GF Builder release notes

Licence activation and site registration, and a steadier mobile menu.

• GF Builder now asks for your licence key on a new site before its blocks, patterns and the Lab appear in the editor. Sites that already have your key are activated automatically when they update, with nothing to do.
• Register each website in your account at licenses.goodfellastech.com/account, then enter your key on that site. Local, staging and .test addresses work without registering.
• Once a site is activated it stays activated: if your licence lapses, every page keeps working and stays editable, exactly as before. Only new updates stop.
• The mobile menu now opens above everything else on the page, so headers, sticky bars and embedded content can no longer cover it, and the page behind it stays put while it is open.

See what changed in each release without leaving WordPress.

• The GF Builder Overview screen now has a Release history panel. It shows how many releases there have been, which version your site runs, and the three most recent releases, with a link to every release at licenses.goodfellastech.com/changelog.
• View details on the GF Builder row of your Plugins screen now opens a Changelog tab listing recent releases and what each one changed.
• Licensed sites that are up to date now show WordPress's Enable auto-updates link on the GF Builder row of the Plugins screen, so you can turn on automatic updates for GF Builder. Nothing changes until you click it.

Stat patterns show off the new stat displays, and Copy design now carries a stat's display.

• Three stat patterns now use the new stat displays when you insert them: Proof, Stats With Prose shows a before and after figure, Proof, Stats Beside Media shows a bar against a typical benchmark, and Stats Band shows two of its figures as rings. Pages where you already used these patterns are not changed.
• Copy design and Paste design on a GF Stat now copy its display and size as well, so a ring or bar style can be passed from one stat to another in one step.

Stats animate in as you scroll, and bar charts can highlight one row.

• Stats animate in as you scroll. Every GF Stat now fades in and fills its ring, gauge, bar or other meter the first time it scrolls into view, including stats already on your pages. Stats already on screen when the page loads, and visitors who prefer reduced motion, see the finished stat straight away. To keep a stat still, turn off Animate on scroll in its settings.
• Count-up now works on ring, gauge and breakdown stats. If you had switched on count-up for one of these displays, the number now counts up with the fill; before, it did not move. Count-up on every display now starts with the fill.
• Screen readers always hear a stat's real figure, before, during and after the count. A page printed before a stat has scrolled into view shows it finished.
• GF Chart: a horizontal bar chart can highlight one row. Turn on Highlight one row and pick the row; the other bars dim and the highlighted label turns bold. Charts without a highlight look exactly as before.

Stat breakdown ring and pie, real heading levels for card and list titles, a left-aligned hero, a curved backdrop, and readable titles in dark mode.

• Two new GF Stat displays: a breakdown ring and a pie. Enter up to five parts with a name and a number; each part gets its own colour that stays readable against the ring in every style pack and in dark mode, and the legend lists every part as real text. On these two displays the big number uses your normal text colour.
• Pricing card, timeline item, accordion item and stepper step titles can now be real headings (H2 to H6), chosen from the block toolbar, so screen readers and search engines see your page outline. A stepper whose steps are clickable keeps plain titles, because a heading cannot sit inside a button. Titles stay exactly as they are until you pick a level.
• New hero layout, Left: your copy sits on the left edge over a full background image instead of in the centre.
• New backdrop shape, Curved slope: a smooth curved edge that scales with the width of the page.
• Text over a light overlay now stays readable in dark mode.
• Pricing card, timeline, modal and dropdown titles were hard to read or invisible in dark mode. They now use the text colour around them, so they read in both modes. If you set a custom text colour on a section, these titles follow it too.
• When you add a new overlay to a hero, card, container or section, it now starts at 70% so text over a photo is easier to read. Overlays you already have are not changed.

Your edits to GF Base Theme are backed up before an update, plus card focal points, 44px admin buttons and tighter band spacing.

• Before GF Builder updates GF Base Theme, the Overview screen lists any theme files you changed or added. When the update runs, those files are first saved to a backup zip in wp-content/gf-builder-backups, and the notice names the backup. Backups are kept if you uninstall GF Builder.
• The same backup is made when you replace GF Base Theme with Appearance > Themes > Add New > Upload.
• Theme buttons follow your site's rules: they are hidden when file changes are switched off (DISALLOW_FILE_MODS) or when your account cannot install or update themes, and the Overview screen says why once.
• GF Base Theme's header now says it does not update from WordPress.org (Update URI: false). Its updates keep coming from GF Builder, which tells you in your dashboard when a newer copy is bundled.
• Card media images have their own focal point. When the image is cropped to a shape, choose which part stays in view. It is separate from the card's background image focal point.
• Hero, Backdrop and Scroll Pin no longer pick up the theme's 24px gap above them, the same as Section, so full-width bands sit flush. A margin you set yourself still applies.
• Buttons on GF Builder's admin screens are now at least 44px tall at every screen width, so they are easier to tap.

Google AdSense and Google Ads tools: a publisher ID, an Ad Slot block, an ads.txt editor and return and shipping policies for search.

• New AdSense publisher ID setting on the Analytics screen. Enter it once and GF Builder loads the AdSense code on every page, which also covers Auto ads and AdSense's site check. If Site Kit already adds AdSense, GF Builder leaves it to Site Kit.
• New GF Ad Slot block for placing an AdSense ad unit. It uses your site's publisher ID, so each block only needs the slot number, and it reserves the ad's space so the page does not jump when the ad loads.
• Ads follow your consent settings: in the EU, UK and Switzerland, advertising stays in Google's denied mode until a visitor agrees, and with a consent plugin installed, ads wait for the visitor's yes.
• New ads.txt editor under Tools, served at yoursite.com/ads.txt. When your AdSense ID is set, it suggests the Google line you need. If your site already has an ads.txt file, that file is used and the editor tells you so.
• Two new Google tag options on the Analytics screen: redact ad click identifiers while ad cookies are denied (on by default) and pass ad click information through page URLs when cookies are not allowed (off by default). If you use Google Tag Manager, set these in your container instead.
• New Return and shipping policy panel under Tools. Google can show your return and shipping policy beside your products in search results; GF Builder adds what you enter to your site's structured data in the format Google documents.

Stat displays: show a number as a ring, gauge, bar, comparison, trend or rating.

• The GF Stat block has a new Display setting with 10 looks: ring, half gauge, bar with an optional benchmark, us versus typical, before and after, trend line, change chip, icon tile, dots and stars. Each look only shows the settings it uses, and the editor previews it as you type.
• Display styles load only on pages that use a display, so pages with plain stats load nothing extra.
• Stat numbers stay readable in every colour, in light and dark mode and in every style pack, including colours you set yourself in the Site Editor. A tone keeps its own colour wherever it reads, and only colours that would be hard to read are shifted to the nearest readable shade.
• What you may notice after updating: stats that used the Light tone on a light page or the Dark tone on a dark page were invisible and now show in the card's text colour; Neutral now reads in dark mode; some tone colours in dark mode, and some in the Flat style pack, are a shade lighter or darker so they can be read. Labels do not change.
• Stats with an icon placed to the left or right now centre the icon beside both the number and its label.
• A benchmark label is your own text. The editor reminds you that naming a real competitor can carry legal risk, so you can back the comparison up.

Automatic breadcrumbs across your theme, with structured data Google can read.

• The GF Breadcrumb block has a new Automatic trail setting. It builds the trail from where the visitor is: parent pages, the post's first category, archives, search results, WooCommerce shop pages and events from The Events Calendar.
• GF Base Theme templates now show the automatic trail above the title on posts, child pages, archives, search results, WooCommerce shop, category and product pages, and event pages. The front page, the 404 page and top-level pages show none. If you customised a template in the Site Editor, your copy is kept as it is.
• The 11 bundled breadcrumb patterns now insert an automatic trail. Pages you already built are not changed.
• Only one trail shows per page: a breadcrumb you place in the page's content (directly or in a synced pattern) takes the place of the template's.
• The breadcrumb structured data now matches the trail visitors see. With Yoast active, Yoast's trail is used. On WooCommerce product pages there is one breadcrumb list, and it includes the Shop step.
• Your site name is now described to search engines as a WebSite, unless Yoast, Rank Math or SEOPress already does so.
• Private, draft and trashed parent pages never appear in a visitor's trail.

Consent plugins now unlock Google ads tracking when visitors agree, and US visitors are measured by default.

• When a visitor accepts marketing in your consent plugin (for example the free Complianz), GF Builder now tells Google straight away, so your Google Ads conversions and remarketing work for visitors who said yes. Before, some free consent plugins never passed that yes on to Google.
• In regions where privacy law works by opting out, such as the US, the Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok pixels now run until a visitor says no, as the law allows. Visitors whose browser sends Global Privacy Control are still treated as having said no. In the EU, UK and Switzerland nothing changes: pixels wait for a yes.
• The Analytics screen now describes exactly what happens with and without a consent plugin.
• Faster pages after a WebP library conversion: GF Builder looks up converted images in one batch instead of one at a time.
• Fixed: after restoring originals in the middle of a conversion, the panel could show more images restored than there were.

Automatic WebP images, better structured data with SEO plugins, and Global Privacy Control support.

• New: WebP images. Turn it on under GF Builder > Tools > Image optimisation and every JPEG and PNG you upload is saved as WebP, which is usually much smaller, so pages load faster. Your originals are kept. This is free for every site.
• New for licensed sites: convert your existing media library to WebP in one go, with progress you can pause and resume, and one click to restore the originals. Pages you built before the conversion switch to the WebP files automatically and keep their responsive image sizes. If your licence lapses, converted images keep working; only new library conversions wait for the licence.
• GF Builder notices other image optimisers (such as Smush Pro, EWWW, ShortPixel or Imagify) and steps aside instead of converting twice.
• Better structured data alongside SEO plugins: GF Builder no longer replaces Yoast's or Rank Math's breadcrumb trail with a shorter one, never outputs a breadcrumb list search engines would reject, and now adds its Article and Organization data on sites whose SEO plugin does not print them (such as free SEOPress).
• Privacy: GF Builder now honours Global Privacy Control. When a visitor's browser asks not to be tracked for advertising, Google's advertising signals stay off and the Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok pixels stay held, unless the visitor later says yes in your site's consent banner.
• The Analytics screen now starts on the recommended setting (measure outside Europe), explains when to use Google Tag Manager, warns when a pixel could fire twice, and notes that serving Google ads in Europe needs a Google-certified consent tool.
• Under the hood: features now register themselves in separate modules, which keeps GF Builder easier to extend and faster to develop.

Faster page loads on phones for sites with an overlay header, and a menu spacing fix.

• Faster: the header and the mobile menu no longer make the browser stop and re-measure the page while it loads. On sites whose header sits over the first section, this frees the phone to show the page's main image sooner. The header still measures itself, after the page has laid out, and keeps following logo, font and screen-size changes.
• Fixed: on pages with an animated block, menu links in the header could lose their padding and run together, and header buttons could shrink. GF Builder's stylesheets now always declare their layer order first, so the spacing is the same on every page.

Countdown gets new timers, layouts and end-of-timer actions.

