This led us to develop our own plugin, Solid Dynamics, which adds a few features on top of Elementor. Let’s see how Solid Dynamics can help build websites with Elementor.
Dynamic Tags
Solid Dynamics adds several dynamic tags to Elementor:
- Custom Callback: This allows you to Call any php function, such as built-in WordPress functions like, get_post_type.
- Post Type Label: This retrieves the post type label of the current post. This is helpful for search results pages where multiple post types might be displayed together.
- Post Field: This retrieves any field on the current post object, such as $post->post_type, or any custom fields added elsewhere.
- Menu: This returns a comma-separated list of IDs of the posts added to a menu. This is helpful to display a specific set of posts in a specific order (using the loop query settings), and the built-in menu editor provides a convenient way to build multiple, ordered lists of posts.
- List Pluck: Like the Menu tag, this also is used to get a list of post IDs, only here the source is a repeater meta field on the current post.
- Parent Meta: This allows you to retrieve a meta field of the parent of the current post if your site uses parent-child relationships.
Display Conditions
Elementor recently added Display Conditions to hide/show widgets based on dynamic conditions, but we’ve found the functionality lacking. One option they provide is called “Dynamic tags”, but it really is just a list of meta fields, and you can’t actually use your dynamic tags for display conditions. We added a display condition to address this:
- Solid Dynamics Macro: This display condition allows you to access the current post or user data, such as “post|post_content”, or “user|user_email”, or call any function like this ”function|get_current_user_id”. The result can be checked directly or compared against a value to determine if a widget should show or not.
Widget Usage
Elementor includes a tool called the Element Manager, which shows you how many times a widget is used, and allows you to disable any widget. But it does not show you where the widget is used.
Solid Dynamics adds a tool called “Widget Usage”, which shows you all the pages where each widget is used. This is helpful when you want to reduce plugins and need to find the couple of pages where a specific widget is used.
Custom CSS
Elementor allows you to add Custom CSS to any widget. This is handy if you need to customize one instance of a widget. However, you might encounter an issue where some Custom CSS is breaking other content on the page. In this case, it is very difficult to find where the problematic CSS is coming from.
Solid Dynamics adds a tool called “Custom CSS Usage” which shows all the pages and widgets with Custom CSS.
Additional Settings
Solid Dynamics also provides several options to tweak Elementor behavior:
“Back to WordPress Editor” button – When you go to the edit page in WordPress for an Elementor page, this button is displayed at the top:
We’ve found this button to cause confusion. Some clients will click this button thinking it will go back to the WordPress panel, but what it actually does is change the page back to the standard WordPress editor rather than the Elementor editor, which removes all styling from the page. Solid Dynamics allows you to simply hide this button, as it causes more problems than it’s worth.
Entrance animations – by default the entrance animations in Elementor slide the full height/width of the widget. This can be a lot of movement when applied to taller sections.
Solid dynamics has an option to make these animations more subtle by reducing the slide to 10% of the size of the widget.
Conclusion
Elementor has been a game-changer for WordPress. If you use Elementor but have been frustrated with some of its quirks, Solid Dynamics just might be the answer you’ve been looking for.
