In our continuing quest to make your life easier, we are here with a new update – Neve 3.4 “Bran”! 🎉🎉🎉
This release improved the user experience and gave you more flexibility in creating your website by adding new customization controls.
We named this version after the Bran castle, known to the international audience as Dracula’s Castle. It is marketed as the home of the title character of Dracula by Bram Stoker. The villain is often confused with Vlad the Impaler, a Wallachian Prince.
Before anything else, we want to thank our product advisors, who are helping us understand what’s missing and what our users want. 🙏
Without further ado, let’s see what’s new in Neve 3.4 “Bran!“
Quick access to controls in the Customizer
Neve alone has over 200 customization controls added to the Customizer. Even though they are well grouped, there might be times when you don’t know where to search for a particular setting. In Neve 3.4 “Bran,” we introduced the Customizer search. All you need to do is click on the small magnifying glass icon at the top of the customization, type the name of the control you want to change, and click on one of the results. It will take you directly to the section with that setting.
Relative units for Customizer controls
In Neve 3.4 “Bran,” we introduced relative units support for a part of the Customizer controls. We decided not to add them everywhere since using relative units for specific properties might lead to unexpected rendering behavior. However, this is an excellent addition and will make your life easier when building your website. Specifically, em and rem are both scalable units that specify values of properties. They meet the web accessibility standards and, unlike px, scale better. Consequently, they are more suited for responsive design.
Allow the possibility of hiding the “reply to comments” form but display the discussion
We changed the behavior for comments, allowing your website’s users to see the already submitted comments after you decided to turn off the ability to add new comments. Don’t worry! You can still prevent showing the whole comments section by editing the post and disabling it from the Neve’s meta sidebar.
Text padding for the header menu icon on mobile
A minor but worth-mentioning feature is the addition of the text padding control for the menu icon component from the header builder. You will now be able to configure the button’s padding, making it more spacious.
Advanced style controls for sub-menus
In this release, we added over 30 new customization options, all referring to styling the submenus of the primary menu component. Container position, container background, item alignment, colors, spacing, and many other cool customizations are now available for the sub-menus.
New advanced search component in the header/footer builder
By default, the WordPress search system is rigid. The result will contain all the posts that feature the words you’ve searched for, no matter where they are. Advanced search components will give you control over the search results. You can choose to search just in post titles, in the content, or in excerpts; exclude the sticky posts; and even limit the search to specific post types.
A better custom layout experience
As you may know, custom layouts are a really powerful feature, allowing you to add content to almost every page and even replace one with a custom-built template. It’s compatible with the block editor, Elementor, and Beaver Builder. In Neve 3.4 “Bran,” we improved the custom layout experience, making it easier to use and understand. Here’s what’s new for the custom layouts:
Add a custom layout directly from the site preview
You can now add a custom layout directly from the front-end part. Just click on the Show Hooks button from the admin bar, and you select where the custom layout will appear.
Create a custom layout directly from the wizard pop-up
We added the wizard pop-up to give you a visual representation (even in the admin part) of where the custom layout will appear. Just select the preferred kind and start building it.
Custom layout settings moved to the sidebar
We moved all the customization to the sidebar, so they won’t take up space and distract you when designing your custom layout.
Additional filters for custom Layouts
There are two new conditional filters for custom Layouts: page parent and page ancestor.
- You can condition a custom layout to appear on a page if the page’s parent is a specific page.
- You can condition a custom layout to appear on a page if the page has a particular ancestor.
Two new template locations
Last but not least, there are two new template locations for Search and Archives. You can now replace the entire search page or the archive page of your blog and make one from scratch.
Responsive controls for social icons in the header
The social media icons component has responsive customizations. Now, you will be able to configure them based on the screen resolution.
New expert starter site: Finance blog
The new site uses the most powerful features from Neve and was built with a focus on blog enhancements, like the Post Social Share module, having a dynamic advertiser disclosure using Neve’s custom layouts, custom headers on single posts, and much more.
On top of that, we integrated Visualizer (adding interactive charts to your blog posts) & Restrict Content plugin, which allows you to display the content dynamically, based on the user role or membership level.
What else
There have been quite a few updates since the previous major release. The most exciting one is the launch of Sparks for WooCommerce ✨. It has eight ultra-performant features like product comparisons, variation swatches, wishlist, and more.
Remaining in the WooCommerce sphere, we acquired PPOM – Product Addons & Fields for WooCommerce.
It lets you add extra custom fields and add-ons to your product pages. Adding additional options, like sizes and colors, is so simple with the drag-and-drop form builder. Give it a try, and let us know what you think.
Lastly, Otter Pro has an excellent addition: dynamic content. This feature is divided into three subcategories:
- Dynamic Values – the dynamic values can import information like post type/title/time/excerpt, and others. It will automatically display them on your website.
- Dynamic Images – will import information related to the images like featured image, author image, website logo, and even images from ACF.
- Dynamic Links – bind page elements with dynamic data from your website database. You can set a dynamic link to get the data from the post URL, website URL, featured image URL, and many more.
What’s next?
We are already working on introducing many other features. A few days have passed since this release, and the developers of the Neve theme are already discussing what they should add in the 3.5 version. Please stay tuned to our Facebook group. We’ll soon post our ideas for the next big release, and we’d love to hear your opinion. ✨
That’s it. We hope you’ll enjoy the new features in Neve 3.4 “Bran.” Have a great week ahead!
Get Neve hereWant to have a say in what’s next on the roadmap for Neve? See this page to get up to date with what we’re working on and also vote up your most desired features to help us prioritize them in the next releases: https://neve.nolt.io/
Or start the conversation in our Facebook group for WordPress professionals. Find answers, share tips, and get help from other WordPress experts. Join now (it’s free)!