• New countdown timers: count to a fixed date, show "Starts in" before a start date and then count to the deadline, or run an evergreen timer that gives each visitor the same length of time from their first view. An evergreen timer remembers a visitor only after they have agreed to preference storage through your consent plugin; without that, it starts again on each visit. You can also show times in your site's time zone or in each visitor's own.
• Choose which units show (days, hours, minutes, seconds) and how they are labelled: long, short, your own words, or none. Pick a layout: boxed, inline text, rings or flip cards. Flip cards stay still for visitors who ask their device for reduced motion.
• When the timer ends, the countdown can show a message, swap in content you add inside the block, or send visitors to another page or any https address. Redirects never fire for logged-in editors or in previews; you see a note instead.
• Optional "spots left" line under the timer, from a number you type or a WooCommerce product's stock. Stock is read when the page is built, so with page caching it can lag behind. Only published products show their stock.
• With Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager set up in GF Builder, countdowns send countdown_view and countdown_expired events, following your consent settings.
• Optional event details: switch on "This is an event", add the name, start and place (or online), and the countdown shows those details on the page and adds Event structured data for search engines.
• Changed: on narrow phones, boxed countdowns now show their tiles two by two instead of squeezing four into one row, so the numbers stay readable. Ring countdowns keep every ring the same size.
• Fixed: the seconds label could read "59 second" after the timer started ticking, and very long day counts could be cut off in the dark scheme.
• The bundled countdown pattern now counts to a date a year ahead.

Site-wide announcement bars you can target, schedule and switch on and off.

• New: Bars. Under GF Builder > Bars you can now create announcement bars that show across your site without adding them to each page. Choose where each bar shows: the whole site, particular pages or posts, whole post types, categories and tags (their archive pages and the posts in them), or special pages such as the front page, search results and 404 page, with exceptions. Give each bar a priority: on desktops and tablets the highest-priority bar shows at the top and another at the bottom; on phones only the single highest-priority bar shows, so a small screen never carries two. Turn a bar on or off from the Bars list, and schedule or limit it with the same Display Conditions the sticky bar block already has.
• A page that has its own sticky bar keeps it: site bars step aside on that page, and the Bars list, the bar editor and the Overview card point out every such page so nothing is hidden by surprise.
• You decide who can edit bars. Editors and Administrators can by default; from the Settings link on the Bars list an Administrator can allow other roles, including roles added by membership plugins.
• The Overview screen has a new Bars card showing how many bars are live, scheduled, ended or off, and the admin bar on your site has an "Edit bars" link.
• On classic themes such as Twenty Twenty-One, a bottom sticky bar now steps aside when the footer comes into view, as it already did on block themes.
• Fixed: updating GF Base Theme from the GF Builder screen could show a page of "File exists" warnings on some hosts even though the update worked. It now updates the theme the same way WordPress's own theme upload does, with no warnings, and removes files a newer version no longer ships.
• For developers: two new filters, `gf_builder_visitor_segments` and `gf_builder_visitor_in_segment`, let a membership plugin offer its levels as bar audiences. A bar limited to a level that no plugin recognises stays hidden and is flagged in the Bars list.

Hero images can stay off phones, and pages load lighter images.

• New Hero setting, "Show media on mobile": switch it off and, on phones, the Hero shows just your headline and buttons. The image is not hidden after the fact, it is never downloaded, so phone visitors get a faster page. Tablets and desktops are unchanged. It works for heroes with the picture beside the words, overlapping them, angled, under the words, or as a carousel. Background images, slideshows and videos are not affected. Heroes you have already built keep showing their image on phones until you switch it off; new heroes and the bundled hero patterns start with it off.
• Faster first paint: GF Builder now preloads a background photo only when it is in the first band of the page, so a photo further down no longer competes with what the visitor sees first.
• Lighter card images: cards in an even grid now tell the browser how wide they really are, so a three-across grid on desktop loads a smaller file than before.
• For developers: a new `gf_builder_background_preload` filter lets image plugins point the preload at the same file (for example a WebP) the page actually shows.

Fixes some PNG images showing as broken after upload.

• GF Builder saves your uploaded JPEG and PNG images as smaller WebP files. On many hosts, PNGs that use a limited colour palette, which includes most logos and anything run through an image compressor, were saved as an empty full-size file, so they showed as a broken image wherever the full size was used. Those PNGs now convert correctly with their transparency kept. GF Builder also now checks every converted file and keeps your original image if a conversion ever comes out empty. Images uploaded before this update are not changed; re-upload any that show as broken.

Fixes admin lists that stopped scrolling on sites running WooCommerce.

• On sites running WooCommerce, the lists in the WordPress admin, such as Products, Posts and Pages, stayed pinned in place while the rest of the screen scrolled. GF Builder's WooCommerce styling was loading on admin screens as well as on your site. It now loads only on your site, so admin lists scroll normally again. Your shop, cart and checkout look exactly as before.

Site search that finds what visitors can actually read, and no double-counted analytics alongside Site Kit.

• Better site search: searching your site now matches the words visitors see on GF pages, not the settings behind them. Searching an ordinary word like "secondary" or "card" no longer returns every GF page, and phrases with characters like & are found. Only text a logged-out visitor can see is searched, so members-only or scheduled content is never revealed. Existing pages are indexed automatically after the update, and developers can rebuild the index with `wp gf-builder search-index rebuild`. If you use Relevanssi, SearchWP or ElasticPress, GF leaves search to them.
• Google Site Kit: when Site Kit already places the same Google Analytics or Tag Manager tag as GF Builder, GF stops placing its own copy, so pageviews are no longer counted twice. If the two use different IDs, both keep running. GF's other tags and consent settings are unchanged.

Support for The Events Calendar, more ways to order Post Loops, and WooCommerce pages that finally follow your brand.

• The Events Calendar: a Post Loop set to events can list upcoming, past or all events in date order, with pagination and correct handling of recurring events. Event cards show the event's date and time instead of the publish date, and can also show the venue and the ticket price.
• Event pages, the month and list views, and Event Tickets checkout and confirmation pages now use your site's colours, fonts and buttons in every style, in light and dark mode, instead of the plugin's default blue.
• Post Loop can now be ordered by menu order, at random, or by a custom field.
• WooCommerce pages now pick up your brand colour, button hover state and font. A styling bug meant these had always fallen back to defaults.
• For developers: a filter to adjust any Post Loop's query (with a marker to recognise GF loops), a filter to add your own details to Post Loop cards, and an archive title and description binding so one archive template can serve every post type.

Automatic structured data for search engines, a lighter and faster editor, and leaner pages.

• Structured data, automatically: GF Builder now describes your content to search engines with JSON-LD, with no setup. Breadcrumbs, videos, FAQ accordions and disclosures (switch on "Describe as FAQ to search engines" on each one), blog posts and your organisation are covered. When Yoast SEO, Rank Math or SEOPress is active, GF adds its items into their schema instead of printing a second, competing one, and it never duplicates WooCommerce's own product markup. You can switch it off with the Structured data setting under GF Builder > Tools. Ordinary pages that contain none of these blocks carry no structured data from GF Builder.
• A faster editor: the editor script is about 17% smaller. The Lab, Design settings, Import HTML, the portfolio Builder, Save as preset and the icon library now load the first time you open them, with a short loading indicator.
• Leaner pages: the image lightbox script loads only for images that use a lightbox, and the background-video and slideshow script loads only on sections and heroes that have one.
• Faster on every request: pattern registration is cached, so pages no longer re-read every pattern file on each visit. Peak memory stays well under the 128 MB limit many hosts set.
• Housekeeping: removed unused code and styles throughout the plugin, including an unused first-run prompt in the Setup screen.

Six new blocks, scroll-driven motion, syntax-highlighted code, a table of contents, and GF blocks first in the inserter.

• New blocks: Pricing Table (a comparison table with a highlighted plan and a phone layout that keeps the row labels pinned), Share Buttons (X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky, WhatsApp, email, copy link and your device's share menu, with no third-party scripts), Before/After image comparison (drag with mouse, touch or keyboard), Map (Google Maps that loads only when the visitor clicks, for privacy), Lottie animations (play on load, hover, click or scroll, with a pause button and a still frame for reduced motion), and Chart (bar, line, pie and doughnut, drawn on the server, with a spreadsheet-style editor and paste-from-spreadsheet).
• Table of contents: the Navigation block can now list the headings on the page as a nested, screen-reader-friendly contents list, with a sidebar layout and a mobile peek tab.
• Scroll-driven motion: a new "With the scroll" animation trigger moves blocks in step with scrolling, plus three new effects: Rotate In, Drift Up and Drift Down. It is switched off for visitors who prefer reduced motion.
• Headings: the typewriter option becomes "Rotating words" with Typed, Slide up and Fade styles, and the highlight format gains a hand-drawn circle that draws itself when scrolled into view.
• Code blocks are syntax-highlighted on the server for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, PHP, Bash, Python and SQL, with a copy button, optional line numbers and colours that follow light and dark mode.
• GF blocks now come first in the "+" quick inserter and the "/" menu, including inside the Lab.
• Navigation can show menus from any theme menu location, such as a footer or social menu, not only the primary one.
• Contrast improvements: the Flat style uses a deeper blue behind white text so it meets accessibility guidelines, outline chips have clearer borders, and several texts on dark backgrounds are easier to read.
• The email opt-in block introduced in 2.31.0 has been withdrawn, because it never registered correctly in the editor. A dedicated email-list plugin is in development.
• Fixes: removed a "translation loaded too early" notice that could appear on sites with debugging turned on, fixed the home template showing invalid blocks in the Site Editor, fixed two admin links that led to an error page, and tightened compatibility checks for PHP 8.0 and WordPress 6.8.
• A new GF Builder icon on the Plugins and Updates screens.

Fix: the Email Opt-in block works on PHP 8.0 and 8.1.

• On sites running PHP 8.0 or 8.1, submitting an Email Opt-in block connected to Mailchimp, Kit or ActiveCampaign failed with a server error. Subscriptions now go through on every PHP version GF Builder supports.

Competitive features: display conditions, dynamic content, popup triggers, email opt-in, selective sync.

• Show or hide any block based on login status, user role, date range, day of week, time of day, or URL parameters. Conditions are evaluated on the server, so hidden blocks are never sent to the browser.
• Three new dynamic content sources let you display site data (title, tagline, URL), current user information (name, bio, avatar, role), and URL parameters in any block via the native binding system. ACF fields already work automatically.
• Modals and offcanvas panels can now auto-open on a timed delay, at a scroll percentage, or on exit intent. Frequency caps limit how often the popup fires: once per session, once ever, or a set number of times per week.
• A new Email Opt-in block connects directly to Mailchimp, Kit (ConvertKit), or ActiveCampaign. Drop the block, pick a service, and subscribers go straight to your list with no third-party form plugin needed.
• Saved presets gain a third sync mode: design stays linked across every instance while text, images, and links are local to each copy. Update a card's styling once and it propagates everywhere.
• WooCommerce pages are polished end to end: My Account (orders, addresses, login), order confirmation, and product category cards all inherit the site's design tokens automatically.
• Bindable blocks expanded from 16 to 30, so more blocks can source their content from post meta, ACF fields, or any binding source.

The Lab gets a full builder toolkit, and the portfolio block gets a drag-to-arrange tool.

