Enfold 8.0 – Redesigned Editor

Enfold 8.0 in a Nutshell: A Modernized Layout Editor, a Notification Center and Two New Demos

Enfold 8.0 is the biggest change to the way the Layout Builder feels since we built it. The elements no longer sit in a toolbar across the top that scrolls away the moment you start working – they now live in a full height sidebar with its own scrollbar, grouped into sections you can open and close. On a long page they stay in reach the whole time. If you prefer the old arrangement it is still there, under Layout Builder -> Position Of The Element Panel -> “Toolbar” :)

The builder’s old fullscreen mode is gone, and a better one took its place. There is now a fullscreen button at the top of the element panel: in the block editor it turns on the editor’s own fullscreen, and in the classic editor it folds the admin menu away and lays the page out in a single column with the builder at the top of it. Either way that is roughly four hundred pixels of extra room to work in, and clicking it again gives the screen back. One nice side effect of retiring the old mode: custom elements can now be added and edited at any time, because the restriction that greyed those buttons out only ever existed inside it.

The whole interface got sharper along the way. Element and toolbar icons are vector graphics now, so they stay crisp on high resolution screens, and there are a lot of smaller tweaks throughout the builder that add up to something that simply feels more solid to work in.

We also improved dragging. Highlighting drop areas always worked, but the scrolling around it is much better now – hold an element near the top or bottom of the screen and the page scrolls to follow you, faster the closer you get to the edge. And in the block editor the element no longer drifts away from your pointer once you have scrolled.

A word about telling you things

Here is something we are genuinely not good at: telling you what we have shipped. Plenty of work goes out that nobody hears about, and that is on us.

So Enfold 8.0 adds a “What’s new” panel – in the admin bar and in the header of the theme options – that shows Enfold news and release information as it happens. And because a notification you cannot switch off is just nagging, there is a Notification Center in Theme Update where you can turn the panel off in the admin bar, in the theme options, or in both. We would rather you kept it on, but that is your call, not ours.

While we were in there we cleaned up the rest of the admin too. Enfold notices now carry the Enfold accent colour on their left edge, skipping several versions no longer stacks a notice for every one you missed, Theme Extensions stopped cluttering the WordPress admin bar, and the theme options address bar now follows the section you are on – so you can finally bookmark or share a link to a specific settings section.

Two new demos, and the elements they needed

We built two new demos: Enfold Reef and Enfold Studio, both installable straight from your theme options. Both are deliberately more complex than our usual demos, because we wanted to show what custom elements and templates can actually do rather than describe it.

Building them turned up things Enfold was missing, so those became new elements. The List Menu drops one of your menus – or a custom list of links – into a column, vertically or horizontally, with its own colours, hover colours, sizes and a link padding that enlarges the clickable area instead of just spacing the text out. The WooCommerce product gallery is now fully integrated too, with half a dozen layout styles so you can present a product’s images properly instead of settling for a row of thumbnails. And there is Cloudflare Turnstile integration for your forms.

Demo import got a serious pass as well – a long list of small fixes that together make importing a demo a good deal more predictable than it used to be.

One more thing: Enfold is becoming THE multilingual theme

We have been working on something alongside 8.0. Omnalingo is our own AI translation plugin, built for Enfold specifically – not a generic plugin that happens to tolerate it. The goal is simple: your Enfold site, properly multilingual, without the usual weekend of wrestling with string tables.

It is in closed beta right now. There are 50 seats, and it is free for as long as the beta runs. If you want one:

Apply for a beta seat

We would especially like testers running real, messy, content-heavy sites – those are the ones that teach us the most.

– Read more –

Enfold 7.0 – Bring Your Own SVG Icons

Enfold 7.0 in a Nutshell: Custom SVG Icon Sets, Coloured Icons & WooCommerce Filters

Enfold has shipped with the same icon font for a very long time. With 7.0 you can finally upload your own SVG icon sets instead — including coloured SVG icons, which keep their own colours rather than inheriting the ones from your colour scheme :)

The whole icon handling was rebuilt around this. There is a new “SVG Iconset and Iconfont Manager” in the theme options, you can switch the bundled entypo-fontello font off entirely if you do not need it, and the accessibility markup around icons got a lot better along the way.

On the shop side, various Layout Builder product elements can now filter for WooCommerce OnSale products. We also fixed two vulnerabilities reported through WordFence and brought the theme up to speed with PHP 8.2. More on the icon sets in the documentation.

– Read more –

Enfold 5.6 – Long Pages

Enfold 5.6 in a Nutshell: Fold & Unfold, Reading Progress and Responsive Sections

Long pages were the theme of this release. Enfold 5.6 introduces a Fold/Unfold option for Textblocks, Grid Rows, Sections and Columns, so you can collapse a long block of content behind a toggle instead of making every visitor scroll past it :)

We also added a Reading Progress Bar that sits below the header and fills up as the visitor moves down the page — a small thing, but it makes a long article feel a lot less endless.

Sections can now take a custom height depending on screen width, the footer can hold up to six columns, and the header shrinking amount starts at 1% so you can dial it in properly.

– Read more –