Beta release of Pinegrow Web Designer 1.2 is available for download on http://pinegrow.com, featuring: – Working with HTML pages that use JavaScript code and plugins – Better Edit code – Visual page synchronization – Support for Revolution Slider and Bootstrap Carousel – Bug fixes At the first glance Pinegrow 1.2 looks very similar to previous releases.
Beta release of Pinegrow Web Designer 1.2 is available for download on http://pinegrow.com, featuring:
– Working with HTML pages that use JavaScript code and plugins
– Better Edit code – Visual page synchronization
– Support for Revolution Slider and Bootstrap Carousel
– Bug fixes
At the first glance Pinegrow 1.2 looks very similar to previous releases. But it has a very important change under the hood. Till now Pinegrow relied on embedded Chromium browser to parse and manipulate HTML source making it impossible to distinguish between the original source HTML that was loaded from the file and the current DOM that was potentially modified by JavaScript code after the page was loaded in browser.
The unpleasant side-effect of that was that when the HTML file was saved all dynamic modifications were saved alongside the HTML code. In best case scenario this just added clutter to the source and in worst it broke the page completely.
For example, Google Analytics code snippet dynamically creates a script tag to load it’s JavaScript code. Each time such page was loaded and saved in Pinegrow one redundant script tag was added to the HTML code. Another example is modernizr script that adds a bunch of classes to the html element. When such page was saved all these classes got saved as well.
Starting with Pinegrow 1.2 we do things differently. Pinegrow now has its own source parser and source manipulation engine that knows how to distinguish source HTML from the current dynamic DOM structure that is rendered by the browser.
For pure static HTML pages that use no JavaScript code or plugins everything works just as before.
Most modern sites and templates use some kind of JavaScript though: Google Analytics, carousels and sliders, Ajax… Pinegrow now lets you work on such files without worrying that saving the changes will break the code.
Pinegrow will not let you modify DOM elements that were dynamically added by JavaScript code. The logic behind that is that if you want to change such dynamic elements you need to do that by changing the JavaScript code that created these elements.
For this to work Pinegrow needs to load local files through an internal web server that is running on port 40000 by default (changeable in Support -> Settings).
This lays a solid foundation for building new features and modules on top of Pinegrow. That includes working with scripting languages like PHP (up-coming developer edition), adding support for other frameworks and UI controls for popular JavaScript plugins (a proof-of-concept support for Revolution slider and Bootstrap Carousel is included in this Beta).
We switched to CodeMirror for the internal code editor (before we used Ace editor). Synchronization between edit code view and the page is also faster and more precise (when you click on a element on the page, its code will be selected in the editor).
Revolution slider Pinegrow plugin will recognise sliders with .rev_slider class and add Pause slider, Resume slider, Next slide, Prev slide, Insert slide commands to the element Actions menu. It also auto-scrolls to the selected slide when you select it in the tree. Revolution slider PG plugin must be activated on the page for that (Page -> Manage frameworks). Note, that this will not add Revolution slider JavaScript code to your page. You have to do that manually.
Bootstrap Carousel support works in the same way and is included in Bootstrap plugin.
Pinegrow 1.2 Beta is a pre-release software. It is recommended to use it with file backup option switched on and to keep a separate installation for Pinegrow 1.15.
This Beta release has a couple of limitations:
– no Foundation support yet
– only one window / app instance can run at the same time
– no loading files from url yet
With this we’ll be back on frequent release schedule. Release of Pinegrow 1.2 is planned for the middle of September. Release version will also include support for the latest versions of Bootstrap and Foundation. Bootstrap 2.x will not be supported any more. If you need to use it keep Pinegrow 1.15 installed alongside the 1.2+.
Please use our support portal docs.pinegrow.com to report any bugs and mention BETA in the title field.
Thank you all for your continued interest and support for Pinegrow!