• The Lab now lets you reorder and remove sections by dragging pills in a strip below the toolbar, or right-clicking for a context menu with move, duplicate and remove. Favourite sections are saved with a star toggle and appear in their own tab.
• A wireframe view strips backgrounds and fades images so you can focus on layout structure. Three responsive preview widths (desktop, tablet, mobile) let you check how the page reads at each size without leaving the Lab.
• Save an entire Lab composition as a reusable design and load it later from the Saved Designs tab. Export layouts as a JSON file and import them on another site.
• A new Block Configurator tab lets you pick any GF block type, configure it with a live preview and the full inspector, then insert the configured block onto the canvas.
• The portfolio block gains a Builder panel: upload images, and the tool auto-arranges them by shape. Drag a tile to the centre of another to group them into a carousel, or drag to an edge to reorder. Capture-time grouping suggests carousels from photos taken in the same session. Pinned call-to-action tiles hold their position through a rearrange.
• Masonry column counts are now consistent between the server and the browser, fixing a mismatch on wide screens that could shift tiles when loading more results.

The Lab: a full page builder inside the editor, and a streamlined admin.

• A new GF Lab button in the editor toolbar opens a full-screen workspace where you browse sections by category, add them to a canvas, edit text and images in place, and apply everything to the page at once. Every GF control works inside the Lab exactly as it does on the normal canvas.
• The admin menu is streamlined to five screens: Overview (getting started), The Lab (create or open a page and go straight to building), Analytics, Tools and Licence. Design settings, navigation and setup all live in the block editor and Site Editor now, so the screens that duplicated them are removed.
• Opening a page from the Lab screen creates a draft with your title and auto-opens the Lab modal, so you go from naming a page to browsing sections in one click.

Cropped images load sharper, and stacked media objects can lead with the text.

• Images with an aspect ratio crop (square, landscape or portrait) now request the right file size from the browser. Previously, a cropped picture asked for the width of its visible box rather than the width it was actually drawn at, which could fetch a file roughly half as wide as needed and upscale it. The fix covers every image block, including images inside a gallery that sets its own aspect ratio.
• A new focal-point picker appears in the image block’s settings whenever an aspect ratio is active. Drag the point onto the subject you want to keep in frame when the crop cuts into the picture. The centre is the default, so every image saved before this update renders identically.
• Media objects (an image beside a block of text) now offer a “Stack order” control when stacking is turned on. Choose “Copy first” to put the headline and text above the picture on phones, which is useful when the words are the primary content and the image is illustrative.

Two new Portfolio Gallery layouts, Tiles and Editorial, with Studio and Editorial presets to start from.

• Tiles sets your work in a steady rhythm of large and small tiles, and every page of the gallery finishes on a full row, including pages brought in by Load more.
• Editorial gives each piece of work room to breathe, with its story beside it. On phones, no picture is ever taller than the screen.
• The new Studio and Editorial presets are ready to fill with your own work, alongside Photographer, Wedding and Designer.
• Captions under masonry pictures now keep their place as the page loads, whatever fonts your site uses, so nothing jumps.
• Galleries on right-to-left sites (Arabic, Hebrew and others) now mirror correctly, and the full-screen viewer's arrows and swipes move in the reading direction.
• On phones, captions shown over pictures are shortened so they always fit their tile.

A new Portfolio Gallery block for photographers, designers and anyone who shows their work.

• The Portfolio Gallery lays out your pictures in Masonry, Rows or Mosaic. Rows line up edge to edge without cropping, and Mosaic mixes large and small tiles while never cutting away much of any picture.
• A tile can be a single picture, a small carousel of several pictures (swipe or hover to browse), or a call-to-action tile with your own words and button.
• The gallery is laid out before the page appears, so it loads without jumping as the pictures arrive, which also keeps your page's Google layout-shift score clean.
• Visitors can open any picture full screen, step through the gallery and each carousel with the keyboard or by swiping, and close it by swiping down.
• Category chips filter the gallery in place, and Load more or infinite scroll bring in more work without moving what's already on screen. Every page of the gallery also has a real address, so search engines can find all of your work.
• Captions and call-to-action words are saved with your page, so search, SEO plugins and excerpts can read them.
• Start from the Photographer, Wedding or Designer preset, each ready to fill with your own pictures.

In a hero with words over a carousel, the waiting pictures now recede into the page.

• The pictures waiting their turn now sit behind the front picture on the side of your words, instead of piling up against the edge of the screen. Each one comes forward in turn, and the one leaving slides out past the page's margin, so the carousel reads as one smooth movement.

In a hero with words over a carousel, the picture now always lines up with the edge of the page.

• On shorter browser windows, where the picture can't fill all the space beside the words, it now sits against the page's side margin instead of leaving a gap at the edge of the screen. The words still overlap the picture, just by a little less.
• A deliberately small picture moves in from the margin just enough to stay under the words, so the words-over look always shows.

A new Overlay header that lets your hero start at the very top of the window, and a cleaner words-over-carousel hero.

• The header has a new Overlay position. It stays pinned to the top like Sticky, but takes up no space, so the first section of the page (usually your hero) starts at the top of the window and runs underneath the header. That first section is given extra top padding automatically, so its words are never hidden behind the header.
• In a hero with words over a carousel, the picture now starts beneath the words, and the soft wash behind the words covers only the picture. The dark empty panel that could appear between the words and the picture is gone.

Links and accent-coloured text are now easy to read in every style and with any brand colour.

• Wherever your primary colour is used as text (links, eyebrows, accent words and active items), it is now darkened just enough to meet the WCAG AA contrast standard (4.5:1) on light backgrounds. Buttons, fills and other shapes keep your exact brand colour.
• This works automatically for any brand colour you choose in Design Settings, in all three styles (Modern, Flat and Material), including text on glass surfaces.

Carousels in every block with a picture, heroes that let the picture lead, and pagination with load more and infinite scroll.

• The 3D carousel is now a media choice in heroes of every layout, cards, images and media objects. Each carousel can show captions, be tilted, and be sized by height, shape, fit and focal point.
• Heroes have new settings that let a picture be the focus: Hero width (content, wide or full), Split (how much of the width goes to the words), Bleed (the picture runs to the edge of the screen) and Room. A side-by-side hero's picture at full width can now be about twice as large as before.
• Words over the media now works with a full-width hero: the headline sits over the carousel on a soft wash, which strengthens itself when a light picture would make the words hard to read. On phones the carousel sits above the words at full width, so the whole carousel can be swiped.
• The carousel's pause button can now be shown only to keyboard users (the default for heroes). Mouse and touch visitors pause the carousel by pointing at it or pressing and holding it. Carousels can also be set to move only when a visitor swipes, with no automatic play.
• When a setting can't have an effect in the layout you've chosen, the editor now disables it and says why, instead of silently ignoring it.
• Pagination has five types: page numbers, previous and next, "Page 2 of 8", Load more and infinite scroll. Infinite scroll pauses after three pages with a Keep loading button so your footer stays reachable. Both still use real page addresses and work without JavaScript.
• Pagination has four looks (pills, squares, minimal and joined), three sizes and three alignments, set once for the whole site in Design Settings and changeable for any list. The same look now also applies to WordPress's own Query Loop pagination, and phones get large, one-row page controls.

A Raised card surface and a Display Small heading size.

• Cards have a new Raised surface: a slightly lifted card that uses your site's raised surface colour and a deeper resting shadow, without the hover lift of the Elevated style. The card's own Shadow setting still applies, so choosing None removes the shadow.
• Headings have a new Display Small size, between Display Medium and Heading XL. It is worked out from those two sizes, so it always sits between them whichever style pack or type scale your site uses.
• Cards and headings already saved with these names start using them straight away; nothing needs to be re-saved.

GF Builder now works fully on WordPress 6.8 and 6.9, not only on the newest WordPress.

• On WordPress 6.8 and 6.9, anchors set on GF sections, heroes and other blocks were dropped from the page, so in-page links such as "Jump to pricing" went nowhere. Anchors now work on every supported WordPress, and an anchor you type in the editor is saved.
• On WordPress 6.8, blocks connected to live data (block bindings, such as a post's terms in a list) showed their placeholder text. They now show the real value on the page. The editor on 6.8 cannot preview a bound value, and now says so in the block settings.
• GF Builder is now tested against WordPress 6.8 as well as the latest release on every change, so the minimum version it lists is one it has been checked on.

A new Filter block for shops, portfolios and blogs, and full control over the size and shape of a hero carousel.

• The new Filter block lets visitors narrow a Post Loop by category, tag, any taxonomy, author, year, price, stock or rating, and sort it. Three ready-made presets (Shop, Portfolio and Blog) are in the pattern inserter.
• Filters can open from a button, sit in a bar above the results, or run down a sidebar; on phones every layout becomes a sheet that slides up from the bottom and can be swiped away. The active filters show as chips that remove with one tap, and the result count updates as you choose.
• Filtering is saved in the page address, so a filtered view can be shared, bookmarked and reloaded, and the Back button steps through your choices. Page numbers keep the filter, and a new choice returns to the first page. Filtered views ask search engines not to index them, pointing to the unfiltered page instead, so they never compete with it. The Filter also works without JavaScript.
• Hero carousels have new Media height (Small, Medium, Large or Screen), Frame (Auto, 16:9, 3:2, 4:3, square or 4:5) and Fit settings. Auto frames the carousel to the shape of your first picture. Fill crops each picture around a focal point you choose per picture, and Show whole fits the entire picture over a soft blur of itself. Existing carousels look exactly as before.
• Carousel pictures now load at the size they are actually shown, including the extra size the 3D motion zooms them to, so the front picture stays sharp. A centred hero's carousel is no longer squeezed to the width of the text above it.

Buttons in a dark header are readable again, and GF Builder is now checked against the latest WordPress on every change.

• Outline and ghost buttons placed in a header with the Dark or Brand look (or the Dark scheme) now use the header's light text colour. Previously they kept dark text meant for light backgrounds, so a button such as a Menu trigger could disappear against the bar. Light panels inside a dark header, such as a white menu panel, keep their own dark text. Headers already on your site pick this up automatically; nothing needs to be re-saved.
• Tested with WordPress 7.1.2.

Headers line up with the rest of your page, you choose where the menu turns into a drawer, and text with quotes or ampersands is kept when GF Builder saves it for you.

• Headers now use the same side margin as the rest of your page, following your site's spacing on phones, tablets and wide screens. Previously they sat a fixed distance from the edge at every width. Headers you inserted with 2.22.0 are updated automatically the first time you open your dashboard after updating, and a side margin you set yourself is left as it is.
• The header variations and the Rebuild button now build the new phone header, with your logo and name on one line and the slide-out menu. The Layout setting now arranges the header: Centered brand puts your name in the middle, and Split with actions keeps a call-to-action button beside the menu.
• A new Drawer from setting on the Navigation block chooses where the menu becomes a menu button: below tablet size, below desktop size (the default, unchanged), or below wide screens.
• Blocks can now be hidden on wide screens (1280 pixels and up) as well as on phones, tablets and desktops.
• Two header styles could show light text on a light background in dark mode. Both now read clearly in light and dark.
• Text containing quotes, ampersands or angle brackets is now kept exactly when GF Builder writes content for you: saving a header from the Navigation screen, building a starter site, or saving a block preset. Previously those settings could be lost.
• For developers: wp gf-builder validate now lists any GF block whose saved settings were damaged by an earlier save that dropped backslashes, with the page, the block and what to re-enter, so nothing is lost silently.
• For developers: the navigation search can be pointed at a different results page or given extra fields with two new filters, and a cancelable gf:navigation-search event fires as visitors search.

A new phone header: a menu button that opens a slide-out menu, search one tap away, and your logo and name kept on one line.

