We are pleased to announce Astra 4.8.
It’s a significant update, especially for those of you that enjoy customizing web templates or tweaking designs!
The big news in Astra 4.8 is the all-new Style Guide.
It’s a unique dashboard that provides a single place to adjust the style of your template.
Watch it in action
It lets you see changes in real time and lets you create a coherent look in seconds.
It’s a superb new addition to the already powerful customization features in Astra!
Astra 4.8 also adds a range of improvements and fixes to make working with it a breeze!
The Style Guide feature was designed to centralize the most common site settings in one place, making it easier for you to get started quickly and effortlessly.
Let’s dive into what’s new.
New Features in Astra 4.8
The Astra Style Guide is the headline feature of the 4.8 update but there are also lots of improvements and fixes too.
Astra Style Guide
Once updated, Astra 4.8 introduces a brand new dashboard within the customizer.
Select Astra > Customize from the WordPress dashboard and you’ll see a new pencil icon at the top left of your screen.
Click the icon and you’ll see the new Style Guide dashboard.
From here, you can play around with colors, typography, buttons and icons all in one place.
- Change a style to instantly see how it works with other page elements
- Switch a color and see how it works with your buttons
- Switch a heading font to see how it looks against body text
It’s an incredibly simple idea that’s going to transform the way you design websites!
Rather than making a change and reloading a page or flipping between elements to see how it looks, you can see a true representation on the same screen.
As far as we know, no other WordPress theme has this game-changing feature!
Using the Astra Style Guide
Select a color in the center and the global palette appears on the left. Make a change and it’s immediately reflected in the main Style Guide window.
From here you can choose a style preset or customize colors individually.
Whatever you change, you’ll see it reflected in the main window in real time.
It’s the same for typography.
Select a heading or body text in the Style Guide window to access the relevant customizer menu on the left.
Change a font and see it represented in real time on the right.
As you make a change, you’ll see every instance of that font change dynamically so you can immediately see what it looks like.
Just like with colors, you can select from font presets to change everything or change each font individually.
Either way, you’ll see the change happen instantly on the right of your screen.
Select to change an individual font and you’ll see the Font Family picker menu as usual.
Here you can change the family, weight and size for every single font on the page.
The Astra Style Guide also lets you preview changes to your logo, favicon and buttons so you can create a coherent look or brand the entire site at once.
It’s a fast, effective way to style a website and makes it easy to bring it on brand, experiment or customize it!
The eagle-eyed among you may notice that not every customization is included in the Astra Style Guide.
This is on purpose.
We wanted to ensure it was easy to use, which is why it only includes the most common customizations we make.
You’ll find all the other customization options still present within the WordPress customizer.
We have only added features, we haven’t taken away!
Other Updates and Improvements in Astra 4.8
The Astra 4.8 update brings a raft of improvements to make living and working with it easier than ever.
Here’s a list of the improvements you can expect:
- Enhanced styling for block-based cart and checkout.
- Header SVG logo now redirects to the homepage.
- Added default top spacing for SureCart Shop title.
- Improved smooth scrolling for deeply nested elements.
- Enhanced keyboard navigation for “Quick View” and “Add to Cart” buttons in Modern Shop.
- Added the filter astra_addon_enable_modern_checkout to enable or disable the modern checkout feature.
- Made alt tags for mega menu icons dynamic to ensure unique alt attributes for each image.
Our team is constantly on the lookout for issues to address and more fixes will be incoming over the next few weeks.
Astra 4.8 Update
We want to say a big thank you to the entire Astra development team for their hard work and for delivering an awesome new usability feature.
We think the Astra Style Guide is an amazing addition to an already powerful WordPress theme.
Whether you’re building your first website or build them for a living, we think the Style Guide is going to make life a whole lot easier!
Add all those other smaller, but equally useful improvements and essential fixes and you have a solid update on your hands.
Hit the Update button the next time you’re in WordPress to install Astra 4.8. We can’t wait to see what you create!
What do you think of Astra 4.8? Do you have any suggestions for future updates? Anything you would love to see added to Astra?
Design without limits with Astra premium plans. Check them out here!
Abhijeet Kaldate is the co-founder and CRO of Brainstorm Force. With a keen eye for detail and a knack for getting things done, Abhijeet oversees the company's operations, managing key areas such as HR, marketing, design and finance.
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