you is: Excellent. Awesome products, great community, fantastic support. I am really excited for your next updates on all your products, but I have a small request to your Dev team:
– Redesign your Theme Options Panel for Divi and Extra, to a more cleaner, WordPress style concept. Keep only the basic styles and remove all of the unnecesary styles in the backend. This will reduce the load on our websites and will improve stability.
– The same requests I have for Bloom and Monarch plugins.
Thank you very much. Great job so far…
I would love to be able to add a calender event to a post, or have an event post to my feed. Any chance we could see a Divi module for events. Our gun club has events and using snap I can post to the website and Facebook at the same time, but when I add all in knew calendar events I have to duplicate the events to post.
I’ve been using The Events Calendar Pro with Extra and you can add events to posts or pages using one of their shortcodes.
Exciting post!
I’m curious… what forum plugin/solution is being used to run the forum on elegantthemes.com?
Loving what you guys have lined up. Thank you so much for all your hard work, ET Team!
Congrats on your nuptials!
365 days of Free Daily Divi Resources sounds ambitious, but I’m happy to hear it. I love Divi’s community focus and am excited about 2017. Thank you and the entire team for all your hard work!
This is great I’m someone that also started just to use Divi on my website and now I’m designing Divi websites for others.
This is really exciting. Another big year for Elegant Themes and Divi.
Very excited to hear Monarch is getting an overhaul, it has had bugs for literally a year that have never been fixed but only temporary patches supplied in support forums.
It will also be great to see (hopefully) the huge amount of Ajax requests fixed and all the Linkedin bugs.
Bloom is awesome as is Extra…but it will be great to see them get some TLC too.
I am surprised to hear the Elegant Themes website is not going to be redesigned or made responsive this year, though?
I think one of the most important things to foster the community is listen to their ideas, wishes and request AND give them insight in how their ideas rank within the community (by a voting system) and with a development status of those ideas.
You already do listen in the request forum and also on Facebook where Nick asks the community for ideas once in a while. That surely gives you some insights in what the community wants, but it doesn’t tell me how my ideas stack up with those of others.
It would be really great if the community could submit ideas and could vote and comment to ideas of others. That’s also great for you, because each idea exists only once (whereas in the forum the same idea is submitted a gazillion times) and you can easily see what the hot ideas are that you should work.
There are a lot of such community sourcing systems (like User Voice and Get Satisfaction) out there that do this for you. I really hope you will introduce something like that in 2017.
That would be cool.
Nice news!! Following!
I joined Elegant Themes a nimber of years ago. But just came back to you all with discovering Divi Builder. I would like to see tutorials that start from scratch with a blank install and move through a workflow of developing a complete site. I know there are many tutorials out there but it would be nice to have a step by step process. That includes choosing the proper child theme and/or creating a new one. If there are such tutorials available now please direct me to them. Looking forward to a great year with Elegant Themes and Divi.
Pastor Mick
Sounds like a good template for a miniseries 🙂
We’ve got some stuff like this planned around different types of Divi sites.
Congratulations! As a new member of Divi Nation, I would like to provide you with my insights from the first five months of membership. I would like to start with the ups: the usability of the visual builder and the amazing technical support. However, I am very disappointed with your outdated documentation that is coming along with the downloads. For example, the full width slider has an video tutorial like two years old, based on divi 2.3 or 2.6. I know it’s similar but still. To me, it looks like you are so focused on adding new stuff that you left out the basics: the documentation which is too thin and doesn’t enable the end user to get the maximum out of the power of the modules.
That’s why I would like to see more tutorials on CSS for Divi, as the basic tabs provide like only 90% of the magic. But the true magic lies in those extra 10% that CSS brings to the table.
Another critical issue at this time is the page speed factor. I have searched the ET blog and I have got the most recent post was more than two years old, which in WP time is two milleniums.
Thank you,
Viorel
You’ll be happy to know that we’re in the process of a complete documentation overhaul. We’re also publishing an article soon on how to speed up your WordPress website.
Thank you! Looking very much forward!
I am one of those people that has discovered Divi and am now building sites for others so thank you and I’m really looking forward to any training that can help me learn how to do this ‘properly’!
I’m really looking forward to better Woocommerce integration in Divi!
Currently, the defaults we set for WordPress within the Divi customizer don’t carry over to Woocommerce or get overwritten by the Woocommerce defaults.
Also, it’d be great if we could also customize the My Account page to include tabs instead of unstyled bullets.
Thanks for all you do!
completely agree with this. woocommerce is one of the only areas where Divi suffers and can’t really compete with others out there.
I’m really looking forward to all you have in mind for 2017. Sounds really exciting. Love your enthusiasm Nathan! All the best!
Great plans to make what is already good even better!
Thanks
I remember reading in some comment like a year ago that there was another magazine-style theme in the works, similar to Extra but a bit more advanced. Is that still being worked on?
No we are not doing another theme like Extra. Our primary product focus is going to be on improving the Divi Builder framework that is at the heart of Divi, Extra, and the Divi Builder Plugin.
You need to add to that list a complete redesign of the Elegant Themes website. In all seriousness, navigating the ET website is a horrible user experience and serves to turn new users away as opposed to being more engaged. And as a member, it’s just a nuisance to use.
Its design is outdated and the site’s repsonsiveness is poor at best — just look at the Blog section on a mobile device and you will see what I mean. It’s a little confusing as to how ET can promote such a flexible and design-friendly theme such as Divi, yet not apply that to their own site.
All I can say is, it’s coming. As much as we’ve grown, we still have a relatively small team for the scale of our customer base. So the vast majority of our resources have gone toward the products. That said, the redesign has been in-progress behind the scenes for a while now. It’ll go live as soon as humanly possible.
I dont know why you still have small team and also I personally think you are giving so much for less price in business point of you. Why dont you make as a monthly payment but keep very little so that every region of the freelancers and small company of the world can afford it. Regarding your customer base you can earn more to support bigger team & more features and themes for customers. hope your divi marketplace will make profit to support big team.I can analyse that you can have commission or small charge from people sell in from divi marketplace :p
Developer Release is what really needed for future progress. Also, leverage the new REST API would be interesting.
I’m looking forward to all that, especially the Divi Marketplace. Also, I wonder if you’re planning to redesign the ET website in 2017?
Yessssssssss
Sounds like a exciting year to come!
Nice update, but how long before we get a shot at DIVI 3.1?? Love all the DIVI 3.0 Bug fixes though.
When we’ve got a sneak peek ready we’ll publish it here 🙂
You need a stable table 😀 (The image shakes every time you touch the table)
I got a little excited…