• The Navigation block has a new Drawer option for phones and tablets. The menu button is a hamburger by default and can instead be two lines, dots, a grid, a chevron or a plus, shown alone, with the word Menu, or as the word only, in a plain, outlined or filled style. The same button closes the menu, turning into an X (the chevron flips instead) with a morph, spin or squeeze animation, or none.
• The menu can slide in from the right or the left, drop down from the header, or fill the screen. Its colour can match the header or be set light, dark or your brand colour, and its links can arrive one after another or all at once. Visitors can close it with the button, the Escape key, a tap outside it, or a swipe on phones.
• Grouped links open inside the menu in place, one group at a time, and on larger screens the same groups are your usual drop-down menus.
• Search can sit in the header bar, where one tap opens a search box across the header; stay open under the header; sit at the top of the menu; or be turned off. It uses your site's normal WordPress search and results page.
• The Header block has a new Width setting: full width, wide, or content width. New headers and the header patterns now start full width, show your site logo and name side by side on one line, and use the new menu with search in the bar. Headers already on your pages are unchanged.
• While the menu is open, screen readers stay within the header and menu, and the page behind it stops scrolling.

No more failed font downloads from leftover theme settings, and steadier angled pictures in Safari.

• If your saved site styles still name a theme font file that your theme no longer includes, GF Builder now leaves that file out instead of asking the browser for it on every page. Your text keeps its font from the copy in your font library, and each page loads without the failed request.
• Angled hero pictures now describe their tilt in a way Safari reads exactly as other browsers do, and they respond to a finger with the same rules as tilted cards and images.

Tilt pictures and cards into the page, and overlap rows of cards, with touch gestures on phones.

• Images, cards, media objects, videos, pricing cards and testimonials have a new Tilt setting. Choose how far the block leans (Gentle, Standard or Strong) and which edge comes forward, and optionally have it straighten when a visitor hovers over it. Pictures in a gallery can each tilt too. Blocks with an entrance animation swing into their angle as they appear.
• Grids and side-by-side stacks can now overlap their cards in a row of any length. Choose how far they overlap, which card sits on top (the first, the last, or the middle one raised like a featured pricing plan), and how they are arranged: a flat row, a fan like prints laid on a table, or the outer cards turned toward the middle.
• The card a visitor points at, or reaches with the keyboard, comes smoothly to the front, so nothing stays hidden behind its neighbour.
• On phones and tablets, a tilted block leans toward a finger dragged across it and settles back, and a tap straightens it. Tapping a covered card brings it to the front, and a tap on it once it is in front follows its link. Scrolling and pinch-to-zoom keep working as normal. On phones, overlapping rows stack neatly instead.
• Four new ready-made patterns show these settings: a pricing row with the middle plan raised, a fan of testimonials, a tilted picture beside text, and a grid of tilted cards.

Four new hero layouts, including a 3D slideshow, with touch gestures on phones, plus better readability in dark mode.

• The hero block has three new layouts. Overlapping Cards places your text on a card over the picture, left over right or right over left, with a choice of how far they overlap. Angled Image tilts the picture into the page and swings it into place as it appears. Text Over Image runs a large headline off the page and across the picture.
• Text Over Image keeps your words readable with a choice of protection: a soft wash in the section's colour, fading the picture into the page, or a glow behind the letters. The picture can be flat, angled, or the new 3D slideshow.
• A new 3D slideshow hero shows several pictures side by side with your text, in four motions to choose from: pictures approaching from the distance, a turning ring, a picture dissolving as the next one swings in, or prints taken from the bottom of a pile and laid on top. It pauses when a visitor hovers over it, focuses it with the keyboard, scrolls it out of view or presses its pause button, and holds a still picture for visitors who turn motion off.
• On phones and tablets, visitors can drag the slideshow with a finger, flick to the next picture, and touch and hold to pause it. Angled pictures lean toward a finger and settle back. Scrolling the page and pinch-to-zoom keep working as normal.
• Sixteen new ready-made patterns show these layouts, as full heroes and as smaller page-top sections for inner pages.
• With your site in dark mode, sections and cards you painted with a light colour now keep dark, readable text inside them, and outline and ghost buttons, breadcrumbs and pause buttons stay readable too.
• On phones, the text-over-picture layout now leaves more of your picture visible above the headline.
• Dark sections set up with the older dark background classes now show the Sheen, Grid and Wash decorations correctly.

Dark sections keep their decorations subtle, and list items with a heading and text line up properly.

• On dark sections, the Sheen and Grid decorations no longer paint a pale haze or light-grey lines over the section. They now show as a faint light accent, as intended.
• A list item with an icon and more than one block of content, such as a heading and a paragraph, now stacks that content neatly beside the icon, whichever side the icon is on.

Links stay readable inside light boxes on dark sections.

• A white or light box placed on a dark section or dark hero, such as a card or a raised panel, now shows its links in your normal link colour instead of white on white.

Dark heroes, left-aligned card content, and matching image shapes across card rows.

• The hero block has a new Dark style. Text, links and outline or ghost buttons in it turn light automatically, so they stay readable on a dark background.
• Outline and ghost buttons can now be recoloured from a surrounding section or theme, so they stay readable on any background.
• Text inside a card now lines up with the card's heading instead of being centred when it is narrower than the card.
• Cards have a new image aspect ratio setting (square, landscape or portrait), so a row of cards with differently shaped images lines up at the same height. Existing cards are unchanged.

Your theme's own colours now reach GF highlights and alerts, and GF buttons can use a gradient from the Site Editor.

• If your theme sets its own brand colours, GF highlight colours and alerts now use them too, without any change in the Site Editor. Sites using the GF Base Theme's standard colours look exactly the same.
• Picking a gradient for Buttons in the Site Editor now applies it to GF's main buttons as well, and themes can set a button gradient without special overrides.
• In the editor, undoing a colour change before you save now shows the original colours straight away.
• Child themes of GF Base Theme now load the base theme's own styles, and no longer load the child theme's styles twice.

Highlight and alert colours follow your Site Editor palette, the editor previews dark pages correctly, and long menus scroll on phones.

• If you change your main colour in the Site Editor, the highlight colours used for the current menu item and for soft and outline button hovers now follow it. Changing the info, success, warning or danger colours now changes the matching alerts and badges too. Sites that haven't changed these colours look exactly the same as before.
• A page set to dark on a light site now opens in the editor in dark mode, so what you edit matches what visitors see.
• A very long menu now scrolls up and down in the phone menu instead of spilling off the side of the screen.

More of what you set in the Site Editor now reaches GF blocks, and existing menus are updated for you.

• After updating, GF Builder checks your existing menus once and fixes them. Links to your pages now follow those pages, so renaming a page or changing its address updates the menu, and a link that was always highlighted as the current page now highlights only on that page. You'll see a short notice when it's done, and nothing else on your pages is changed.
• Menu dropdown labels taken from a page now follow that page's title too.
• GF text now uses the text size and line spacing you set in the Site Editor, including the smaller size on phones.
• GF links use the Site Editor's link colour, and image, video and embed captions use its Captions style.
• Dark mode now follows palette colours you change in the Site Editor. In light mode, the page background and text colour you set there are no longer overridden.
• Navigation menus built in the Site Editor now show their Home link, page lists, search box and social icons in a GF navigation block, and hide links to unpublished pages.

Your Site Editor button styles and page widths now reach GF blocks, and menus follow your pages.

• Changes you make to Buttons in Appearance > Editor > Styles now apply to GF buttons: colour, hover colour, corner shape, font and weight. The editor shows the change straight away, before you save. GF's own button sizes are kept.
• Changing the content width or wide width in the Site Editor's Layout settings now resizes GF containers and heroes too.
• Menu links you add from a page now follow that page. Rename it or change its address and the menu updates itself. If the page is unpublished or deleted, its link disappears from the menu instead of leading to an error page.
• Menus now highlight the page the visitor is actually on, instead of always highlighting the same link.

Cards that reveal their text on hover now keep the title with the button.

• On a card set to reveal its text on hover, the title used to float on its own above an empty gap while the text was hidden. It now sits just above the button, then moves up smoothly as the text fades in.
• The card itself never changes size, so nothing around it moves. Keyboard users and anyone who has turned off animations still see everything straight away.

A footer credit line that keeps its own year up to date and names the agency that designed the site.

• New GF Site Credit block: © with the current year and your business name, Built with GF Builder, and an optional Designed by line with a link to the agency's website. The year updates itself every January.
• Fill in the agency name and website once in the block's sidebar and every credit on the site uses them. The Built with GF Builder part can be switched off there too.
• Every GF footer pattern and the GF Base Theme footer now include the credit, replacing a copyright line that showed a fixed year and a sample business name.

Fonts you pick in the Site Editor now reach every GF block.

• Changing the Text or Headings font in Appearance > Editor > Styles now changes GF paragraphs and headings too, and GF buttons, menus, badges and form fields now use your Text font. Before, they all kept the original font no matter what you chose.
• Sites that have not changed their fonts look exactly the same after updating.

Search engines and social links finally get a description of your pages, plus fixes to cards, menus and buttons found by testing a real site.

• Your pages now tell Google and social networks what they are about. WordPress never adds a description of its own, so unless you run an SEO plugin your pages had none. GF Builder now writes one from the page's own words, so it is always in step with what is on the page. If you use Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, Slim SEO, The SEO Framework or Jetpack, nothing changes: they keep control of it.
• A menu that lists categories can now keep one hand-written link beside them, such as an "All industries" link at the end of the list.
• The Muted style on a navigation link now actually looks muted. It had been rendering the same as the plain style on every page.
• A button pinned to the bottom of a card no longer touches the text above it when the card is full.
• In a header row that cannot wrap, a call-to-action button no longer squashes the logo, badge or menu beside it, and the mobile menu drops below the row instead of pushing the menu button sideways.
• The mobile menu now closes when you press Escape or tap one of its links.
• A looping typing headline now has a pause button, so the movement can be stopped. It appears only while the text is looping.
• The Floating action button style now floats in the corner as intended, including inside a card.
• Fixed as well: images in steps and timelines keep their size, step numbers show in interactive steppers, and card icons no longer upset the spacing.

Fourteen new settings asked for by a real site build: parallax, a typing headline, card icons and hover reveals, button hover colours, and more.

• Hero and Section backgrounds can move with the scroll (parallax), at three strengths. It switches itself off for visitors who have asked for less motion.
• A Heading can type its last words in turn, optionally mistyping and correcting itself. Screen readers hear the finished sentence once, and a visitor who prefers less motion sees the final word straight away.
• Cards can carry a small icon badge, and can keep their body text hidden until the card is hovered or reached with the keyboard. Touch screens always show everything.
• A card can make its button the whole-card link, so the tile is clickable everywhere and keyboard and screen-reader users meet one link instead of two.
• GF Button has hover colours (background, text and border), which also show when its card is hovered, and it now has the Animation panel.
• Animations can wait for the block around them to finish ("After the block around it"), and delays now go down to a tenth of a second.
• A navigation dropdown can list a category or other taxonomy automatically, so a menu like "Industries" stays current as content is added.
• Stepper steps can carry an image, and Backdrop shapes can draw themselves in as they scroll into view.
• Button labels stay on one line wherever there is room, and the editor tells you when a label is long enough to wrap. Media Objects can stay stacked through tablet sizes, and Cards can use different padding on tablets and desktops.
• Fixed along the way: the Floating action button style now floats as intended, linked cards inside linked cards can be clicked, images in steps and timelines keep their size, and interactive steppers show their step numbers.

