Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder 2.5 “Contra” – Outline Panel, Module Improvements, and More

Robby McCullough - June 30, 2021

Beaver Builder 2.5 “Contra” is no longer in beta and is available for download. You can download a copy from your account page and try it out today. For a detailed overview of all the changes, check out this Contra update article on our docs site.

We’re excited to announce a major update coming soon to a Beaver Builder site near you. Beaver Builder 2.5 “Contra” – named after the epic Contra Dam notably featured in the James Bond flick “Goldeneye” – features a brand new Outline panel, many module improvements, and lots of quality of life changes throughout.

In our last major update, we added several new modules to the palette. In this update, we focused effort on modernizing and improving existing modules. A big shout out to the development team for their hard work and Nancy from our docs team for compiling this fantastic about this release Knowledge Base article.

Outline Panel

The most significant change in 2.5 is the introduction of the new Outline panel which gives a bird’s eye view of all the content on a page and a streamlined interface to edit and interact with page content. Attempting to drag a row from “below the fold” on a long page could always be a bit agonizing.

The Outline panel makes it easy to rearrange content on large pages and to quickly jump around and edit different parts of a page. All versions of Beaver Builder will have this update – it is not limited to premium versions.

Take a sneak peek at the new outline panel coming in Beaver Builder 2.5…

Beta is coming out soon! pic.twitter.com/qoJbADhUlX

— Beaver Builder (@BeaverBuilder) June 21, 2021

See more of what it can do on our Outline panel documentation page.

Major Module Updates

Pricing Table

The Pricing Table module has a new set of customization features to enable you to build more complex and (hopefully) effective pricing tables! There is now an option to add highlight ribbons, icons, tooltips, and the option to display different pricing options for monthly and yearly subscriptions

Menu Module

The Menu module is getting a major overhaul to make it much more powerful. It now has styling options for sub-menu link colors and the responsive toggle, also a new option to have a logo in the center of the menu, a new option to add search to the menu, and support for showing WooCommerce cart contents in the menu!

See the Menu module article for a more thorough breakdown.

Separator Module

The Separator module has new responsive toggles for both the Height and Alignment settings, with the result that you can now specify different settings for height, width, and alignment for large, medium, and small devices.

Minor Module Changes

Here are a few highlights from a long list of module changes available in Contra. We also maintain a complete changelog here that includes version 2.5.

List: Settings were rearranged so the list items section appears at the top.
Content Slider: Added background transparency functionality.
Number Counter: In the bar display of the number, you can now set the height of the bar.
Content Slider: Added background overlay option for individual slides
Post Slider: Now has typography options
Separator: Height and alignment are now responsive
Contact Form: Labels can be translated.

Other Notable Changes

Change history and for undo/redo functionality can be disabled or limited to increase performance.
There is now basic support for the official Font Awesome Plugin so you can use that plugin’s shortcodes in your Beaver Builder layouts.
There’s now an easy way to disable smooth scrolling.
Added a Duplicate option for BB posts in the WordPress Admin area.
Automatically clear CSS/JS files when URL changes
You can set the line height to be 0 in any Typography section.
Column widths can be set individually.
Add custom position for column backgrounds.
In WP Admin list for for saved elements, show shortcode and add click to copy to clipboard
Added more WPCLI functionality.

Here are some fun egghead stats, there have been 800 commits and 400 file changes from 2.4.2.4 to 2.5-beta-1, 23,974 additions, and 8,298 deletions!

This is another brief list of bigger changes. Nancy’s About this release article has accompanying images and more detailed write ups on all of these changes. Also, one of our long-time power users, David Waumsley, made a video showing the big changes in Contra.

Bug Fixes

The list of bug fixes this time around is exhaustive! Hats off to the dev team for knocking out some of those pesky problems. Also, a big thanks to everyone who has and continue to help beta test and play with the new software!

As opposed to listing all the fixes here, there are two forum threads that detail the bug fixes, the alpha discussion, and the (ongoing) beta discussion.

The community forum has become a “live” changelog and discussion thread during alpha and beta testing. If you’re not already, come join the conversation.

Last but not least, if testing out cutting edge software is something you like to do, there is an alpha version of Beaver Themer out as of the time this post is published. There are several new header and footer templates to try, conditional logic enhancements, and a bunch more!

15 Comments

Jason Smith on July 6, 2021 at 3:48 pm

Super excited for the updates Robby. This team is moving mountains. I couldn’t do my job effectively without BB + BTB.
Nathalie Lussier on July 6, 2021 at 4:34 pm

Yeah!! I’m super excited for all of these changes, and especially the outline functionality. It’s going to save us all a lot of time when editing those gorgeous Beaver Builder long form pages!
Roy Randolph on July 6, 2021 at 5:45 pm

Great work guys! Looking forward.
Eric Wiinanen on July 6, 2021 at 7:53 pm

Great job improving an already awesome page builder!! BB is a core tool to our business!
Alok Sharma on July 6, 2021 at 10:59 pm

Hey Robby,

The outline panel will definitely add more charm to BB and make it even easier to play around with the rows, columns & modules. I already tried out the beta version on my sandbox website, and it would be a great addition to BB.

Not trying to hijack this post, but the only suggestion I have for the future releases is the ability to allow single post template in Beaver Themer work for posts created using BB also. However, this currently does not work for posts created in BB.

But it can be made to work such that the POST CONTENT module will not have any styling options because all the styles & formatting will be inherited from the posts created using BB.

Its sole purpose would be to stop having to rely on the theme’s default single post template, which it does in the present scenario. This way, the users would have complete control over the single post template.

For the time-being, I have created a default single post fallback template in GP Elements to display the single posts created using BB.
- JamieV on August 19, 2021 at 12:07 pm
  
  If I understand correctly, that is a feature of Themer 1.4, which is currently in beta 🙂
  - Alok Sharma on August 19, 2021 at 11:09 pm
    
    Thanks, Jamie.
    
    That sounds good. Once live, it will completely remove all the theme template dependencies.
Anh Tran on July 6, 2021 at 11:10 pm

The outline panel is very useful to navigate between modules. Thanks for creating it!
Colin Needham on July 7, 2021 at 2:30 am

Looks good, especially the outliner, will have to play around with the beta version. Great job guys.
Mary Motz on July 7, 2021 at 5:42 am

I’m so happy about the new outline panel feature!! Thanks!!!
Abby Buzon on July 7, 2021 at 6:29 am

Ohhhhh my gawwwd, BB, I am SO EXCITED! Thank you for listening and growing!
Miguel on August 21, 2021 at 5:38 pm

I’m debating between Beaver Builder vs Bricks Theme Builder vs Zion Builder, and honestly I like Beaver Builder more because is easier to use. However, there is one thing I need before I could follow the Beaver Builder path with Full Happiness, and that single thing is REMOVE the Front-End “jQuery” dependency and replace it with vanilla & lightweight JavaScript to get the Best Possible front-end Performance. Some other builders have already done it.

All the Best.
scott on September 3, 2021 at 9:03 am

this is great, thanks guys !!!!!
- Anthony Tran on September 3, 2021 at 9:24 am
  
  Thanks Scott we appreciate you taking the time to read about all the things we’re working on.
Mike on September 3, 2021 at 9:56 am

Awesome!! and Finally! Not in a negative way, but some of these fixes are things I’ve been waiting for. Beaver Builder has absolutely changed the way I run my business and build websites. No more hand-coding themes and charging hours of time for updates and client changes. Beaver Builder is at the heart of everything and I couldn’t be happier that you guys keep reaching for the stars with this page builder. BB + Themer forever!