In cooking a great dish one has to cure with a whole range of treatments and embellishments that build up the flavour and taste of the product to a new level. Divi Builder since November 22 2022 has been going through that curing process with Nick Roach offering a series of monthly reports on progress to date.
Now given the hypercompetitive Web Developer marketplace with new tools like Breakdance, BricksBuilder, Oxygen adding novel ThemeBuilder features and AI add-ons tools appearing in SquareSpace, Wix, and a host of AI enabled WordPress Plugins. Nick’s promise to hold fire on new Divi features and extensions appears bold if not fool-hardy. Here is a judgment in favor of bold.
Divi – A Web Page Builder Innovator
Along with Visual Composer, Divi was an early pioneer in drag-and-drop page layout and design. To this day, the Divi Navigator tool bears testimony to the UI innovation Elegant Themes brought to Web Page Design:
So a whole page is devoted to the Divi Navigator in contrast with say Elementor or BeaverBuilder where the navigator is a popout onto the edit screen. Each strategy has its trade-offs, but the Divi “build on the Front End” button flags a Divi weakness – slow response in returning to the live edit screen and one key target of Divi 5’s performance enhancements.
Currently Divi’s live editor gives users a real WYSIWYG page layout as edits are made – something that other PageBuilder tools such as Gutenberg Builder still stumbles on.
The Divi builder also has desktop, tablet, or mobile edit views available.
DivI 5 Reports
Back in November Nick promised not new features but improvements in performance, reliability, and foundational extendability.. The May report showed the new performance improvements. I was expecting runtime perormance gains but Divi was showing dramatic editing performance improvement. Users could startup and then move objects in the editor with stunning speed. In contrast, the Elementor and Wix Editor X could use some bosts here. On the website runtime side, Divi developers work on RPC and improved Divi API should improve speed.
Here is the June Divi report where Nick describes how Gutenberg Blocks will become full members of the Divi API so that Divi and Gutenberg code can be mixed and matched in the Builder. Also, Divi is preparing for changes to shortcode management in WordPress.
But perhaps the most interesting item was that Nick, having denied new feature work, was ready to introduce in early August with its Divi 4 compatible AI extensions that go beyond the Wix and SquareSpace AI with Text only capabilities. Divi AI tools gens images and composite images along with text blocks. Not too bad for an organization under strict development focus and control.