Flex Features & Updates You Don’t Want to Miss

Despite its stressful, chaotic nature, 2020 has been a productive year in many senses. Here at Flo, we’ve worked hard to bring you new features and enhanced options, while building your website with Flothemes and Flex.

For those of you who are new, Flex (also known as FlexBlock) is the design editor that allows you to tweak and personalize your theme’s layouts. It comes as a free plugin that you install to your website, and it powers your theme – hence the name, Flexthemes.

In case you missed last week’s update, or haven’t logged into your dashboard for a while, here are all the new and exciting features that we’ve added to Flex and your theme, in the last few months.

All these features are available with FlexBlock v. 3.8.0 or higher. Be sure to update your FlexBlock plugin to access them. Note: We recommended to create a back up for your website before proceeding to any major updates (including this one).

Advanced Photography Editor

We’ve listened to your feedback and developed a more intuitive and easy to use typography editor, to make your designing experience as seamless and smooth as possible. The new editor is WYSIWYG, which stands for What You See Is What You Get. In other words, now when you’ll select a text element, all the settings related to it, will appear right next to the element – easy access and no sidebars overlapping with your texts. See how it works.

Google Fonts Language Filter

Now you can easily search for Google Fonts that support a specific language’s characters, to avoid having characters not displayed correctly. Here’s how it works.

Mobile Improvements

This one is especially exciting for designers and those who love creating their own custom page sections. You’ll be able to add groups of elements to the mobile layout for blocks built from scratch. You can also adjust the height of the block to see the missing elements in a much simpler way. Here’s a preview.

Block Height Adjustment

We added a simpler more intuitive way to adjust your block height on both, desktop and mobile. See how it works.

Custom Grid Alignments

The new grid options allow you to save your own settings and alignments and use them across all your Flex blocks, which makes designing page layouts easier and faster. See how it works.

UI Improvements

We added multiple design enhancements to make the interface of the Flex editor more compact and easy to work with. All notes/hints were replaced with tooltips. Here’s a preview.

UX Improvements

The sidebar with the settings for each element will automatically move to the other side of your screen, depending on your working area – to help avoid any overlapping elements. See how it works.

Embed Element

We added a friendlier code highlighter for those with advanced skills. Here’s a preview. And if you’re wondering how to add a Google map with your office address to your site, here’s a quick tutorial. You can also add video, audio, and dynamic content through the embed element.

Countdown Timer Element

There’s a new element available inside Flex that can help you add more urgency to your landing pages and offers, or create excitement around an upcoming launch, event, or campaign. See some examples of the Countdown Timer in the demo of our Ember theme. Check this tutorial to find out how to use the timer and add it to your own pages.

FloForms Integration

Many of you have been asking for this, and we’ve found a way to integrate your custom contact forms build with FloForms into your Flex blocks. You can add the FloForms element just like any other element. Here’s a tutorial on how this works.

Animations

Animations allow you to add movement to your elements (titles, images, buttons, paragraphs, icons, etc.) and make your website more interactive and dynamic. Here’s how they work. You can guide your user’s attention and highlight the important sections with some fun and impactful motion. You can choose to animate elements on hover, on scroll, or as they appear when the page loads. Check this tutorial for more details on how to use animations on your own website.

Styling Enhancements

After this update, new buttons or text elements will automatically inherit the style of your theme, if you use a Flextheme (any theme currently available on flothemes.com/themes).

***

Flex Updates Coming Soon

Here are some things we’re currently working on and will release with future updates: FAQ element to offer a more dynamic option to present information to your clients, an updated design for Flex Elements Bar.

We care about the experience that you have with your themes and are always listening to how we can improve and enhance our products. If you have an idea or request for a feature, please fill out this form or share a post about it inside our Flothemes Community.

Flothemes Team,
Empowering Your Business