Today we're excited to announce the availability of the first alpha of Oxygen 4.0 and Oxygen WooCommerce 2.0.
Oxygen 4.0 includes multiple major changes to Oxygen, including a UI overhaul, a fix for duplicated Repeater IDs, and a change to the way Oxygen stores its designs.
Because of the number of CSS changes to the builder UI, you may need to ensure you clear your browser cache on existing sites that are upgraded to Oxygen 4.0 in order for the UI changes to load correctly.
The Repeater has been plagued by the duplicate IDs problem since it was released. We've publicly discussed that it was a very difficult problem to fix, but our developers came up with a rather clever solution to allow us to get around this problem. In 4.0, Repeaters will no longer generate duplicate IDs. Because of the way Repeater styling has changed to accommodate this, you'll need to regenerate your CSS cache to ensure existing Repeaters are styled properly after installing 4.0. This isn't necessary on fresh installs.
Oxygen 4.0 uses JSON instead of shortcodes to store your Oxygen designs. This is a much faster format to work with, and cuts out some intermediary processes we were having to employ to convert shortcodes to JSON and back again. We expect there will be some performance gain from this change. Because of this change, it's necessary to resign all your shortcodes after installing 4.0 on an existing site. The site will continue to render fine (via shortcodes) until this is done, but it's strongly encouraged to resign as soon as possible after installing 4.0 on an existing site to ensure the switch to JSON is completed.
Oxygen's UI has needed a bit of a makeover for a little while now. We've made several changes to the way the builder interface looks, including using neutral grays, exposing breakpoint controls on the top bar, indicators for whether a property is styled via id or class, and much more.
You can find a full list of the changes included in 4.0 alpha 1 below:
We also gave our WooCommerce add-on some attention, implementing a mini cart element, a cross sells element and implementing many other fixes and improvements. Please take a look at the changelog for more details.
Existing users can download Oxygen 4.0 alpha 1 and Oxygen WooCommerce 2.0 alpha 1 from the customer portal.
Please note that alpha and beta releases of Oxygen or Oxygen add-ons should not be used in production environments. We do not provide official support for alpha or beta versions of Oxygen or Oxygen add-ons. If you encounter bugs, please report them on GitHub.
