Major Version 1.2.0 with New Features Released

The second major version of Toolbar Extras – v1.2.0 – brings several new features, including general settings plus Smart Tweaks, and overall continues the existing journey of this site-builder’s helper tool.

User Requested Features

For the first time, the plugin got features that were requested by its users. The first one of this is the disabling of all link attributes (aka “Tooltips”) from the Toolbar. These are the little info texts that appear when hovering over a link with the mouse. By default this setting is disabled, so the attributes are shown. You can find this setting under: Settings > Toolbar Extras > Tab: General – look under “Links Behavior”.

The second user requested feature is the plugin support for the “Convert Plugin” suite by Brainstorm Force: now “Convert Plus” (via CodeCanyon marketplace, formerly known as “ConvertPlug”) and “Convert Pro”, including its “Convert Pro Addon” are now integrated in Toolbar Extras, once any of these plugins is active. The same plugin support was added for their competitor called “OptinMonster” and its free OptinMonster API plugin. The Toolbar items of all four plugins are to be find within the “Site Group”. More plugins of this kind may be added in future releases.

New Smart Tweaks

The list of plugins where you can re-hook the original top-level Toolbar items to the Site Group or anywhere else got expanded: Now you can do this optionally also for “WP Rocket” (awesome caching plugin), “Autoptimize” and “Swift Performance”. The latter two are “optimization” plugins and the support for Swift covers its lite version from WordPress.org as well as the Premium version of that plugin.

And then, there’s something new for Toolbar Extras: after many, many thoughts about it I decided to add three tweaks that are beyond the WordPress Toolbar/ Admin Bar. This is, to optionally achieve a better environment more suited to site-builders and multilingual setups. Please note: this kind of beyond-the-Toolbar-Tweaks will be strictly limited, to resist feature bloat and only add useful features for our target user group(s).

So what you can do now? – You can optionally unload the translations of Elementor and/or Elementor Pro so it falls back to its original English strings and wording. And the very same you can also do for Toolbar Extras itself. Both can be very useful in multilingual installs where you as site-builder are hired to do some work within Elementor or such. If you are not speaking any foreigh language you can just work in an English environment with your favorite “Tools”/ Page Builder. Please note, this tweak is “global” and completely independent of the WordPress settings for site language (in General Settings) and (admin) user language (in Profile Settings).

Plus, another special tweak got added for the Elementor Live Editor, also known as the Elementor Panel. Here you can now optinally disable the category of “WordPress Widgets”. These are the regular widgets of WordPress Core which Elementor supports. However, since these widgets are mostly simple and have no styling in Elementor available you can now – optionally – disable them for projects where you will never need them. Please note, this tweak will only unload these widgets from Elementor Panel, it does not touch these widgets in any way! You can still use them outside of Elementor, of course.

Extended Theme and Child Theme Support

As you would have guessed, the Theme support was extended again in v1.2.0. Three regular (parent) themes were added, with “Customify” and “Flexia” leading the pack. But also the awesome independently released “Eletheme” by Romanian WordPress developer Liviu Duda was added as well. He just did so great work I couldn’t resist to add support for it, even if the theme is currently only available via GitHub.com (and therefore requires a manual install).

One more word to Customify and Flexia: these belong to the new kind of WordPress themes that got popular in the last few years. Signature features are awesome Customizer support, a clean design and support for Page Builders (like Elementor). Both themes have a Premium Add-On plugin (very much like GeneratePress, Astra and Page Builder Framework) which further extends Customizer options plus other features. While both are still very new, I can only recommend to check them out!

Then the focus this time was on adding more Genesis Child Theme support: 15 more Child Themes were added, including the Genesis Sample (v2.6.0+). This shows the strong support and respect we give to the users of this ever popular theme framework. Even more Child Themes might be added over time.

More Plugins and Add-Ons Supported

Eight additional WordPress plugins were added in v1.2.0, including the four Optin plugins mentioned above, “Lightweight Sidebar Manager” by Brainstorm Force, and “Widget Options” which includes native Elementor support in its Premium version (also supported).

Of course, also more Elementor Add-Ons are now supported. Leading the pack here is the brand new white-label solution for Elementor: The company IdeaBox Creations just released “White Label Branding for Elementor” which basically brings all the features and options Elementor users requested so many times over the last few months. Additionally I added support for two special Elementor Add-Ons that improve the integration with WooCommerce. “JetWooBuilder” and “DHWC Elementor” are both very similar and allow you to create and style product templates for WooCommerce with Elementor. It is really nice as you now can finally break out of the limitations a native WooCommerce has.

Update Now!

As always you can find the full changelog on the site here. Feel free to post any feedback in the comments below or in our facebook User Group. — And, don’t forget to update your install to version 1.2.0 of Toolbar Extras! 😉