WE SUGGEST BOOKMARKING THIS PAGE AS WE WILL BE ADDING NEW CONTENT TO IT THROUGHOUT AUGUST – OCTOBER.

We are pleased to finally introduce a live editor plugin – often called a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”, pronounced “wisi whig”) editing ability via the Elementor Plugin.  Our version is the free plugin in the WordPress Plugin codex.  FYI, there is a pro version available but theme developers are not allowed access to it for inclusion into a theme.

To bolster the free version we have purchased theme licenses for 2 premium Elementor Addon plugins. Both are high quality addons with one being the most popular paid Elementor addon available at this time.  Together this combination surpasses the availability of widgets available even in the Pro version and provides many more prebuilt modules.  This includes many abilities for working with plugins such as Gravity Forms (our hosting customers get Gravity Forms as part of their hosting package), Essential Grid and the Rev Slider.

Our main goal initially is to give our theme owner base, especially those who are more visually oriented or challenged when using shortcodes an alternative means of creating the body content portion of each webpage.  So at the outset our Elementor integration is for designing the content between the Feature Header and the Footer.  Our Elementor integration is not for designing header content, feature header content or footer/subfooter content.  This may come in the future but our theme abilities are extremely strong in those areas, most Champion users have had few issues with these areas and although Elementor is a lovely plugin, its code base is a bit primitive and it does not easily integrate with advanced functions in our theme.

We should note that almost no existing premium themes have attempted integration AND maintained an upgrade path for the standing userbase. The normal practice is to build a new theme around the Elementor plugin.  A very well known ThemeForest theme recently “triumphantly” launched a new version of itself with Elementor integration, but none of their existing userbase could upgrade to it.  Those prior owners had to repurchase the theme in its new “iteration” and rebuild 100% their website content.  As we say the old userbase was “left in the dust” – profit trumped ethics.

All of you who have been our customers (in some cases for almost 9 years) know that our policy has always been to provide an upgrade path that did not destroy the existing site.  The integration path we have chosen allows every Striking and existing WP Champion license owner to seamlessly upgrade to the latest Champion build, and your existing content be functional and look the same after the update as it did before – no worries about impairing your website in our upgrade path!  You can then use Elementor and if upgrading from Striking all the WPC abilities to create new pages and posts, and over time modify existing ones only if you feel a need to do such.  We will be posting videos shortly on how to modify existing content.

• Added: Elementor Page Builder Plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/elementor/)
• Added: Element Pack – Premium Addon for Elementor Plugin (https://bdthemes.net/demo/wordpress/element-pack/)
• Added: Super Elements – Premium Addon for Elementor Plugin (https://selements.themerevealed.com/)
• Changed: Remove #page from theme css for links and h-tags as it was overriding Elementor styling (due to the fact Elementor only targets containers in its css, not actual tags).

NOTES ABOUT USAGE:
Live editors work using the equivalent of shortcodes, but presents as widgets/modules that are formatted so the settings appear when you select one by dragging it into the content area from a vertical sidebar beside the live content.  In that respect they are not even very different from shortcodes but you never see the shortcode strings, just the actual names of the settings, color fields to select the color, and alpha numeric fields to enter value or text. 

The extra magic that so many love is that as you edit normally the change occurs live.  The other benefit is that there are many ready made content blocks for most of the widgets.  So instead of dragging a widget into a section of the page and working through its settings you can instead select a “ready-made” (prebuilt and formatted) content block that might for example be a two column section with an image on one side and text on the other with everything laid out more or less how you like it.  Then you just click on the image to change it, click on the text to change it, and your done.

–>> PUT LINKS HERE TO YOUTUBE ELEMENTOR VIDEOS.
–>> PUT IN BUTTONS TO DOWNLOAD THE READY MADE BLOCKS FOR THE ADDON PLUGINS.

DISCUSSION ON THE ELEMENTOR PREMIUM PLUGINS IN WP CHAMPION:
Some content will be added here for novice users soon.