Seven fixes found by building a real site: card alignment, right-hand images, sticky bars, stepper tabs, phone scrolling and overlines on dark cards.

• A Card set to Vertical alignment Bottom or Middle now actually moves its content there. With Equal height switched on, which is the default, the text stayed at the top of the card. Photo tiles in a row are the place you will notice it most.
• A Card with Equal height switched off and a Vertical alignment chosen no longer squeezes its text into a narrow column in the middle of the card.
• A Media Object with the image on the right now gives the image the width you picked. Before this, Wide on the right produced a narrow image, and Narrow produced a wide one.
• A Sticky Bar placed inside a page now runs the full width of the screen, the same as one placed in the footer. A bar pinned to the top of the screen now sits flush with the top edge instead of a little way down.
• Stepper-style tabs now centre each step's number above its label on the line that joins them.
• Blocks that slide in from the left or right no longer make the whole page scroll sideways on a phone before they have animated.
• A Text block with the Strong overline is now readable on a dark card or a dark section. It used to stay in your brand colour, which disappears against a dark background if your brand colour is dark too.
• If you worked around any of these on your site, the workaround can come out once you update. Nothing else about your pages changes.

The Divider's spacing setting works now, and the Animation panel is where you can see it.

• The spacing you choose on a Divider — None, Small, Large, XL — was being ignored on almost every page. A divider inside any GF container took a fixed gap from WordPress instead, so all four settings looked the same. Medium is the one that hid it, because Medium happened to be the same number as the gap it was losing to. All five now do exactly what they say.
• If you set a Divider to None or XL and wondered why nothing happened, that is this. Your existing pages will now show the spacing you originally picked.
• Every block that can animate — Section, Hero, Container, Card, Grid, Stack, Text, Heading, Image and more — has an Animation panel with a fade-and-rise on scroll, delays, and staggering for a group of children. That panel was collapsed by default, so most people never knew it was there. It now opens with the one Effect control visible; the rest appear once you choose an effect.
• Nothing about how a page looks changes because of that second item — the settings were always there, and now you can find them.

Buttons and chips on a dark band are readable again, and a backdrop panel can now be one solid colour.

• 2.13.0 fixed cards sitting on a dark band you had made by choosing a dark colour. It did not fix the buttons and chips ON that band, which were still too dark to read — an Outline button measured barely distinguishable from the background. Those now take the right ink, in every place a dark band can come from.
• A chip inside a pale card on a dark band had the opposite problem: it was being lightened to survive the dark band behind the card, and came out white on a white card. Also fixed.
• Backdrop shapes have a new Fill setting. The clipped shapes — Blob, Wedge, Ribbon and Split — have always faded their second colour out towards the far edge, so setting both colours the same still gave you a panel that faded to almost nothing. Choose Flat and it stays solid all the way across, which is what you want for a panel in one brand colour. Ramp is the default and is exactly what those shapes did before.
• If a page of yours had unreadable text in any of those places, it will simply be readable now — there is nothing to change and nothing to re-save.

Cards and figures on a dark band are readable again, and there is a new sticky bar for your main call to action.

• If you set a section's background to a dark colour — either one from your palette or a colour you typed in — any card sitting on it was showing white text on a white card. The words were there and completely unreadable. This is fixed, and so is the same problem on a dark band made from a gradient or a photograph.
• A figure block (a big number with a label) on a dark band had the number itself turn white while its box stayed pale, so the number disappeared. The label beside it stayed readable, which is probably why nobody spotted it. Both now read properly.
• The soft glow and sheen you can add behind a section were built for pale backgrounds only. On a dark band the sheen painted a grey haze across the top and the glow was too faint to see. Both now have proper dark-background versions.
• Cards have a new Vertical alignment setting. Set a Minimum height in the Dimensions panel and choose Bottom, and a row of image tiles will line their headings up along one baseline instead of each sitting wherever its own picture ends. This is what makes a row of photo tiles look like a set rather than a pile.
• Dropdown menus can now open when the mouse rests on them instead of needing a click. It is off by default — turn on “Open on hover” on the menu group. It only applies to a mouse on a screen 1024px or wider; touch, keyboard and clicking are completely unchanged.
• New Sticky Bar block. Put a sentence and a button in it and it appears once a visitor has scrolled past your hero, sticks to the bottom of the screen, and gets out of the way when they reach the footer so it never covers your footer's own call to action. Visitors can close it, and it stays closed for the rest of their visit.
• One pattern, Footer With Accreditations, had a broken name that stopped it being referenced reliably. Fixed.
• Nothing changes on a page you have already built unless you turn on one of the new settings yourself.

A column with nothing in it no longer holds half your row empty, and the editor now tells you what you left blank.

• A two-column row where one side was never filled in — a video you had not uploaded yet, an image whose file was deleted — used to leave an empty half beside the side that did have something in it. The empty half is now gone from the page entirely.
• Grid and Media Object have a new setting, "When a column is empty", with three answers. Keep the space leaves the row exactly as it is today and is what every existing page already does. Fill the row lets the remaining column stretch across the whole width. Centre it keeps that column at its normal width and centres it, which usually reads better for a card than stretching it. The setting only applies where the row is two columns wide; a three- or four-across grid is left alone.
• Nothing changes on a page you have already built unless you choose one of the two new answers yourself.
• The editor now lists anything you have left blank. It appears in the sidebar as "Unfilled slots", naming each one — an image with nothing uploaded, a button with no link — and telling you whether that block will be missing from the page completely or will simply appear with that piece absent. Clicking one takes you straight to it.
• When you publish, the same list appears one more time with a tick-box, so a page does not go out with a hole in it just because nobody noticed. Saving a draft is never blocked — a page you are still building is meant to have gaps.
• Nothing is hidden or deleted on your behalf. If you remove an image and its caption is left behind, the caption stays exactly where you put it and the missing image is what gets listed. What to do about it is your call.

Two more places where a button or a chip was too faint to read on a coloured background.

• A Ghost button on a frosted glass panel over a dark band was too faint to read. It now uses a deeper shade of your brand colour in that one place, so it stays recognisably the same colour and is comfortably legible. A Ghost button anywhere else is unchanged.
• A chip in the Glass style was too faint on a band using your secondary colour, in every tone. The pill behind the label now sits a little deeper against that background, which brings the text back to a comfortable contrast.
• Both are contrast fixes only. Nothing moves, resizes or changes shape on a page you have already built.

Buttons and chips that were invisible on a dark background now read properly.

• Outline and Ghost buttons inside a white box on a dark band were drawing white text on a white face. The button was there and correctly shaped, and you could not read a word of it. They now take their ink from the box they sit in.
• A chip using one of the named tones — Primary, Success, Danger and the rest — in the Outline or Glass style was unreadable on a dark hero or band. It now keeps its colour and is legible against the darker ground. Chips in the Filled style are unchanged.
• The dots under a carousel are now reliable to tap. They were smaller than the minimum a touch target should be, so on a phone they were easy to miss. The dots look exactly as they did; the area that answers a tap around each one is larger.
• The backdrop block no longer offers a Second colour on the shapes that never read one. The Orb and Wash shapes paint from the first colour alone, so setting a second colour did nothing and there was no way to tell that from the editor.
• Style packs can now set the gradient angle and the fade of a backdrop's clipped shapes, which were fixed before. Nothing changes on a page you have already built.

GF Builder now has its own icon on your Updates screen, and the bundled theme shows itself rather than someone else's demo site.

• The theme that ships with GF Builder had the wrong preview picture in Appearance → Themes: a mock-up of an unrelated design studio, left over from a test build. It now shows GF Base Theme itself.
• On Dashboard → Updates, and in the “View version details” panel, GF Builder appeared with an empty grey square where every other plugin shows its logo. It now has one.
• Nothing about your site's appearance or content changes in this release. Both fixes are pictures.

Equal-height grids and cards line up properly, and the Design screen says when Global Styles is overruling it.

• Equal-height grids that wrap onto more than one row now really are equal. Cards in the second row used to be a different height from the first, which read as random because it only showed on grids that wrapped.
• Cards set to equal height now line their content up as well as their boxes. In a row of testimonials the attributions sat at three different heights even though the cards matched; they now sit on one line.
• If a block is using an icon name that is not one of the bundled icons — after a rename, or a typo in a template — the editor now tells you, instead of silently drawing nothing.
• The Design screen now tells you when Styles in the Site Editor is deciding part of your design instead of that screen. It could only report colours before, so on a site where Global Styles was setting spacing, shape or type it said nothing at all while those settings were being overruled.
• A template row reading a post's categories or tags now behaves the same however the setting is capitalised. “Parent” and “parent” previously took different paths, and one of them quietly stopped inheriting.

A link kept beside the menu button can now use a shorter label there, while your header keeps the full one.

• When you keep a navigation link visible on the bar next to the menu button, you can now give it a shorter label for that bar alone — “Free Roadmap” beside the menu button, “Get Your Marketing Roadmap” in the header. Set it in Short label for the mobile bar on the link. Until now the two shared a single label, so shortening it to fit the bar also shortened it everywhere else.
• Opening the menu shows the full label again, at every screen width, because there is room for it once the menu is open.
• Leave the field empty and nothing changes — the link keeps one label everywhere, exactly as it does today.
• What a screen reader announces always matches what is on the screen, whichever label is showing.

A hero sized to the screen now really does end where the screen ends — and so do the Small, Medium and Large sizes.

• This corrects something the 2.11.0 note promised and did not deliver. A hero set to Full viewport height still ran past the bottom of the screen by roughly the height of your header — about 19 pixels on a typical site, and more if your header is taller. Your header's real height is now measured, so the hero ends where the screen does.
• The Small, Medium and Large viewport heights had the same fault and had never been corrected at all: each was a share of the whole screen, with the header then added on top, so they always ran over. They are now shares of the screen you can actually see. Large means 90% of the visible screen rather than 90% of the screen plus a header, so these heroes will be a little shorter than before — which is the size they were always meant to be.
• The correction no longer depends on the page noticing in time. It previously worked only if a measurement happened at the right moment, and if that moment was missed — a tab opened in the background, a logo image arriving late — the hero kept the wrong height for as long as the page stayed open.
• If you padded a hero or typed a minimum height by hand to work around any of this, you can take that adjustment back out; leaving it in will now make the hero taller than the screen.
• A warning shown in the editor, when a theme's styling overrides one of the plugin's block styles, no longer refers you to a file that is not included with the plugin. It explains both fixes in the warning itself.

Everything released since 1.4.0 arrives in this one update, and a menu opens smoothly on a tablet.

• If you are updating from 1.4.0, this single update carries every release between — 2.0.0 through 2.11.2. The version number jumps a long way in one step; your pages are unaffected, and the entries below describe what changed along the way.
• On a tablet-width screen, a menu with a link kept beside the menu button opened in a single frame instead of fading in. It now opens the same way it does on a phone.

A menu now opens smoothly at tablet widths, and two colours no longer vanish on sites that do not use the light/dark scheme.

