Two New Features In Breakdance 2.0

In this article I’m looking at some of the new features of Breakdance 2.0. The Breakdance team has been working for some months on version 2.0. It’s going to have a lot of features, but in this video I’m just taking a look at two that caught my attention.

Video Version

Migration Mode

The first one is a big feature and it’s pretty cool. Breakdance 2.0 has a migration mode option. For example, I started with a website built with the Site Editor. What the migration mode feature does is it allows us to continue to show the Site Editor version to visitors while on the back end we’re able to rebuild the site using Breakdance. And then when we are done and turn migration mode off then everyone will see the new Breakdance site. So it’s pretty cool. We don’t have to rebuild the site in Breakdance using some staging site or testing site.

This solves a big problem that WordPress site builders have because if you have an e-commerce site you might have orders coming in. How are you going to handle it so that you don’t lose those orders when you import your new design? Or maybe you’ve got a membership site or an LMS site where new users are signing up or they’re going through their lessons and marking them complete. If you’re not careful when you import your new design you’re going to overwrite all of those transactions and lose data and that’s not good. So Breakdance solves this problem and I think now that we’ve seen this feature it’s going to be something we expect to see in other page builders.

Now there are a couple of things I want to say about migration mode:

• The first is that to enable it you need a separate plugin. There is a link to it in your Breakdance dashboard.
• The second thing to note is it’s for migrating from another builder to Breakdance. It works with Elementor, Beaver Builder and so on but you can’t use it to have two versions of the Breakdance site going at the same time. You can’t have one version of the Breakdance site for the public and another one that you’re working on behind the scenes. This is for migration from some other builder to Breakdance.
• The third thing to keep in mind is you know if on the front end for visitors you’re serving up the website, the Elementor or Beaver Builder site, to those visitors. So, you can’t disable Elementor or Beaver Builder. Those plugins still have to be active and that means that there may be some CSS files or JavaScript files that are being loaded on the site even while you’re working on it with Breakdance. So if there’s something that’s not coded well you could have a CSS conflict or something like that. I didn’t notice any problems but that’s something to keep in mind.

So I think the migration mode plugin is very cool. I think a lot of Breakdance users, a lot of agencies and freelancers who are working with Breakdance are going to get good use out of this new feature.

New Layout Builder

The second new feature in Breakdance 2.0 is a feature that’s going to benefit every user of Breakdance and that is that there’s a new layout builder. There are a few advantages to the new version. The first is there are new icons to show the options and they are much more intuitive, so it is easier to pick the right one. Also, there are now four main icon options.

• There is column or stacked mode.
• There is row or horizontal mode.
• There is a grid mode.
• There is an advanced mode.

The first two options give you a very easy to use and understand simplified version of Flexbox. The third option is a simplified version of CSS grid. Then the advanced mode give you a tab to select the full Flexbox options or the full CSS grid options. I think that probably 95% of the time users are going to be able to use one of the three “easy modes” options which are more intuitive in order to achieve the layout they’re looking for.

Conclusion

Breakdance 2.0 has a large number of new features. I just picked two to show you in this video. If you are interested in learning more about this new version then I encourage you to take a look at the announcement when it’s released and take a look at the change log so that you can see the full list of everything that’s coming. I hope this article has given you some insight into new features coming in Breakdance.