Visual Edit Lite – Visual Editor for Block Themes

Changelog

1.31.4

• New: A designed form can be handed to Contact Form 7 or Fluent Forms. Pick
  the form in the FORM panel and check which of its fields each designed field
  fills; that plugin then validates, checks for spam, verifies its captcha,
  sends and records the submission, while the design stays as it is. Without
  JavaScript the page comes back with the errors under the fields.
• New: On a block theme, the ⋯ menu of the Visual Edit Lite workspace can
  duplicate the page or post that is open, and move it to the trash. The copy
  is a draft and brings its content, categories and tags, featured image,
  search-appearance record and small-screen rules; its canonical address is not
  copied. The front page and the posts page cannot be removed from here.
• Changed: Duplicating works for posts as well as pages, and asks for the right
  to create whichever of the two is being copied.
• Fixed: A backslash in page content survives a save. Every write of page
  content now goes through wp_slash(), which WordPress expects.
• Changed: The readme no longer describes the paid edition, and documents the
  captcha providers a connected form plugin may load.

1.31.3

• Changed: The readme carries captions for the seven screenshots on the
  plugin’s directory page.
• Changed: The plugin’s homepage link points at html2wp.dev; the source stays
  on GitHub.

1.31.2

• Fixed: The SMTP password is stored exactly as it is typed. It was trimmed
  before being encrypted, so a password that begins or ends with a space saved
  without complaint and then failed to authenticate. Secrets are never put
  through a text sanitizer: they are encrypted, and never printed back. A
  pasted API key still loses the stray space or newline a paste leaves on it.

1.31.1

• Security: Each editor route asks for the right to do what it does, on top of
  the right to edit the page: copying a page asks for the right to create
  pages, removing one for the right to delete it, importing an image for the
  right to upload files, and a save, a restore or a search-appearance change
  addressed to one page asks about that page.
• Security: The form block’s output is filtered through an allowlist of what a
  form may consist of at the moment it is returned, so nothing else can come
  out of it. The honeypot field is hidden by a stylesheet rule as well as its
  own inline one.
• Changed: Navigation class names supplied by a theme are escaped as attribute
  values when they are written into a menu.

1.31.0

• Changed: Edit history keeps the ten most recent saves of each page plus the
  Original. Every save the plugin holds is listed and can be restored. A page
  with a longer log is trimmed to that the next time its history is opened or
  the page is saved.
• Changed: Every stylesheet and script the plugin adds now goes through the
  WordPress enqueue API — the decorative and article styling layers, per-block
  styles, and the Form Settings and SEO & Sharing screens, whose behaviour
  moved into assets/admin-settings.js. Structured data is printed with
  WordPress’s own inline script tag function.
• Changed: The paid plugin is mentioned in one place: a single plain item,
  Visual Edit Pro, at the end of the Visual Edit Lite menu, opening one screen
  of text with one link. The two Pro-marked items are gone, and nothing is
  added to any other admin screen.
• Removed: The part of the content exporter that could package a theme. Lite
  exports content bundles only; theme export is not in this plugin.
• Security: The public “load more” route answers only for a published page
  without a password, and gives one answer for every refusal. A listing no
  longer includes password-protected posts.
• Security: A form field whose name starts with an underscore is ignored, so a
  visitor cannot write one of the submission’s internal meta keys.
• Security: The legacy static import copies only files of a type WordPress
  accepts as an upload, from inside the extracted folder. A double opt-in link
  stops working after fourteen days, and exporting parked content, which can
  include submissions and subscribers, requires an administrator.
• Added: A Credits section, and a notice in the four editor files that derive
  from Open Design (Apache License 2.0).

1.30.3

• Changed: The package ships the plugin only — the developer documentation
  lives on GitHub and is linked from this readme.

1.30.2

• Changed: Contributors names the wordpress.org account that owns the plugin,
  and the 1.27.0 upgrade notice fits the directory’s 300-character limit.

1.30.1

• Changed: The Get Pro item opened the pricing page in a new browser tab.
  Replaced in 1.31.0.

