It’s time for another great release of Essentials for YOOtheme Pro! As in the latest 2.1 release, our focus is adding more and more features to the already great Dynamic Content, as well as the addition of new Sources and Form actions. Let’s dive in!
Dynamic Query Arguments
This is undoubtedly the biggest addition to the 2.2 release. Up until now, the dynamic button and its powerful capabilities have been restricted to the main elements fields, but when a dynamic source was selected, its arguments (or parameters) needed to be manually set.
While this is still a powerful feature, it was limiting since you could not do more advanced integration, like limiting based on a request parameter, or working with relative time periods with dates.
But no more! Our latest addition, Dynamic Query Arguments, allows you to make use of the dynamic feature in the source query arguments! But since a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s see it in action!
We can’t wait to see what you build with this addition!
New Sources
In this release we’re continuing to add new sources to Essentials to further extend the capabilities of YOOtheme Pro. With 2.2 there are 3 new sources that we think will be super useful to many of our users:
Google Photos Source
Integrate your Google Photos media and albums! Same as the already existing Instagram and Facebook sources, you can now show any image you have on Google Photos on your website. Perfect for events or photographers that have the need to quickly showcase their work.
Google Calendar Source
This source finally makes sense now that the new Dynamic Query Arguments is available! With it you can add in your site any event present in your Google Calendar, and thanks to the latest additions, you can decide to filter them based on the current date, or even on the date of some other dynamic data, like articles, event details, etc! Super powerful stuff.
P.s. we’ve also added a new filter that allows you to modify the date being displayed with some similar features.
Airtable Source
We’re adding a brand new player here! In this release, we’ve added support for Airtable, and this source is one of the integrations available. Display your Airtable data in your site with ease. We’re pretty sure that our Airtable users will be pretty pumped to try this!
New Form Actions
Alongside the new Sources, we’re also adding 2 new sets of Form actions! Both of these are pretty powerful, and we’re sure they will allow new and awesome integrations.
Airtable Actions
Having added Airtable for the source we’ve already highlighted, we decided it was a good idea to also allow saving and deleting data from Airtable with your Forms! This allows for a 360 integration and data flow between your site and Airtable. Let us know if you find this new integration useful!
Mailchimp Actions
For a long time YOOtheme has provided an element to allow subscribing to mailchimp from your website. While useful, this integration lacks some advanced features and doesn’t always comply with the infamous GDPR legislation.
With this new Form action, you can add, edit or remove contacts from your mailchimp lists, while also gathering more than the simple email. Just map your data to Mailchimp, setup your options, and you're done!
Conclusion, and some spoilers
We’re currently hard at work on something that needed to be done, but got always postponed due to our excitement in releasing new stuff for our products: upgrading our site, subscription and distribution system.
We’re currently using old versions of Joomla, YOOtheme Pro and several tools like Akeeba Subscriptions and Akeeba Release System to showcase, sell and distribute our tools. While they are still doing their job, it’s clear that we “got stuck” and need to upgrade as soon as possible.
In the last 6 months we worked on upgrading our site to the latest Joomla and YOOtheme Pro version (to be able to use the newest and shiniest thing we built!).
Alongside this upgrade, we’ll be moving to a new checkout system based on Stripe Checkout that will retain the same capabilities as the old tools (so yes, Paypal will still be available, and we’ll add new payment systems as well) and all the existing subscriptions will be migrated as well.
The process should be pretty straightforward without too many issues, but there will be a brief period of downtime to perform the migration of the data and (hopefully very few) hiccups in the launch phase. Please bear with us in the next months and warn us of any inconsistencies you may find.
Thanks again for your trust and patience.