ET has put out the notice; the Divi Theme Builder (Divi 4.0) will arrive on October 17th. This is a pretty big deal for some of us. When ET announced, over a year ago, that the theme builder was coming, I rejoiced.
I started building WordPress websites in 2008. I had always coded my themes because I couldn’t find ones that fit my designs. Things changed for me when I started my own business and began working with the client instead of the middle man.
The clients that came to me were frustrated because, as small business owners or creatives, they wanted to be able to maintain or update their sites but couldn’t because a lot of things were “hardcoded” in the template files. They had to hire a developer if they wanted to update a slide. (Sliders were still a big deal back then.) I took this to heart, understood their frustration, and started looking for a solution to this complicated and rather costly problem. That’s when I stumbled upon Divi and fell in love.
I’ve been using Divi since its first released in 2013. I love Divi. It was the first page builder I had ever used. (I’ve used many since, but Divi is still my favorite.) I still get to work on plenty of sites that have bespoke themes. I get to work on them because, of course, the client has no idea how to change anything on their own. And they can’t unless they learned some PHP and mastered Advanced Custom Fields. And every time, I think to myself, “this would be so much easier for them if they had just used Divi.
I genuinely think you can build anything and mostly everything with Divi. It could be the last theme you ever need. But, even with Divi and its incredible flexibility, I still have to build things into the template files. Header, footer, search results, and archive files still need to be coded and styled. Yes, now that there is a Divi Library, I have roundabout ways for clients to access these parts, but it’s not as intuitive and easy as everything else.
I’m really hoping the Divi Theme Builder will take care of these issues and possibly if I can hope and wish for big things, better support for Custom Post Types.
Long live Divi and thank you Elegant Themes for all of your hard work. It is appreciated. When I first started using Divi, I never imagined it would become such a robust and powerful machine. You’ve truly done some amazing things. Thank you!