1.30.0

• New: A screen in the Visual Edit Lite menu that lists what the separate paid
  plugin adds. Nothing is loaded from outside the site and nothing is sent
  anywhere. Reduced to a single menu item in 1.31.0.
• Changed: The plugin is listed as “Visual Edit Lite – Visual Editor for
  Block Themes”. The menu, the admin bar and every screen are unchanged.

1.29.1

• Fixed: The ＋ Section browser labels its two groups — Theme sections and Your sections.

1.29.0

• Save a section and use it on any other page. Save as a section… on the
  Section tab of a section’s popup stores it as one of your site’s own
  sections, listed under ＋ Section as Your sections everywhere. Each copy you
  place is ordinary blocks you can edit one by one, independent of the page it
  came from. Saving happens at once rather than as an unsaved change, and a
  saved section is removed again under Patterns in the WordPress admin. A
  section holding a synced pattern, a template part or content bound to that
  one page cannot be saved, and the form says which it was.
• ClaraVE.apply() can treat a run of neighbouring blocks as one, with three
  operations: group wraps them in a single Group, ungroup takes a Group
  apart again in its place, and move-to moves a run of blocks elsewhere on
  the page, including inside another container. Each is one change the editor
  undoes in one step. Blocks that are not next to each other, or that
  WordPress will not let move, are refused with the reason instead of quietly
  doing nothing.
• ClaraVE.saveSection() and a save-section event for the same, and
  GET /block-patterns now says which source each section came from.

1.28.0

• A theme section shipped as one Custom HTML block — an FAQ of details, a
  list, a row of buttons — goes onto the page as native blocks when it is added
  with ＋ Section: a Details block per question, headings, lists and buttons,
  each editable in the popup, in one undo step. Markup with no native block (an
  embed, an icon drawn in SVG, inline styles) stays Custom HTML exactly as it
  was. A Details block’s popup edits its question.
• Forms from other plugins — Kadence Form, Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity
  Forms and others — are marked green in the block workspace like Visual Edit’s
  own, and a Kadence Form can be sent by Visual Edit: choose Form Settings and a
  contact address or a mailing list in its popup. Kadence’s own sending is
  switched off while connected, so nothing arrives twice.
• Form button styles reach a Kadence form in the editor, where Kadence draws
  the button as an editable box rather than a button.
• The HTML editor’s popup has a pin: pinned, every element opens it in the same
  place, and dragging it moves the pin.
• History and other side panels no longer open over each other.
• On a phone the workspace toolbar keeps Save on screen.
• The block gate refuses a static core block written as a self-closing comment
  (), which the editor flags as invalid and the site shows
  as nothing.
• For developers: the clara_ve.toolbar.extras and clara_ve.popup.top
  filters, the clara-ve-dock-opened event, the convert-to-video operation,
  Kadence images in set-image, and POST /native/convert-blocks.

