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The Best of Divi 5 (So Far…):

If you’ve built a website on WordPress in the last few years, you’ve heard of Elegant Themes‘ Divi. Divi 4 is the latest, fully released theme in the Divi series, but Divi 5 is well on it’s way to being fully released. Currently, it’s in the Alpha stage, available for use while being updated frequently with new features. I’ve watched the update log as they roll out new pieces, and I can’t lie, they are killing it right now. I’ll run through some of the latest rollouts that I’m excited to use while I’m building sites!

Variable Manager and Presets

Similar to the WordPress Customize section, Divi 5 has prioritized variable management. I wasn’t sure how much this would affect my process until I tried it out for myself. Not to be dramatic, but this has completely changed my workflow when building websites with Divi 5. After I was shown how to create presets for any element you want (think buttons, headings on dark backgrounds versus on light backgrounds), I immediately went and set some up on my current project.

Divi 5 makes it seamless to create your main presets and go from there. As I just mentioned, I was excited to try it on headings that were on dark backgrounds and light backgrounds. It made the building process so quick to click and go. I knew everything would have a cohesive look as it used the exact same styling. There was no need to remember the line height that the H2 text had on the About page, or the letter spacing on any H4 texts. I didn’t have to go into each heading section and set it. I was able to create the same preset styling but change only the colour to go with each background.

Divi 5's new variable management and presets showing an example of how to set some for text.

Another cool thing I found is that I could set fonts as variable items, rather than static fonts. This way, if you change the font in the variable manager, it changes across the whole site without having to scope out every location where the font was used! Here’s a video that covers this example.

One click, and all of the settings are set. It’s small things like these that save a huge amount of time. Originally, I didn’t understand the impact it would have, but now I can’t build without it. There’s a manager for colours, fonts, elements, and so much more. As I play around with it, I’m sure I’ll have an update for you all on the new things I’ve learned. Honestly though, this isn’t even my favourite feature, that’s at the end…

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Interactions

This one took me a bit of studying to get an understanding of and it’s not something I noticed or used on Divi 4. Interactions on the Divi 5 theme are a feature that I can see being incredibly useful. It will be beneficial for those looking for some more user interaction with their site, hence the name of the feature! Elegant Themes has a great video here showing off the capabilities. I watched this and was instantly inspired to fiddle with it.

One of the things that had people buzzing was the pop-up ability. Unfortunately, pop-ups were one of Divi 4’s sore spots in the past, because you would need different plugins to test/use to find the right fit for your needs. But, this is no longer an issue with Divi 5 and there is an incredible response to this news from users across the board. I’m 100% one of them! Picture advertising your free e-book, but instead of having your sign-up form right there, you can hide it in a pop-up. Better yet, as they scroll down the page, the email pop-up will, well, pop up!

Another fun one with Interactions is the mouse effect. Similar to how scrolling down the page can trigger a pop-up, you can now create interactions with mouse movement. In the video, they show us how we can now make images move and tilt as we move our mouse around the image. I can picture so many creative uses for this feature. It’s perfect for businesses looking to stand out and capture their users’ attention. Who wouldn’t want to make an image move with the movement of a mouse?!

It’s overwhelming the options they gave us with Divi 5’s Interactions feature. There are a few more types of interaction examples they showed, but the pop-ups and mouse effects were ones I couldn’t resist covering. Reach out to us and start getting creative with your site!

Divi 4 (left) vs Divi 5 (right) row options. You can see clearly how much effort they put into this new feature.

Nested Rows

The big daddy of the rollouts, if you will. Too long I’ve had to fight with Divi 4 and its lack of flexibility when it comes to rows. I could’ve cried happy tears when I heard they were releasing an update that included nest rows. Gone are the days when I had to be creative with a chunk of text, with two buttons below. In all honesty, it may seem like the most basic feature, but this will impact my builds the most. Something like this will push Divi 5 to be the best theme out there.

This is updated very recently, as the day before, there weren’t this many options. I’m completely blown away by the options now. You’ll see in the image beside the comparison of Divi 4 versus Divi 5. You could technically use the specialty section for some multi-column grids, but it was limited and required a separate section instead of a row. The fact that they even give you the options right in the row section, without having to build it out yourself, is a very nice touch. Additionally, they’ve increased the amount of columns from 6 to 8!

The best thing about Elegant Themes is that they delve into the updates and inspire with every video. The video for nested rows opened my eyes to some beautiful gallery builds. These examples could have never existed without this update. If you want to watch that video, this is the one that shows the massive strides they’ve made rolling out this feature.

Conclusion

Although Divi 5 isn’t quite ready for big, complex sites, it’s a theme that is great to play around with on a staging site or a new build. I’ve had so much fun and gained real learning experience as I’ve used it on our builds and it’s a theme that would recommend to everyone. Not only is it user-friendly but the features are fantastic … oh, and did I mention, the complete speed upgrade they managed for Divi 5 is incredible!

I’m not sure how many more features are on the way, but if Elegant Themes stopped here I would still be ecstatic with the next-level abilities that are available. If your site hasn’t been upgraded in a while, this is the perfect time to contact us to start implementing Divi 5 and its new features.