Today we're excited to announce the availability of the first alpha of Oxygen 3.9.
Oxygen 3.9 includes a native Meta Box integration, a fix for inefficient queries that should improve the load time of the builder, and a completely rebuilt Structure Pane which should improve latency experienced within Oxygen over the course of a session.
Our Meta Box integration should be very familiar for those who have used Advanced Custom Fields with Oxygen. In Oxygen 3.9, you can choose Meta Box fields as your source when inserting dynamic data anywhere in Oxygen.
There are a few improvements as well, such as the ability to use HTML line breaks as separators, and the ability to switch your text element to a shortcode and use the native output of Meta Box when inserting Meta Box field data. This is very useful for fields with multiple values, or fields that output as a table by default.
We were able to identify an inefficiency in a query that Oxygen performs when loading the builder. Based on our tests, this can reduce the loading time by up to 50% for some sites. This will be most impactful for large sites with lots of posts or taxonomy terms.
We also identified one major cause of latency that accumulated over the course of an Oxygen session: the Structure Pane. To fix this, we've completely re-built the Structure Pane. We also took this opportunity to implement a new drag & drop solution which should improve the Structure Pane experience across the board.
These fixes are just the start, and we intend to monitor Oxygen's back-end performance closely so that we can identify and fix more problems as they arise.
Existing users can download Oxygen 3.9 alpha 1 from the customer portal.
Please note that alpha and beta releases of Oxygen should not be used in production environments. We do not provide official support for alpha or beta versions of Oxygen. If you encounter bugs, please report them on GitHub.