I’m back with another Divi 5 progress update. I am happy to report that we completed all the features slated for the Public Alpha release. Before getting this initial version into your hands, the final step is to perform one more round of testing and bug fixing. We will polish things up and release the Public Alpha with my next update.
It will be an alpha, and there will undoubtedly be many bugs at first, but we want to reduce as much noise as possible so that you can effectively test the alpha without running into problems at every turn.
In the meantime, swing by the demo to check out the latest version of Divi 5, including all the updates I’ll cover in this post.
Get all the details in the video below. 👇
What We Accomplished
This month, we got a lot done, filling in the missing features needed to make the Public Alpha broadly usable. We finished important front-end rendering components like Dynamic Assets and Critical CSS. In Divi 5, we improved Dynamic Assets by further abstracting each module’s JavaScript, significantly reducing page size and the amount of usability-blocking scripts that negatively affect PageSpeed scores.
We finalized the Theme Builder, bringing in the new Visual Builder interface. We wrapped up Responsive Content, allowing you to display different content on different breakpoints. We added Visual Builder history and undo/redo functionality. We finished the Divi 5 Readiness system and the site-wide conversion mechanism to migrate your Divi 4 shortcodes to the new Divi 5 format. We also implemented Divi’s Dynamic Content system into its full suite of modules.
We also began our new bug-fixing mission and fixed 65 bugs. 🥵
What’s Left To Finish?
At this point, Divi 5 includes almost all of Divi 4’s most important features. The remaining features are mostly related to UI and UX and are some of Divi’s lesser-used features. These include Find & Replace, Extend Styles, Quick Actions, Split Testing, and a few others.
We will fill in all of these features during the Public Alpha, but you’ll get to test and use Divi 5 in the meantime. I’ll discuss this in more detail in my next update when the Public Alpha is available.
Introducing Divi Dash
In other news, we are super excited to have recently released Divi Dash, a WordPress site manager included for free with your Divi membership.
Divi Dash empowers you to manage all your WordPress websites in one place. You can manage updates, themes, plugins, and users and log in to any website with a single click. It’s a great value add to your membership, and we hope you find it useful.
Log in to your account and visit the Dash tab to try it. Let us know what you think!
Stay Tuned For More Updates
That’s all of this month’s Divi 5 update. It’s been a long road, and waiting so long has been understandably challenging, but we are making steady progress, and I am excited to be soon entering the phase of public testing.
Stay tuned for more updates, and don’t forget to follow us by email and subscribe to our YouTube channel to ensure you don’t miss a thing.
Any news about the Alpha version launching?
The one thing I’m not seeing on the testing site is the Free-Form CSS area under Custom CSS?
Good catch. We have that feature finished, but it looks like it didn’t get through review in time to be merged into the Dev Beta 25 release. We’ll make sure it gets merged before the Public Alpha goes live.
Excellent, looking at that and the announcement that the presets are now class based it would be good if these are a precursor to a truly class based builder like bricks.
Of course we need to see a move away from the current section, row, column markup to semantically bare bones elements with the regulation tags covering everything from div trough section and down ul/ol and li.
Ultimately though we need to see WordPress get its act together on a better core editor to conform to the above as well, offering a central architecture that all tools tie into and provide better interoperability for users needing to move from one builder to another. A big big discussion is happening around this at the moment and how WordPress needs to get on a better path for success. The next year will be telling.
I really want Divi to get better, but I feel like progress is getting slower and slower, and I’m worried that Divi is moving so slowly when so many page-building tools are appearing out of nowhere.
Astra, which has never had a page builder before, has a brand new page builder called Spectra, and Divi still hasn’t been able to reinvent itself.
As a Divi Lifetime member, It’s so sweet to see how far your hard-working team has come on the much-awaited Divi 5. From what I am seeing, Divi 5 will be the most powerful WordPress theme builder now and beyond.
Very much looking forward to it!
Very exciting, thanks for the progress update!
I read somewhere that you are also going to implement Flexbox fairly early in Divi 5. It is one of the important things missing in Divi. Any news on that front?