Today we are proud to announce the release of the first alpha of Oxygen 2.2.
Oxygen 2.2 alpha 1 includes many highly requested features like scroll animations, a revisions system, significant performance enhancements, and more.
Join our Facebook group to download the alpha.
You don't need to be a customer to get the alpha version. It is available for free. Of course, once 2.2 final is released, you'll need to purchase Oxygen to continue using it.
Existing customers can download the alpha in the customer portal.
New in Oxygen 2.2 alpha 1:
Add a scroll animation to any element at Advanced > Effects > Animate on Scroll.
Global settings for all animations are available at Manage > Settings > Page Settings or Manage > Settings > Global Styles.
Scroll animations are powered by AOS. Special thanks to Sridhar Katakam from WPDevDesign.com for the initial proof of concept.
Apply a transform from Advanced > Effects > Transforms.
Blend mode for background layers is available at Advanced > Background, and blend mode for elements is available at Advanced > Effects > Opacity.
The Z-Index property has been added to Advanced > Layout.
All CSS is now cached. There are no more xlink=css URLs, which some caching plugins and CDNs did not like. If you're on a host like WP Engine this won't help your performance at all, but if you're on a lesser host or one without any built-in caching you could see load time improvement of over 1 second. Basically, the worse your host is, the bigger speed up you'll see from this change.
It is not necessary to disable this caching for development, although you can do so from Oxygen > Settings. This cache won't result in unexpected behavior, and is regenerated every time you save a page in Oxygen automatically. When changing global colors, you'll have to regenerate the CSS cache, but Oxygen will give you a notice in the admin panel when this is necessary.
We also found an opportunity to enhance performance of Google Fonts. New in 2.2, if you choose a Google Font at Settings -> Global Styles -> Fonts, you can now choose which specific weights will be loaded. By default, Oxygen loads all available weights except italics. However, most sites do not use all available weights, and some designers want the real italics. So now you can choose just the weights you need and speed up your page load times.
The Image element now has a Media Library option which will reference the element from the media library and fill the srcset attribute to optimize image performance on smaller devices and slow internet connections.
We've also significantly reduced the load time of the builder itself.
Also new in 2.2 we've added Oxygen -> Settings -> Bloat Eliminator, where you can disable some of the bloat WordPress loads by default, like the inline CSS for emojis, which almost no one needs. Special to Supa Mike for the article on Oxygen4Fun that inspired this.
Oxygen now has a revisions system.
When you save a page, template, or reusable part, a revision will be automatically generated. You can preview and restore previous revisions from the Edit screen in the WP admin at the bottom of the Oxygen metabox by clicking [+] Revisions.
Restoring a revision will restore the changes to that specific page, reusable part, or template - i.e. content, shortcodes and ID styles. Restoring a revision will not overwrite global styles, classes, stylesheets, or any other site-wide settings.
Note: previewing revisions for reusable parts & templates is wonky in the alpha.
You can now type to search the available elements in the +Add section. Just click +Add and start typing to search elements. If you're already up to speed with Oxygen you already know where everything is, but if you're new you'll appreciate this a lot.
If your page uses anchor links, for example a link that scrolls to a particular #page_section, enable smooth scrolling to those links from Manage -> Settings -> Page Settings -> Scripts.
Documentation, video tutorials, and a complete change log will be published when 2.2 final is released.
Thanks so much for helping us test Oxygen 2.2! All bug reports should be posted in our official bug reports forum.