• Between roughly 768px and 1024px — a tablet held upright — the header menu appeared and disappeared instantly while the same menu faded in and out on a phone. It now animates at every width.
• If your site does not use the light/dark colour scheme, two things quietly painted nothing: the text colour on a solid-tone chip or badge, and the two neutral background gradients named Surface lift and Quiet. Both now fall back to your site's own surface and muted colours. If you do use the scheme, nothing changes.

Keep a call to action on the phone bar, match a curved section edge to the band beside it, show a post's own categories in a template, and get a full-height hero that really does end at the fold.

• A navigation link can now stay visible on the bar next to the menu button on a phone, instead of folding away into the menu. Turn on “Keep visible on mobile bar” on the link. Until now the only way to do this was to build the button twice — once in the menu and once beside it — and keep the two in step by hand.
• A curved section edge left without a colour now takes the colour of the band next to it, instead of painting the page colour between two coloured bands. If the neighbour is a gradient or a photograph, the editor says so, because one flat colour cannot follow either.
• New: a template can show the categories or tags of the post it is rendering. Pick a taxonomy in the Attributes panel of a text block — all of them, the top level only, or only the deeper terms — and each post fills the template in for itself. A row set to the deeper terms removes itself on a post that has none, so a specification table never shows an empty label. Previously this needed custom code on the site.
• A hero set to Full height now ends exactly at the bottom of the screen. It used to be the full height of the screen and then pushed down by whatever sits above it, so the bottom of the band was always off screen by the height of your header, and copy centred in it read low.
• The overlay's Fade distance now goes to 100, and a value stored outside the range no longer renders as one number while the panel shows another.
• An image set to Stretch beside a column of text no longer overflows the page sideways. It fills the height of the row and crops, which is what stretching promised.
• The editor now warns when your theme's stylesheet is overriding a block style you have chosen — the case where a style is selected, named in the toolbar, and doing nothing.
• The setting labelled “Show to” on a navigation link is now “Show to (signed-in state)”, because it has always been about who is signed in rather than screen size.

Menus and dropdown panels now open and close with motion instead of appearing instantly.

• Reported as menu animation being poor. Measured on the site that reported it, there was none at all: every panel appeared and disappeared in a single frame. The mobile menu, the navigation dropdowns and the click-to-open popover now fade and lift as they open, and fade out as they close.
• Motion follows the reduced-motion setting on the visitor's device, as everything else here does. A browser too old for the underlying feature simply gets the instant open it had before.

Fixes dropdown labels that rendered as blank boxes in a dark mobile menu.

• On a site with a dark mobile menu, the labels that open each dropdown — the words you tap — rendered white on white. Four of them, on every phone. It reads as a menu that failed to load rather than as a colour problem, which is why it went unreported for a while.
• The cause was one colour pinned in place while the menu around it followed your theme. Both now come from the same place, so a menu you have repainted keeps its labels legible whatever colour you choose.

The embed frame is easier to find, and the colour-scheme switch stops telling you to turn on a setting that is already on.

• GF Embed Frame — the responsive wrapper for a map, a booking widget or a shop embed — now sits in Essentials next to Image and Video, rather than among the interaction blocks where nobody would look for it.
• The Scheme Switch block showed a notice telling you to enable the site's colour-scheme setting, with its own controls disabled behind that notice — even when the setting was already on. The editor now reads the real answer, so the block works where the setting is enabled and the notice only appears where it is not.

A new mobile behaviour for navigation: an edge tab that slides a table of contents over the page.

• On a phone, a long list of sections eats the first screen. Set a navigation's mobile behaviour to Edge tab and the list sits just off the side of the screen with a small tab showing. Press the tab and it slides over the page; press a section and the page jumps there and the list closes behind you.
• It closes when you scroll, when you press a link, and on the Escape key, and the page behind stays readable and scrollable the whole time — deliberately, because closing on scroll is the point.

A navigation can now be built from a taxonomy, so a menu of industries or departments maintains itself.

• If your navigation is really a list of categories — a portfolio whose top level is Industries, a shop whose top level is Departments — you can now point a menu at that taxonomy instead of copying the terms into a menu by hand. Add a term and it appears; rename one and the menu follows.
• You choose the order and direction, a maximum number of items, whether to hide empty terms, and whether child terms fold into a dropdown. The current term is marked as the current page while its archive is being viewed, and every navigation style, the scroll spy and the sliding indicator work exactly as they do on a hand-built menu.

A current-page marker that travels between items instead of appearing and disappearing.

• Navigation gained a current-page style called Slide: one marker that moves to whichever item is current, rather than each item drawing and erasing its own. It is most useful under a scroll-spy subnav, where the current item changes as the reader moves down the page.
• It is a new option on the setting you already use for the current-page treatment, so it cannot collide with Underline or Bar — a navigation has one current-page style.

Fixes two underlines on the Underline navigation style.

• With the Underline navigation style, the current link and a hovered link drew a second line about 4px above the first. Checked across every combination of navigation style, current-page treatment and hover motion: two of the forty-five drew a double line, both on this style, and both now draw one.

Place the content inside a full-height grid cell — top, middle or bottom.

• In a grid where every cell is the same height, the cells already fill the row, so the vertical alignment setting has nothing left to move. What you actually want is the content placed inside the cell: a short card's text sitting in the middle of a tall cell rather than at the top.
• That is now its own setting, and the panel offers whichever of the two can do something: content alignment while the cell fills its row, vertical alignment while the cell is free to move.

The grid no longer offers a vertical alignment that its own equal-height setting cancels.

• A grid has equal-height cells switched on by default, which means every cell already fills its row and the vertical alignment setting could not move anything. Two settings sat in one panel with one quietly cancelling the other.
• Vertical alignment is now offered only when it can do something, and the equal-height setting says that it takes over the vertical axis. Any alignment you had stored is kept untouched and comes back if you turn equal height off.

Internal checks only — nothing on your site changes.

• This release is a build-time check that hunts for settings which accept a value and change nothing, and a written record of what it proved and where it is still unreliable. No block, style or setting changed.

Internal checks only — nothing on your site changes.

• One of the build-time checks had a standing warning that was always wrong, which teaches everyone to ignore the line where a real problem would appear. The warning now reports accurately. No block, style or setting changed.

The Post Loop's post type is a picker rather than a typed-in name.

• A mistyped post type returned nothing, and the block showed its empty state — which reads as “no posts yet” rather than as a mistake. It is now a list of the post types your site actually has.
• If a post type is not one the list can see, the field stays a text box rather than trapping you, and a value already stored is kept and shown rather than replaced by the first option.

The navigation's own colour settings now work, striped tables are readable on a dark band, and tooltips can be dismissed.

• The navigation block offers seven colour slots of its own — link, hover, current item and the pill behind the menu. Two of them collided with WordPress's own colour setting names, so the custom picker wrote a value that nothing read. They are renamed and both work. A colour you picked from the palette stays exactly as it was; a custom colour moves across for you.
• A striped table inside a dark section drew light grey rows, because the stripe colour was fixed. It now takes a few per cent of the row's own text colour, so it is a subtle stripe on a light band and on a dark one.
• A tooltip or popover that appears on hover can now be dismissed with the Escape key and stays open while you move the pointer onto it — both requirements of WCAG 1.4.13, and both previously missing.
• Two card corner radii that were only reachable by hand are now part of the shape scale, so a style pack can set them. Measured at the default scale they are identical to what they replace, so nothing you have published moves.
• The two-package pricing pattern now carries a real comparison table beneath the cards, which is what it promised.

Dark backgrounds get readable text, links with no destination stop pretending to be links, and the editor tells you when a setting is not one it knows.

• Picking a dark background for a section used to leave the text dark as well — not hard to read, absent. The text colour now follows the background you choose, on every block that takes one, and the same fix carries the eleven built-in gradients, several of which failed contrast at every point across the band.
• Five blocks — Button, Nav Link, Pill, Page Link and Dropdown Item — emitted a link to nowhere when they had no address yet. A screen reader announced each as a link, a keyboard user could tab to it, and pressing it jumped to the top of the page. With no address they are now announced as ordinary text and skipped, and the styling is unchanged.
• A value the plugin does not recognise no longer saves and renders as something else in silence: the editor shows what is stored beside the control, and a new command, wp gf-builder validate, reports every unrecognised value, unknown setting name and missing icon across your pages. On a 64-page site this found 176 settings that were quietly doing nothing.
• New: a grid can number its cells, a heading can carry a short accent rule above it, and the type scale gained two missing sizes — a small heading and a medium display size — so a sub-heading and a lighter page title no longer have to borrow a size meant for something else.
• Swapping one block for another now tells you what could not come with it, naming each setting, instead of dropping it quietly.
• A horizontal list row now scrolls sideways as intended rather than crushing its own items — at 390px one label had been squeezed to a single pixel wide — and there is a new wrap option for when you would rather it ran onto a second line.

A background image and the tint that makes text readable over it now sit together, near the top of the settings panel.

• Sections, heroes, containers and cards can all take a background image, and the setting that tints it so your copy stays readable was two screens further down the panel than the image itself. Worse, adding an image pushed the tint further away, so the control you needed next moved off screen at the exact moment you needed it. Both now live in the panel called Background, which sits near the top with the rest of the appearance settings — the image control moved from roughly two-thirds of the way down to just under Block Styles.
• Add a background image and the Overlay control appears directly underneath it, with its own reading of whether your text still has enough contrast against the picture. That reading used to be a separate panel below everything else, which is a strange place to put the answer to a question you just asked.
• The Overlay control no longer appears when there is no background image. It never did anything in that state — there was nothing to tint — so it was a setting you could change with no effect. If you already have an overlay set, it stays visible so you can still clear it.
• “Reset all” in that panel now clears the background image and its tint properly. It used to leave the tint’s opacity behind, which then turned up unannounced the next time you picked a colour.
• Nothing you have already published changes appearance. The settings are in a different place; what they do is the same.

Four more blocks can take their content from custom fields, the editor now tells you when one cannot, and text blocks gained an Overline setting.

• If you build a template once and let each post fill it in — a case study, a project, a plan, a person — you connect a block’s text to a custom field and every post renders itself. Four more blocks can now do that: description list pairs, timeline entries, pricing cards, and carousel slides. The description list is the one worth knowing about, because Client / Industry / Services / Year is the standard specification table on a case study, and until now it was the one block that could not be filled in that way.
• Connecting a field to a block that could not accept one used to do nothing at all, quietly. The block simply rendered whatever was typed into it — usually nothing, in a template — so a page came out with empty rows that looked exactly like missing data, and there was no way to tell an empty field from a wrong field name from a block that was never going to work. The editor now says so, naming the block and the setting, and listing what that block can accept instead. It also shows in the browser console, so it is there even when nobody has the block selected.
• Text blocks gained an Overline setting: the small, uppercase, letter-spaced label that sits above a heading or beside a value. It has two strengths, Subtle and Strong, and it carries its own size, so it stays a label whatever you set Size to. This treatment was already used inside timeline entries and pricing cards and could not be reached anywhere else — getting it on ordinary text meant writing custom CSS.
• Those timeline and pricing labels now share that one definition. They look the same as before with one deliberate change: they carry proper letter spacing, which uppercase text at that size needs to stay legible. If you have a page using either block, the labels will look very slightly wider apart.
• Nothing you have already published changes otherwise.

The card no longer offers a pinned button in the one arrangement where it cannot deliver one.