1.27.0

• Icons from a theme’s or a plugin’s own controls are no longer invisible in
  the dark editing popup. A whole family of icon sets is drawn with strokes
  rather than fills, and the contrast repair only ever looked at fills — so an
  icon picker full of line icons kept its author’s dark grey on a ground the
  editor had just painted dark. They are repaired on the property they are
  actually drawn with, and never by filling them in.
• A form whose fields cover it completely — a one-row signup is an input and a
  button, edge to edge — could not be connected at all: there was no pixel of
  the form left to click, and what a form does when someone submits it is only
  offered on the form itself. A field now says Part of a form and offers
  the way up, opening the form on the tab that holds those settings.
• A theme converted from HTML no longer white-screens its visitors. Such a
  theme carries its own form runtime that asks this plugin about Cloudflare
  Turnstile as soon as it is loaded; this edition has no Turnstile and had no
  answer, so every page holding a form died with a critical error — the public
  page, not only the editor. It now answers “off”, which is the truth.
• On a theme converted from HTML, form submissions were being accepted and
  silently thrown away: the theme and the plugin signed the anti-spam timestamp
  in two different shapes, and the visitor saw a thank-you either way. They are
  delivered again, and stored.
• Where a form sends is signed into the page and checked on the way back, for
  every form — including one a converted theme renders and hands over. Until
  that theme signs the value itself, a per-form Send to on such a site falls
  back to the address in Form Settings rather than being taken from the request.
• A media bundle can no longer place a file in the uploads folder that you
  could not upload by hand: the extension has to be one this site allows.
• Send to and List on a form block are honoured only on a page whose
  author administers the site. Anyone who can publish could otherwise point a
  form at their own address, or at your mailing list. A form in a template part
  is unchanged.
• Forms are marked in green — the whole form, its fields and a Form label,
  in both editors and without clicking anything first. Everything else stays
  blue, so it is clear at a glance which part of a page collects answers.
• Block themes are now edited the way converted themes are: the page, one dark
  toolbar and one popup. WordPress’s block toolbar, sidebar and breadcrumb bar
  no longer compete with it; ⋯ → Show WordPress controls brings them back.
  The WordPress admin bar and side menu stay available.
• A sidebar WordPress remembered from an earlier session no longer opens over
  the workspace. The Search appearance dialog says when the theme or the
  site-wide SEO settings keep Visual Edit from printing titles and
  descriptions on the public site.
• Clicking the block that is already selected reopens its popup after Apply
  or Cancel. Undo reverts one popup session at a time, and Reset styles is
  its own undo step. A responsive value can be set again after it was cleared
  and saved. Number fields ignore text that is not a number.
• Clicking a photo that sits under a theme’s overlay or tint (a hero image
  behind its heading layer) selects the image, as in the HTML editor, so it
  can be replaced. Empty decorative groups no longer show WordPress’s
  “Select a layout” placeholder over the design.
• WordPress’s own editor UI shown inside Visual Edit (the Advanced tab,
  sidebars opened from ⋯, dropdowns, colour pickers and native dialogs)
  follows the popup design: the same type, rounded dark fields, grey labels,
  uppercase section titles, buttons, tabs and menus. Colours are measured after every change, so
  native controls stay readable while swatches and style previews keep their
  real colours. Menus, selects and scrollbars in the
  dark UI no longer show dark text, white tracks or double borders.
• Clicking a block outlines and labels it and opens the popup beside it, at the
  height of the click, without covering it. The popup stays put while you
  scroll, can be pinned, and is a bottom sheet on phones.
• The popup is organised into Content, Style, Section and Advanced tabs, with a
  path to parent blocks, Duplicate / Move / Delete, bold, italic and link for
  text selected on the page, an items list for containers, and “Add a section
  after this one”.
• Style has a Desktop / Tablet / Mobile switch that edits the same fields per
  screen and switches the preview. The separate Responsive section is gone.
• Sections locked by WordPress (theme patterns, template parts) offer Unlock
  design — WordPress’s own “Enable editing all patterns” setting, per session.
• ＋ Section adds one of the theme’s own sections with previews.
• History docks beside the page and says when a restored version still needs
  Save.
• The toolbar is reduced to page, device, undo/redo, History, Section, status,
  preview, More and Save.
• The converted-theme popup gains the same Content / Style / Section tabs, opens
  beside the clicked element, calls its button Apply, and offers RADIUS on every
  element rather than only boxes that hold a field.
• New window.ClaraVE editor API shared by both editors, with operations,
  events, clara_ve.popup.groups / clara_ve.popup.footer /
  clara_ve.toolbar.more filters, and the clara_ve_workspace_config,
  clara_ve_workspace_enqueue and clara_ve_native_entity_saved PHP hooks.
• The front-end block editor writes small-screen values into a block’s
  claraVe attribute when the block already uses it, and shows those values.
• The Gutenberg sidebar integration is no longer loaded inside the workspace,
  where its panel appeared a second time inside the popup’s native settings.
• Linking selected text from the popup: Enter applies the link, Esc closes the
  address field, an address without a scheme gets https://, an empty address
  says so instead of doing nothing, and the link still lands on the words
  picked first when the page selection changes while typing. Links inside
  running text get a dotted underline in the editor only, since many themes
  style them exactly like the text around them.
• A link inside the workspace that leads to any other screen (the dashboard, a
  list, the site) opens in the whole window instead of showing a second admin
  bar and menu inside the workspace.
• Document ▾ lists only content that can be opened (Global Styles and menu
  items no longer appear and fail to load), hides Previous/Next when there is
  one page of results, shows load errors readably in the dark menu, and
  WordPress’s own site management opens as a labelled link in the whole
  window instead of replacing the workspace inside its frame.
• Native colour palettes inside the workspace show their real colours again
  (the dark skin had recoloured every swatch to the text colour), with room
  around the palette and a faint ring so dark theme colours stay visible.
• The block inserter shows separate rounded tiles with readable icons; block
  icons were painted near-black on the dark panel.
• Style any form from the popup: Form labels, Form fields and Form button
  groups (colours, fonts, sizes, case, letter spacing, field border shape and
  colour, border while typing, placeholder colour, button hover, corners).
  They work on what every form is made of, so a theme’s shortcode form,
  Contact Form 7, WPForms or a hand-written HTML form all take the same
  settings, and they are saved on the block like other Visual Edit styling.
• Shortcode blocks show what the shortcode puts on the page on the workspace
  canvas instead of WordPress’s text box; the shortcode itself is edited in
  the popup’s Content tab.
• More › Site styles opens WordPress’s Styles panel again on WordPress 7,
  which shows it only while a template is on screen: the page is shown inside
  its template while the panel is open and returns to the page alone after.
• Notices in Visual Edit’s dark dialogs and menus are coloured by kind
  (error, success, warning), and Esc still closes Search appearance after
  saving (focus used to fall back to the page).
• Editable forms. A new Form block with field, text area, choice list,
  checkbox, row and send-button blocks: labels, notes, placeholders, choices,
  required fields, field names and the button text are edited in the popup
  (or WordPress’s sidebar), fields are added from the form’s popup and
  reordered or removed under Items. Submissions go to Form Submissions and are
  emailed to the Form Settings address — a recipient posted with the form is
  ignored — with the spam checks of connected forms; “Go to page” and
  “Message” set what happens after sending. The form is saved as plain HTML,
  so it stays visible (without sending) if the plugin is switched off.
• “Make this form editable” on a shortcode or HTML block holding a form turns
  it into form blocks, keeping its class names and so its look, its redirect
  and its thank-you sentence; its form styling carries over. One Undo step.
• A form says what it is for — “Contact form” or “Mailing list”, the same two words in both editors — with the list picked by name and an optional address for that one form. A signup now reaches the mailing list and the Subscribers screen instead of arriving as an enquiry. What the form was set to is signed into the page, so a visitor cannot retype it into somewhere else; that now covers connected [wp-form] forms as well as form blocks, and an unsigned or altered one falls back to the address in Form Settings rather than being refused.
• Each form field keeps its own name in submissions: a second Email, a pasted
  or a duplicated field is numbered (email-2) instead of overwriting the first
  one’s value, and renaming a label later does not move its column.

