Blocs 4.4 - New Feature Poll

Hey everyone,

You’ll be happy to hear work has now begun on Blocs v4.4. We would like your input on which feature you would most like to see in the next release.

Get your vote in :raised_hands:

  • Dark/Light mode site creation features.
  • Support for Adobe fonts.
  • Missing Font Manager (detect and manually install/find fonts).
  • Support for Wordpress Loop filtering for Categories, Tags and exclude post ID’s.
  • Ability to add classes to the body tag per page.
  • Prevent layout elements being exported.

0 voters

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You can only choose one, but they are all good. It’s hard to choose. :+1:

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More than one will be implemented, just interested to see which are the most popular, so the top ones are prioritised.

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Will we be able to dance round your pole!! :rofl:

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Hi @Norm will there be ways to ask for features?

I am desperate for scroll to target speed being brought back, as I loved having it scroll down nice and smooth and able to change the speed, its a massive feature for me which i’m desperate to have back.

One thing I would love and its not so much an update of features, but a short cut around the way we use it . And this is at a time when so many short cuts are being added like drag and drop text in etc…i would LOVE Carousel to have options in the side bar/menu with short cuts to change icons, inside or out. We have a few basic ones, but this could be taken to the next level. Also maybe bring in Ken Burns effect into the slider…options to fully customise it, rather than use cheats to built it outside and sneak it in.
Yes - i know so much can be done in classes and cheating away by hiding images in the background with full opacity to make the slides bigger for text only, but its a very long winded experience and can be made to be in line with the others.

I know a few users have joined Blocs from other builders and having issues with carousel from chatting to them, tabs is also one they struggle with. I do hope they could be revamped for simplicity…and yes I know a few users think this is a pointless update, but for them - they still can add classes…and for others, simply select from the side menu!

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:flushed: yikes, I missed that!

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I liked pole better :laughing:

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We usually ask for feature requests when we begin researching for major upgrades (Blocs 5).

We try to implement and offer a range of features in these votes for pros and beginners.

But thanks for the feedback, bringing back scroll speed is on my radar but unfortunately my research and attempts to do it with vanilla JS have had very unreliable results across various browsers.

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Thanks for the reply as always @Norm

Thanks for looking Norm, appreciate that. I am still using an old version of Blocs for when I do need it, but would be good for the new one when a reliable one is out.

Is this became of BS5? if so - can scroll speed be used for BS4 and then taken off when the user selects BS5?

Blocs no longer uses jQuery for the blocs.js file that’s the bit that has changed.

Vanilla js doesn’t offer an out of the box way to control scroll speed and the few solutions I’ve tried so far don’t work reliably on safari and Firefox.

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Just to be clear blocs.js is used with both bootstrap 4 and 5 so it’s not a limitation of the framework.

Once I have a reliable enough solution I’ll include it into a beta to test. But be aware one solution has already been included and then pulled due to reliability so it may be something that takes a little longer to be included in the main release.

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Hey Norm, excited to see the dark / light mode stuff since it’s something I mentioned previously with the way Blocs handles default colors on dark mode.

Just a few other thoughts on new features:

PageSpeed Recommendations

With Google’s move to use PageSpeed / Lighthouse numbers to influence SEO ranking - I’d love to see some features and changes in Blocs that accommodate for that.

Would be great to see Blocs recognize layout shift or images with missing size data and self-correct.

I also get notices for render-blocking resources for my Bootstrap CSS and a note to use for fonts.

I don’t know enough about web to edit the code to add these things myself, but would be fantastic to have it adjusted app-side.

Next-Gen Format Auto-Select

I believe you mentioned it might be a V5 feature, but would love to see the ability to upload both JPEG / WebP versions of an image and Blocs writing code that is intelligent enough to serve the right next-gen image based on browser.

Image Compression

Would also eventually love a built-in image compressor that runs on export, so I don’t need to run all my images through ImageOptim to reduce image size before bringing them into Blocs.

Would be super helpful for Blocs to be smart enough to create smaller images when things are scaled down. As a video guy managing my own web stuff through Blocs, I’m kind of oblivious to the 1x, 2x stuff and wish the app would see that I uploaded a 4K image and figure out sizing for me.

Hello @Norm,
Don’t know it it helps but I found this article, had made some tests and apparently works very well. I had tested in Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox.

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Great find @Pealco !..I have had a look around - but not a clue what I am looking for !! if this can be tried in Blocs @Norm ! haha!..cheeeeeeers!

Agreed @AdieJAM

:white_check_mark: Scroll to target speed control - click the blue button here to see what I mean

and

:white_check_mark: Toggle visibility speed control - click any red button here to see what I mean, half speed would be good!

It seems that “Prevent layout elements being exported.” is not really in demand, but it would still be a very helpful feature (at least for me :smiley:).

I’ll have a look does it let you control the speed?

Hello @Norm, from the documentation we can change the following Arguments:

  1. target: the element to be scrolled smoothly - can be a div or document
  2. speed: the amout of pixels to be scrolled per mousewheel step
  3. smooth: the smoothness factor, the higher the value, the more smooth.
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I will make a demo with the code….

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Dark/Light mode site creation baked into Blocs would be awesome. Just updated my portfolio site with dark mode. Also would love some more Safari Meta Tags for web app support on iOS and theme-color for customizing the Safari Menu Bar in the next Apple OSs

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