• Pinning a card’s button holds it at the foot of the card, so a row of cards lines its buttons up however long each one’s text runs. It cannot do that when the image sits below the copy and the button is inside a Stack — which is how most of the built-in card patterns are put together — because the button is part of the copy, and the picture is underneath all of it. Something has to be last, and it is the picture.
• Rather than leave a setting switched on that quietly does nothing, the card now hides Pinned while the image is below the copy, and says why. Every other image arrangement keeps it. If you already have a card set that way it still shows Pinned and looks exactly as it did — nothing you have published changes.
• One more piece of help text was being cut in half by a typo and now reads in full.

Ten more things that were invisible on dark sections are readable, and a card image now meets the card's edge exactly.

• The companion to 1.2.0, and take it for the same reason. 1.2.0 fixed cards, pills and pagination drawing white text on their own white background inside a dark or gradient section. The same thing was happening to ten more: list groups, accordions, carousels, boxed tabs, compact timelines, step markers, the light/dark switch, and the modal, dropdown, disclosure and navigation panels. A list group needed no special settings at all to hit it — its ordinary bordered look was enough.
• Each of those now decides its own text colour, its own quiet text, its own links and its own outline, so it reads correctly whatever it is sitting on. One thing to know if you set a Text colour on a section: it no longer reaches inside those particular boxes, because a box that paints its own background is now responsible for what can be read on it.
• A card's image meets the card's edge exactly, whichever padding you chose. If you set the card's padding with the Dimensions controls rather than the card's own Padding setting, the image was drawn against the wrong number — hanging 7px over the rounded corner at one size, stopping 17px short at another. It now measures against the padding you actually set, on each side independently.
• The Image card style had the same problem without anyone changing a setting: its picture hung about 31px outside the card on both sides. That is fixed too.
• Nothing you have already published changes appearance unless it was one of the cases above, where it was unreadable or misaligned to begin with.

Text on cards, pills and pagination is readable again on dark and gradient sections, and four settings that did nothing now do something.

• Take this one if you use dark or gradient sections. A card sitting on a dark or gradient band was drawing white text on its own white background — the words were still there, still findable by search engines, and completely invisible to a reader. It affected an ordinary card with no special styling, which is the most common kind, and it has been that way since 1.0.1. Cards read correctly now, on every background.
• The same fix reaches three more things that were invisible in the same place: cards using the Tonal style, the cards in a Posts list, and pill and pagination links, which drew white on white on a dark band.
• One appearance change to expect: pill and pagination labels on ordinary light sections now use your body text colour instead of your link colour. That is what those components were always meant to do, and it is easier to read, but it is a visible difference if you use them.
• Pinning a card's button no longer cancels a side-by-side image. Choosing Actions: pinned on a card whose image sat to the left or right quietly threw the arrangement away and stacked the image on top instead, while the settings panel went on showing both choices as active. Both work together now.
• A pinned button lands at the bottom of the card when the image is below the text. It used to stop above the picture, which put it a long way from where every other arrangement puts it.
• Settings no longer offer arrangements that draw nothing. Image placement is shared across nine blocks, and no single block supports all six options — so a card offered Overlay, which did exactly the same thing as Above, and a carousel slide offered Left and Right, which did nothing at all. Each block now shows only what it can actually draw. Anything you have already chosen is left alone and still shown to you.
• Backdrop shapes have a Softness setting, and pages with them scroll more smoothly by default. The blur behind those shapes is the one thing on that block that costs scrolling smoothness, and it was fixed at a value you could not change. It is now Crisp, Soft or Hazy, and the default is a little crisper than before — measured on a deliberately heavy page, that is roughly six extra frames a second while scrolling, with no change to how quickly the page loads. Existing backdrops using the clipped shapes look exactly as they did.
• The backdrop's Shape opacity slider now shows its effect while you drag it. It always worked on the published page; the editor simply did not draw it, so the control looked broken. Its colour pickers also stand down on the Grid shape, which does not use them.

Fixes pages published before 1.1.0 showing a media object on the wrong side.

• If you updated to 1.1.0, please take this one. Media objects, carousel slides and alerts saved before 1.1.0 were only corrected when you opened the page in the editor — on the published page they fell back to their default. A media object set to show its image on the right appeared on the left to your visitors until you opened and re-saved that page. Found on a real site with 17 of them.
• Published pages are now correct straight away, whether or not you have opened them. Nothing needs re-saving, and opening a page still tidies up the underlying markup as it did before.

A card can hold its own picture, and every block that takes an image now lets you say where it goes.

• Cards hold their own image. Until now you dropped an image block inside a card and hoped — and the arrangement most people actually want, a picture running edge to edge across the top of the card with its corners rounded to match, was not reachable at all without hand-written CSS. Add a Card image, choose Media placement, and the card draws it: above, below, or beside the text.
• Full bleed is what a card image does by default. The picture meets the card’s frame and takes the card’s rounded corners; your words keep their padding. Choose Framed or Raised if you would rather it sat inside the card with a border.
• Nine blocks now speak the same language about images. Where an image or icon sits used to be called something different on every block — and on two of them the same word meant two different things. Timeline entries, testimonials, pricing cards, list rows, stats, alerts, carousel slides, media objects and cards all use one Media placement setting now, so what you learn on one carries to the rest.
• Alerts can move or remove their icon. The old Show icon switch could only say whether there was one. It is now a placement — none, beside the message, or above it — which reads better on a longer alert.
• A card can pin its button to the bottom. Previously this only happened as a side effect of turning on equal height, a setting about how tall the cards are. It is its own choice now, so a row of cards lines its buttons up whatever length each card’s text runs to.
• Everything you have already published keeps the design you chose. Carousel slides, media objects and alerts saved before this release are updated as you open them, and none of them change appearance.
• Thirteen of the built-in card patterns were rebuilt on the new setting, so inserting one gives you a card you can restyle with the controls instead of a hand-assembled stack you have to take apart.

Pinned sections behave, animations can be given a feel, and a card is a surface again.

• Animations inside a pinned scrolling section now wait their turn. Every animation in the section used to run the moment the page loaded — so by the time a visitor scrolled to the third panel, its heading had already faded in and finished, three screens earlier, with nobody watching. Each panel’s content now plays as that panel arrives.
• Pinned panels leave when the next one arrives. Panels with a see-through background used to stack up as you scrolled, so partway through you were reading three of them printed over each other. One panel at a time now, all the way through.
• Animations can be told how to move, not just how long to take. A new Easing setting sits under Speed: Entrance settles into place, Exit gathers speed as it leaves, Emphasis is slow at both ends, and Linear is for anything that loops. Until now every animation in the plugin used the browser’s default curve and there was no way to change it.
• Cards have a background again. Every card was see-through — including ones with a border and a shadow, which is a shadow cast by nothing. On a white page you would never notice; on a gradient, a photograph or a coloured band the background showed straight through the card. Cards now fill by default, and there is a Fill setting if you want one that does not.
• A picture in a rounded card is rounded too. An edge-to-edge image kept its square corners and hung over the card’s curve unless you knew to pick a particular style. The card now trims whatever is in it to the corners you chose — except when it is holding a tooltip or a drop-down, which are meant to open outside it.

Version one. Twenty-eight fixes found by building a real site with it, and a stepper your visitors can work through.

• Fixed, and it was on every slideshow: as one photograph changed to the next, the page behind briefly showed through and the whole band flashed lighter. It was most obvious on a pale page and invisible on a dark one, which is how it went unnoticed. Slides now hand over cleanly, so there is no moment where neither picture is fully there.
• The navigation’s colour settings now reach the whole menu. Setting a highlight colour changed the top-level menu and left every drop-down item alone — the half of the menu people actually read. The same settings now cover both, and the current page is marked correctly in both.
• Steppers can be worked through. Turn on “Let visitors move between steps” and each step becomes a real button: choosing one marks it as current, everything before it as complete, and everything after as still to come. It works by keyboard and is announced properly by screen readers.
• Curved section edges and decorative patterns can be used together. Put a curved cut on a band that also has a pattern behind it and the pattern used to draw straight through the curve. It now stops at the edge, as it should.
• A background someone pauses stays paused. Press pause on a moving background and it stays paused as they move around your site, rather than starting again on every page.
• Copy over a photograph can carry its own contrast floor. A new Contrast floor setting on headings and text adds a small shadow under the words — enough to keep them readable over a busy picture without darkening the photograph until it turns to mud. It works correctly with gradient-coloured words, which an ordinary text shadow does not.
• Seven cards in three columns no longer leave a hole. The grid’s feature setting gained “First and last”, which widens both ends of the run so the last row fills the width instead of trailing off.
• Chips can take their colour from whatever is behind them. A glass chip on a dark hero used to pick dark text and disappear. There is a new Inherit tone that reads the band it is standing on, and the default now does the right thing on dark bands.
• Backdrop shapes no longer push the page sideways. Rotating or enlarging a blob, wedge, ribbon or split shape could add a thousand pixels of horizontal scroll — very visible on a phone. It is contained now.
• Pinned scrolling sections say what their limit is. Ten panels is the most that can be pinned; past that the editor tells you, and the published page falls back to ordinary stacked sections instead of quietly misbehaving.
• Security: the HTML importer added in this release now refuses any link or image address that is not an ordinary web address. Pasted markup containing a script-style link is stripped of the link while keeping your words.

Curved section edges, gradients built from your own colours, and a backdrop that drifts.

• Sections and heroes can have a curved edge. Choose a shape for the top of a band, the bottom, or both — a wave, a double wave, a hill, a scoop, a rounded slope or a row of soft drips — and the band stops being a rectangle. The shape is filled with whatever sits behind the band, which is what makes it read as a cut rather than as decoration sitting on top. You can set how deep it goes, and give it a colour from your palette if you would rather it stood out.
• You can draw your own edge. Pick Custom and paste the path data from whatever tool you drew it in — Figma, Illustrator, an online wave generator — and it is drawn the same way the built-in shapes are. If what you paste is not a shape, nothing is drawn rather than something you did not ask for, so you always know where you stand.
• The gradient picker offers your colours instead of WordPress’s. Every block with a gradient control used to show the same twelve stock gradients — the cyan-to-purple one you have seen on a thousand sites — none of which had anything to do with your palette. It now offers nine built from your own brand colours, so repainting your palette repaints every gradient built on it.
• Three of those gradients are shapes rather than fills. A soft circle of colour, one anchored in a corner, and a pair on opposing diagonals — each fading to nothing so the rest of the background shows through. They are what you want behind a card or in the corner of a section, rather than a band of colour edge to edge.
• A backdrop can be recoloured, and it can move. The decorative shape behind a run of sections was locked to your primary and accent colours whatever you did; now you choose both ends of it. Switch Movement to Drift and it wanders slowly around wherever you positioned it, on two rhythms that never quite line up, so it never looks like a loop. It stops completely for visitors who have asked their device for reduced motion.

The pattern library’s example copy has been rewritten so nothing in it describes a real business but ours.

• Every pattern used to be written around one construction firm — a real one — and two of the footer patterns carried its trading name, address, phone number and company registration number. Insert that footer and you published somebody else’s contact details. That is gone.
• The example copy is now modelled on our own agency instead, which is the only business we can safely put in a product we sell. Where a pattern needs a client, a certification or a review score, it now uses an obvious placeholder rather than a convincing one — “Your Company Ltd”, “a retail client”, “Registered in England 00000000” — because a believable placeholder is the one that survives onto a live site by accident.
• Named certifications have been removed rather than reworded. A pattern that displays a certification mark now displays a partner mark, and the layout is unchanged. Nothing in the library claims a certification, a rating or a review score on anyone’s behalf.
• Nothing about how the blocks work has changed. This release is example copy only — no settings, no styles, no markup. Pages you have already built are untouched, and patterns you inserted previously keep whatever wording you gave them.

