Family News
July started with some serious storms in our area, with that “heat dome” (don’t you just love the new terminology these days?) over most of the United States.
My daughter Abrielle turned 7 this month! She shares a birthday with my dad, which is special. One thing we got her was a light-up princess dress, and we knew we also needed to get Reiah one too, and oh my goodness, unbelievable cuteness. She also got lots of LEGOs and tons of craft supplies, so she’s very happy!
We officially entered the minivan era! After an extremely thorough analysis of every motor company, model, year, trim, etc, I narrowed it down to a Honda Odyssey 2014-2016. I found a deal I couldn’t resist 4 hours away in Richmond, Virginia, and was so confident I rented a car one way. After a long, stressful day, I came home with the van. We love it! Quite a different ride than our beloved faithful Subaru Crosstrek.
Divi News
In July, Elegant Themes introduced a new CSS Grid Editor, along with several bug fixes and additional features. If you want to learn more about these updates, I recommend checking out their two release posts below.
Nick Roach recently shared a video about the upcoming Divi AI Agent on their YouTube channel. I’ve used tools like Google AI Studio and Lovable to build personal apps, so I understand how these tools work. What stands out to me is how Divi is integrating AI directly into the builder while keeping the familiar structure many of us rely on. That’s a unique approach I haven’t seen in other tools.
A lot of the hype around building websites with AI focuses on random design libraries or no CMS at all, and the code isn’t built to be updated the way a WordPress site with a page builder like Divi is. In this crazy world, where I have a love-hate relationship with AI, I might go out on a limb and say AI + Divi Builder is the best use of AI I’ve ever seen for web design.
If you’ve seen troll comments suggesting that AI can replace Divi, that’s just silly. I encourage you to take a closer look at what Divi is actually doing. It’s designed to help you, not make magical code changes; it simply does the things a human would do in the builder, while the underlying Divi theme continues producing the code just like before. That’s why I think this approach is so unique and well done.
New Resources
Here are the latest blog posts and tutorials we published!Â
How To Use YouTube And Other External Sources As Dynamic Divi Background Videos
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use dynamic background videos in Divi. Until now, this was essentially impossible, but with Divi 5 and our Divi Dynamic Content Helper plugin, we finally found a way to make it work.
How To Set Conditional Admin Email Address Routing In The Divi Contact Form
In this tutorial, I will show you how to set up conditional admin email address routing based on selections in the Divi Contact Form module. This uses the fancy new visual logic builder we introduced for the Divi 5 version of the plugin.
Product News
Here is all the product news for this month!Â
Divi Events Calendar 3.1 Released
We’re excited to announce Divi Events Calendar 3.1. The Events Carousel module has been completely rebuilt to match the functionality and layout system of the Events Feed module, giving you the same layouts, event selection options, and display settings, all while retaining its carousel functionality. After spending the last few years rebuilding our plugins for Divi 5, we’re thrilled to be back to adding major new features again, and this release is just the beginning. The announcement post and video will come soon, but the features are available now in your plugin.
Lots Of Updates
We continue to release features, but we often can’t announce them right away, as it takes a while to be approved by Divi Marketplace. We actually added a couple of new features in Divi Table of Contents Maker, where you can automatically hide the table of contents if there’s not a minimum number of words on the page. We also did a really big update to Divi Builder Experience Helper, which I’ll need to share more about soon. Divi Carousel Maker will also be released this month for Divi 5. We also released a new option in the Divi Social Sharing Buttons Maker where you can add a menu to show additional sharing buttons.Â
If you have a large site, I will be announcing a crazy update to Divi Migration Helper, our FREE plugin, and now you can use WP-CLI and AI to migrate your sites from Divi 4 to Divi 5. Fun stuff for a few of you out there, and this actually opens up a massive obstacle for the power users and large sites, so I hope Elegant Themes can refer people to our tool.
Our Largest Toolkit Update Ever
If you happen to be using SureCart, then be sure to check out our Toolkit for SureCart addon. It’s our flagship addon with hundreds of tools, and we just released a massive version 1.9 update with a review shortcode builder, order logs, conditional product fields, multiple downloads per price, and so much more.
Behind The Scenes
No Known Bugs!
At Pee-Aye Creative, we believe transparency is just as important as the software we build. Over the coming months, expect to see more behind-the-scenes information about our company and how we work. I recently published our official No Known Bugs Policy, putting into writing how we have always operated so you can understand how we approach bug reports, support, feature development, and product quality, because these areas are just as important as the features themselves.
Performance And Security Audits
We are currently in the process of doing an extremely intensive performance and security audit of each plugin. Since the beginning, we have had an extremely high internal bar for our plugin code quality, and we have never had any performance issues, but we are taking steps to improve even the most minuscule milliseconds and kilobyte types, making sure our plugins are 1000% optimized. By next month, I hope to publish a blog post and video on this topic, as well as provide a summary and detailed downloadable report available on each product page for full transparency and accountability.
Busy Busy, Far Behind
I know I’m behind on sharing updates and news lately. But August is going to be packed with announcements, so stay tuned, there’s a lot coming your way!
I’m giving our support form a complete makeover. It’s almost ready to launch and will be much simpler, more visual, and just plain easier to use. I really hope it makes things better for you.
I’ve also made some small but important tweaks to both the support form and our universal settings interface. These changes should help you always stay up to date with the latest plugin version. I’ll share more details about this soon.
There are a few other projects I’m working on that I hope I can share soon. I can’t make any promises yet, but I’ll do my best.
I’d also love to hear what new projects you’re working on these days. Things are a bit crazy out there right now. How is everyone doing? I know it’s been tougher than ever for me lately, but I hope you’re all hanging in there.
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