DesignSetGo 2.8 is out, along with two quick follow-ups, 2.8.1 and 2.8.2.
This one started as a layout release and turned into a cleanup release halfway through. The new layout settings are the headline, but the fix I’m happiest about is one most people never knew they had: 33 blocks were sending their editor-only styling to your visitors.
More control over where content sits
Section has a new Content Position setting. If you constrain a Section’s content width, you can now put that content column on the left, in the centre, or on the right of the section. Before, it was always centred. That sounds small until you try to build a hero with the text pinned to one side and an image filling the rest.
Section also has Box Width. Content width only ever narrowed the text inside a section. Box Width narrows the section’s own box, so the background, border, shadow and shape dividers shrink with it. That makes a Section usable as a card or a panel without wrapping it in something else.
Grid gets a Column Template setting for desktop. Instead of equal columns, you can give it a narrow sidebar beside a wide main column, or any other split you can describe as column widths. Tablet and mobile keep their own column counts. (Tablet and mobile templates came later, in 2.10.)
The bug hiding in 33 blocks
Timeline items are meant to fade in as you scroll. On published pages they had stopped doing that and showed up all at once. The cause turned out to be bigger than Timeline: 33 blocks were loading a stylesheet meant only for the editor on the front of your site. In Timeline’s case, an editor rule forced every item to be visible, which beat the hidden starting state the scroll effect needs.
The same problem put a dashed outline around Image Accordion and a grey border on Scrolling Gallery images. None of those blocks send editor styling to visitors now, and there’s a test that stops it creeping back.
Forms
Two published pages can end up holding forms with the same ID. It happens when you insert the same pattern twice or duplicate a form block. When that happened, a submission could be matched to the wrong form: the notification went to the other form’s recipient, or the visitor got told to fill in a required field that wasn’t on the form they could see. A submission is now matched to the form that was actually filled in.
Fields laid out in three or four columns also fit on one row now, and stack properly on phones instead of running off the side.
Smaller things you’ll notice
- Overlays on Section, Row, Grid and Scroll Accordion items start lighter. If you pick an overlay colour that already has transparency, that transparency is used as is instead of having more applied on top. Overlays already on your pages keep their current strength, even after you edit them.
- Tab labels take their colour from the text around them, so they stay readable on dark or coloured backgrounds.
- The faint horizontal line that could show across a shape divider at certain zoom levels is gone.
- The contact form’s “Select an option” placeholder and other bundled text show up translated on non-English sites. An older language pack could hide newer translations.
- More blocks added by an AI assistant come out valid the first time you open them, so you see “Attempt Recovery” far less. There’s also a new
designsetgo/add-blocksability for adding several blocks in one step.
2.8.1 and 2.8.2
2.8.0 broke something on pages with an overlay header: it started adding space above the first section, which pushed the hero down and left a strip of plain background under the header. 2.8.1 puts the header back over the top of the hero.
2.8.2 fixed a nastier one. If you had ever switched a block off under DesignSetGo → Blocks & Extensions, blocks added in later versions arrived switched off too, and pages already using one showed “Your site doesn’t include support for this block.” New blocks and extensions now arrive switched on. The extension switches on that screen also take effect now, and those settings save exactly as you set them. If a page still reports a DesignSetGo block as unsupported, turn that block back on under Blocks & Extensions. Your content is fine either way.
Try DesignSetGo 2.8
Update, then try Content Position on a hero section and a Column Template on a Grid that has always wanted a sidebar. If you have a Timeline on a page, scroll down it again: the items fade in as you reach them, the way they did before.