Family News
January has been very cold in Pennsylvania, with a fun snowstorm, the largest of our daughter’s life. We have not done much outside except sledding. How perfect that the girls received new sleds for Christmas, and they were able to enjoy them already. On Christmas night, a drunk driver crashed in front of our house and ran off, which was quite unusual for a back street in a small town. Tashia spent a day in Lancaster County with a friend who needed encouragement, while I spent the day with another friend who needed encouragement, while the girls stayed with their best friends, so it was a good day all around. The girls continue to enjoy LEGOs, and it’s an everyday thing for them. The snowstorm brought out the humor and games in us, and we had some real downtime playing together as a family. Tashia loves working on huge, difficult puzzles in the winter and lots of reading. How does winter always feel like the slow time of year, and yet it’s already February!
Divi News
The official release date for Divi 5 has been announced for February 26, 2026! This is the date they will remove the “beta” tag and offer an option to upgrade from Divi 4 within the official Divi 4 version.
I’m not a betting person, but if I were, I would predict a rebrand announcement that day from “Elegant Themes.com” to “Divi.com.” Let’s see if I’m right! I really don’t know, just a hunch.
Elegant Themes has been releasing several new features over the past few months, mostly smaller ones handled by Nick Roach, while the team focuses on migration bug fixes.
To stay up to date with the latest Divi 5 news, especially on our own plugin development progress, visit our Divi 5 page, which will always have the most recent information.
Product News
Here is all the product news for this month!
A better way to control and simplify the Divi 5 Builder experience
Divi 5 brings a huge amount of power and flexibility, especially for advanced users. The builder now includes more options, deeper controls, new terminology, and more advanced concepts than ever before. For experienced designers and developers, this is fantastic. For many clients, editors, and everyday users, it can be overwhelming.
Too many menus. Too many options. Too many things that look intimidating.
This is exactly what inspired Divi Builder Experience Helper.
This plugin was built to help you shape and simplify the Divi 5 builder experience so it matches the people using it, without taking away the power that makes Divi great in the first place.
You seriously should check our product page and see what al lthis can do already! We have been releasing huge updates every few weeks since launch, and the feature set is quite incredible now.
Divi Responsive Helper – Compatible With Divi 5!
After a year of extensive work, we are so excited to let you know that Divi Responsive Helper, the beloved plugin, is now fully compatible with Divi 5!
▶️ Please watch the video in the blog post to get all the exciting details!
P.S. Look for a super-important new feature to prevent accidental edits at each breakpoint launching in the next few days!
Divi Search Helper – Compatible With Divi 5!
After a long journey of rebuilding our plugins from Divi 4 to Divi 5, we are excited to announce that our powerful plugin Divi Search Helper is now fully compatible with Divi 5! 🎉 Get the news about the update here. We are now in the planning stages for some big new features for this plugin!
New Plugin And Features
Our popular Fluently Toolkit just received an update with about a dozen new features, too many to list here, but some highlights are full product page shortcodes and separate thank you pages for each product. And we released our second plugin, Fluently Marketing, with advanced discount features, stock FOMO, activity indicators, and shortlinks!
Lots Of New Features
Since the last newsletter, we released (4) main features in our SurelyWP plugins. That includes Wishlist feature, Save For Later feature, Activity Indicators, and Stock FOMO. These are all available now in our Marketing for SureCart addon. We are also very close to releasing the Scheduled Products and Limited Products features, and a long list of miscellaneous admin tools in the Toolkit for SureCart addon.
Behind The Scenes
Divi 5 Plugin Beta Progress!
It’s a miracle! We are almost done with all Divi 5 plugin rebuilds. We have been waiting on Elegant Themes for several plugins, as they forgot to enable support for third-party plugin migration of child modules. A “child module” is a weird term, but it’s like the items in an accordion, slider, or tab. I was surprised when we were the first developers to discover this issue and alert them, and then others chimed in, and we all had a big “hurry up and wait” party on this final stretch (my dad says that phrase all the time, I don’t even know what it means, haha). So we are waiting on that for Divi Social Sharing Buttons Maker (each network is a child module) and for Divi Tabs Maker. At the time of this writing, I see they just replied with what I believe we need to proceed.
The good news is that several more plugins have reached the finish line and have been approved by Elegant Themes QA. That includes Divi Responsive Helper and Divi Search Helper.
The Divi Events Calendar is completed for Divi 5, but we are still working on migration, which, as I keep saying, is extremely complex. The good news is that we are well on our way with the migration and are doing our best to complete it within the next few weeks.
Keep checking the status page of each plugin in our docs and our dedicated Divi 5 page to stay up to date. I fully expect these to be completed before the Divi 5 official launch.
Difficult Decisions
For the first time in our history, we had to make a choice about the future of a product. This is hard, but we spent months thinking, researching, gathering customer feedback, and even consulting Elegant Themes. We decided not pursue converting Divi Carousel Maker to Divi 5. The amount of work it would take is too much, and our finances took a huge hit with Divi 5, and we need some time to heal and recover. The biggest reason, of course, is that Divi now has most, if not all, the features of Divi Carousel Maker. At the time of this writing, I have reached out to Elegant Themes, inviting them to officially acquire the plugin so that they can make a converter for existing carousels to support our mutual customers. It was a long shot, but I felt it was worth a try. I will let you know any news we receive on that.
We also announced that the original free Divi Image Helper for Divi 4 is now part of Divi Assistant in Divi 5. Please check our blog post and video to learn more about that decision.
The last (I think) big decision was what to do with Divi Taxonomy Helper. This is a highly niche feature set that was created as a standalone plugin years ago, before Divi Assistant existed. After much consideration, I decided to merge the features of Divi Taxonomy Helper into Divi Assistant in a future update this month. The features will be located in a new “Taxonomy Helper” tab and others will be located in the recently added “Module Helper” tab under a new “Blog” and “Woo Products” subtab. As a reminder, the Module Helper will be updated to include new features added to existing plugins going forward, which I would call phase 2 of Divi Assistant. Expect a lot of new features soon!
New Features
It’s hard to overstate how much of a relief it is to complete most of the Divi 5 rebuilding work. Imagine a product that took 5 years to create, but needed to be completely rebuilt in 1 year, and multiply that by 12. That’s why this past year has been so heavy. I have been very discouraged, but this year, I feel so positive.
I started the year by optimizing our YouTube videos and blog content for SEO and AI, and it feels like a strong foundation. I hired a VA to support content writing and marketing, and it feels like 2026 will be a comeback after a relatively quiet 2025. I have a full Divi 5 beginner trail guide to release as individual blog posts, and I’ll be posting more content highlighting our existing plugin features.
We have big plans for a lot of plugins, especially Divi Contact Fgorm helper, Divi Responsive Helper, Divi Dynamic Content Helper, and divi Assistant. Several major new features are nearly complete, including multi-step forms for the Divi Contact Form Helper, which are ready for QA and will be released.
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