1.26.1

• Fixed repeated dropdown arrows and light disabled fields in the dark VE popup
  caused by WordPress admin select styles.
• Content-only editing now exposes permitted text/media controls instead of
  disabling the whole panel. Design controls remain restricted by WordPress.
• Recheck block editing mode and bindings when asynchronous media choices return.
• Added Gutenberg save history, per-document staged restores and native Undo/Redo.
• Fixed Google Fonts preview stylesheet duplication and removal.

1.26.0

• Gutenberg block themes now open WordPress’s complete native Site and Post
  Editors from Visual Edit Lite. This covers every registered block, nested
  editing, Query Loops, navigation, patterns, templates, template parts and
  Global Styles through their native WordPress controls.
• Added a Visual Edit Lite Gutenberg sidebar with per-page search appearance,
  Media Library selection for sharing images and shortcuts to site tools.
• Added selected-block movement and responsive controls to Gutenberg. Page
  responsive values share Gutenberg’s save state and undo/redo stack, render
  in the editor preview, and are included in VE history.
• Native Gutenberg saves now feed the existing VE page history while core
  keeps revisions for templates, parts and Global Styles. Autosaves are not
  recorded as explicit saves.

Earlier versions

The entries for 1.25.12 and earlier are kept on GitHub:
https://github.com/iOSDevSK/visual-edit-lite/blob/main/docs/changelog-archive.md