In the first of hopefully many plugin releases this year, the WP Offload Media team has been working hard on some big integrations and improvements.
Today we’re pleased to announce the latest integration for WP Offload Media, full Elementor support.
Elementor Integration
Elementor is one of the most popular page builder plugins around. The free plugin has over 5 million active installs, and the Pro version is an extremely popular page builder.
What is Elementor?
WordPress page builder plugins enable users to create stunning looking websites without having to learn to create WordPress themes or touch a line of code. Even in a Gutenberg world, page builders like Elementor still have their place and are continuing to grow and improve.
Although it helps design a site, Elementor is actually a WordPress plugin rather than a theme, and once installed allows users to edit their pages with the Elementor interface.
To design pages with Elementor you first need to understand how Elementor structures its design elements. A page can have multiple sections in it, and each section can contain any number of columns. Each column can contain one or more content elements, and these elements can be styled.
Elementor has over 100 different widgets (free and pro) that can be used to design a page, including but not limited to:
- Heading
- Image
- Gallery
- Testimonial
- Button
- Video
Any Elementor widget that lets the user insert a media item will do this by allowing them to select an existing item from the WordPress media library or upload a new one.
This means WP Offload Media works out-of-the-box with Elementor, and will make sure media items are offloaded to the configured storage provider.
However, when it comes to the offloaded media item URL being used in Elementor widgets, things can go a bit wrong. Or if you start using WP Offload Media on an existing Elementor site you might find not all your images are being rewritten correctly to the storage provider or CDN URL.
Which is why we’ve fixed up, enhanced, and added full integration for Elementor. 💪
Full Integration with WP Offload Media
With the latest release of WP Offload Media, we’ve improved the main integration points between the plugin and Elementor.
So if you are using Elementor and WP Offload Media together, things just got a lot easier. You don’t need to turn on a setting or enable anything to get access to this new integration, simply upgrade to version 2.5.3 of WP Offload Media and you’re good to go.
Let’s take a look at what’s been added.
URLs in Elementor Content
If you have added media URLs to text inside Elementor widgets, for example, you’ve linked to an image from within a text widget, then offloaded that image to your storage provider. Without our integration, the URL will remain as the local site URL, but with the integration the URLs are replaced and updated.
Background Images
A large number of Elementor widgets allow you to set a background image for the element. When the image is selected from the media library, its URL is used in a CSS file specific to that page or post. When the page is rendered on the frontend of the site, Elementor looks for the CSS file and re-generates it if it is not found.
The CSS file is cached and purged nightly by Elementor, however, WP Offload Media will also flush the cached file whenever the image is offloaded to your storage provider.
Existing Elementor Sites
If you start to use WP Offload Media on an existing site running Elementor, there’s a good chance you’ve used images that will be in Elementor widgets. Running the tool to offload your existing media library to your storage provider of choice will also make sure images used in Elementor widgets and content will be fixed and the CSS cache files will be flushed.
In case you’ve been using WP Offload Media and Elementor together for a while and are unsure if there are incorrect media URLs used in Elementor content, then the integration can help. We’ve created a new tool in the WP Offload Media settings to analyze and repair Elementor content, which makes sure any URLs are correctly rewritten and the CSS cache files are flushed. Read more about fixing your content with the Elementor tool.
And More
There are updates to both WP Offload Media and WP Offload Media Lite – both version 2.5.3, which includes compatibility with WordPress 5.7, and a handful of bug fixes.
Take a look at what’s new.
Next Up
We are hoping to bring you new releases more often this year, to get the features and integrations that matter the most in your hands sooner. Here’s what we have coming up.
BuddyBoss
Our next release will feature an integration for the popular BuddyBoss plugin.
Although BuddyBoss uses the media library to store some of the images uploaded by its users, other images like user profile images and group images, get stored outside of the media library in a custom uploads directory. WP Offload Media doesn’t know about these files and so we need some BuddyBoss-specific code to handle offloading them to the configured storage provider and serving them from the configured delivery provider.
This is a big change to how the plugin works, but Erik’s been working hard to make this happen. Because we will be adding support for any images that aren’t uploaded to the media library, it opens the door for a large number of integrations with other popular plugins. Think Gravity Forms file uploads, NextGen Gallery image files, or your own custom plugin.
If there’s a media-related plugin you are using that doesn’t quite work with WP Offload Media, I’d love to hear from you.
A New Look
I can’t wait to show you what Lewis, our designer, and Jonesy have been working on. I mentioned it in the last release post – a new UI for the plugin is coming soon.
We’ve given WP Offload Media the same treatment as the upcoming 2.0 release of WP Migrate DB Pro – so fresh and clean!
If you want to be first to hear when these features are released then make sure you subscribe to stay in the loop.
Are you excited about the new Elementor integration or the features we plan to launch next? What else would you like to see in WP Offload Media? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.