Shadows are back on every raised surface, buttons can carry depth, and a mega menu fits on a phone.

• Fixed, and it is the reason for this release: if you had turned dark mode on, every shadow in the plugin was missing — on light pages as well as dark ones. Cards, dropdowns, dialogs, buttons and the focus outline all painted flat, which made a page look subtly cheaper without anything looking broken. Nothing you set was wrong; the shadows simply never reached the page. They do now, and a dark page gets shadows tuned for a dark page rather than the pale ones meant for white.
• Buttons have Elevation and Emphasis. Elevation is how far off the page the button sits — flat, raised or floating — so the one action you want people to take can look like it. Emphasis adds a soft gradient across the button’s own colour, whichever colour that is, so it still repaints with your palette. Outline and ghost buttons stay flat, because there is no fill there to shade.
• A mega menu no longer runs off the bottom of a phone. Opening a large menu panel inside the mobile drawer could push the rest of the menu — including the button at the end of it — past the bottom of the screen with no way to scroll to it. The drawer now scrolls on its own, the heading you tapped stays in view while you read the panel, and closing one panel leaves you where you were instead of jumping back to the first item.
• Background tints can be shaped. The fade presets gained two numbers underneath them: how far the tint travels across the picture, and how strong it is halfway. That is the difference between a headline sitting on a clean photograph and one sitting on mud. There is also a new Fade from both, for a picture that has to carry something at the top and something at the bottom.
• The contrast check reads every slide, not just the first. A slideshow uses one tint for a set of photographs, so it is usually wrong for at least one of them — and you cannot tell which by watching it rotate. The panel now names it: “worst of 3 slides: slide 3”. Change that photograph, or raise the tint until every slide clears.

A sweep of colour faults on dark bands, plus ten settings that used to need custom CSS.

• Fixed: on a dark band, a carousel’s dots and its previous/next controls were painting dark on dark and light on light — in places invisible. The active dot is also three times wider than the others now, because telling slides apart by colour alone does not work for everyone.
• Fixed: putting a decoration on a dark section covered the top half of it in a pale fog. Decorations now read the band they are on.
• Fixed: the navigation’s highlight colours reached the top-level menu and stopped there, so a mega-menu panel — the half people actually read — ignored the colour you picked and looked broken.
• Fixed: a solid badge chose white or dark text from a hand-written list of colour names, so a badge in a pale colour could be white on near-white and impossible to read. It now works the ink out from the colour itself, and keeps working when you repaint your palette.
• Fixed: images inside a tab panel did not start downloading until you clicked the tab, so switching tabs showed the words instantly and an empty space where the picture should be. They now start loading a moment before you get there.
• Fixed, in the background slideshow: the cross-fade borrowed a button’s timing and read as a cut rather than a dissolve — there is a Cross-fade control now, 200–2500ms. Every slide also used to download on first paint, so a four-slide hero fetched four photographs to show one; slides now arrive one step ahead of the ticker, and the first one is preloaded so it appears with the page.
• New: Post Loop can make every card the same height, so the link at the end of each one lines up. Off by default, so nothing you have already published moves.
• New: Card has a Hover setting — lift, border or glow — for what a card does under a pointer.
• New: Chip has a Glass style, a translucent chip that takes its colours from whatever it is sitting on. It is the one you want over a photograph or a coloured band.
• New: Navigation has size and letter-spacing controls, which is most of the difference between a plain menu and a toolbar.
• New: stepped panels. Choosing the Stepper look on a Tabs block gives you numbered steps that are genuinely navigable, rather than a progress picture that only looks interactive.

Hero and Section backgrounds can be a video or a slideshow, and a visitor can always stop them.

• New Background media control on Hero and Section, with three modes: Still, Video and Slideshow. Video plays muted and on a loop behind your copy; Slideshow cross-fades between pictures at a pace you choose. Only the words stay put — nothing on top of the background moves, re-fades or jumps while the picture behind it changes.
• Your image is never optional and never wasted. In Video mode it becomes the poster; in Slideshow mode it becomes the first slide. It is also what a phone shows, what someone who has asked their computer for reduced motion sees, and what remains if a video fails to load — so switching modes never means picking your picture again, and moving between Video and Slideshow does not throw away what you set up in the other one.
• A pause button ships with it and cannot be switched off. Anything that moves on its own for more than five seconds has to be stoppable — that is a Level A accessibility requirement, not a preference — and it is the single most common way a site with a video background fails an audit. It sits in the corner of the band and removes itself whenever nothing is actually moving.
• Phones download nothing. Below the tablet width the video is not merely hidden, it is never requested at all: the visitor gets one image instead of several megabytes of film. The same is true for anyone with reduced motion turned on. A background that scrolls out of view stops playing rather than decoding quietly for the rest of the visit.
• The panel warns you at the moment you choose, against the file you actually picked: over about 5 MB, longer than about 15 seconds, no poster image set, or more than two background videos on one page — the last of which nothing else can see, because it is about the page rather than the block.
• Fixed: a background video that failed to load — a wrong address, or a format the visitor’s browser will not play — left a blank rectangle sitting over your photograph for as long as the page was open. The photograph now simply shows through.
• Section gained all of this. Previously only Hero could carry a moving background, so a plain band that wanted one had to be built as a Hero and inherit its two-column layout and viewport-height sizing whether you wanted them or not. Cards and containers deliberately do not offer it: nine autoplaying films in a grid is a page nobody can load on a phone.

Every block and preset in the inserter now has its own icon.

• When you press the + to add something, blocks and presets used to share icons — the six card styles were the same small square, and the link blocks were all the same chain. There was no way to tell them apart without hovering each one in turn, which made a library you could see feel like a library you had to search. Every entry now carries its own icon.
• Nothing about your pages changes. This affects only what the inserter looks like while you are building.

Heroes arrive already designed, and copy can sit across a picture.

• Heroes can now carry a decorative ground — a soft wash of your brand colour, a tonal fade, a hairline grid or a gradient shape. It is drawn entirely from your style pack, so it follows your palette and changes when your brand colours do. All fourteen ready-made hero sections now use one, chosen to suit that particular hero. The mechanism existed before this release and nothing switched it on, so heroes inserted flat and looked it.
• New Cross overlap for two-column layouts. The two items each grow to two-thirds of the band and interlock over the middle third, with the words on top of the picture rather than behind it. That is the composition most marketing pages open with, and it previously needed custom CSS. It keeps its proportions at every screen width and becomes a plain stack on a phone.
• Fixed: every image carried a strip of empty space beneath it that no setting could remove. It came from WordPress’s own stylesheet, which was overriding the plugin, and it has affected every site since images shipped. Spacing you set yourself is unchanged.
• The prompt on a new empty page now says what pressing it gives you — previews of ready-made sections you can insert and then edit — instead of naming a feature. And the section library no longer opens onto three grids of blank placeholder cards: it leads with real sections. The blank grids are still there for anyone who wants to fill one in, through the search box or the category filter.

Container widths work everywhere now.

• Fixed: setting a container to a specific width — Narrow, Content, Wide or one of the insets — had no effect on any container that also had an alignment set. It quietly used the page width instead of the one you chose. This applied to every site and has done since the control shipped; the reason nobody spotted it is that the two widths usually match, so the only case where it shows is the case you reach for the control to change.
• Fixed: a chip or tag with a long label could run past the edge of a narrow column instead of wrapping inside it.
• Behind the scenes, both of these came from the same cause, and there is now an automated check that finds it. Four separate layout controls had been written correctly and were being silently overridden by WordPress’s own stylesheet — including the one that lines up buttons across a row of equal-height cards, which had never worked. All four are fixed, and the check runs against a real rendered page so the next one cannot slip through unnoticed.

Backgrounds that run behind a whole run of sections, not one band at a time.

• New Backdrop block. Put two or three sections inside one and a gradient, a diagonal or a soft shape runs behind all of them at once — the full height of the group, however tall it grows. Previously a background restarted at every section boundary, so a page of decorated bands read as stripes rather than as one surface.
• Five ready-made backdrops to start from: Dawn, Aurora, Divide, Blueprint and Undercurrent. Each one is a considered starting point with every control still adjustable — angle, size, position and strength — so you can move it until it suits the page. None of them carries a colour of its own: they all paint from your style pack, so your palette decides how they look and changing your brand colours changes them with it.
• Screenshots can now sit in a browser frame, which is the fastest way a page says “this is a product” rather than “this is a brochure”.
• Pictures can be set to two-thirds or half width, hung off either side, and lifted into the text above them. A heading held to a readable width on one side with the picture on the other is the layout most marketing pages are built on, and it was not previously possible without custom CSS.
• Fixed: in a row of cards set to equal height, the buttons now line up along one baseline instead of sitting wherever each card’s text happened to end. They never did before, on any site.
• Fixed: content inside equal-height cards was being squeezed to the width of its own text and centred. Headings and paragraphs now fill the card as intended.
• Material gains a floating action button, and Modern gains a rounded gradient panel for calls to action.

Your site really does use the font it was designed for now.

• The style packs are drawn against a typeface called Inter, and it was never actually loading. Every visitor saw whichever font their own device supplies instead — Segoe UI on Windows, Roboto on Android and Chromebooks, San Francisco on a Mac. Headings came out heavier and wider than intended, and the three packs looked far more alike than they should have.
• Inter now ships with the theme and loads from your own server. Nothing is requested from Google or any other third party, so no visitor data leaves your site and there is nothing to break if an outside service goes down.
• This also fixes a wider problem on sites built with a child theme — a brand layer sitting on top of GF Base Theme, which is how most custom builds are put together. GF Builder was quietly overriding things the underlying theme had set: its fonts, and potentially its colours, spacing and shadows too. It now leaves them alone unless you have deliberately changed that setting yourself.
• Worth taking on every site. If you use a child theme, take it sooner rather than later.

First half of the font fix.

• Corrected the cause of the missing typeface described above, for sites running GF Base Theme directly.
• It did not go far enough for sites using a child theme, which 0.18.2 completes. If you are reading this, take 0.18.2 instead — there is no reason to stop here.

Each style pack now offers layouts the other two do not.

• Modern, Material and Flat used to differ mainly in colour. They are three genuinely different designs now: section spacing, how wide a line of text is allowed to run, corner shape, depth and the way highlighted words are treated all change with the pack.
• Six new page sections, two belonging to each pack, appear in the inserter under their own heading and only while that pack is active. Modern gets a hero and a feature grid over a clipped gradient shape; Material gets tinted panels where depth is carried by colour rather than shadow; Flat gets a rule-divided list and a full-width statement band.
• Section headings and intros are held to a comfortable reading width instead of running the full width of the screen, which is the single biggest change to how a page reads.
• Core WordPress blocks now follow the pack's content width too. Previously a GF section and an ordinary paragraph on the same page could be set to different widths.
• Anything you have already built keeps working. Switching packs restyles it rather than breaking it.

Choosing a style pack no longer replaces your brand colours.

• Each pack used to carry its own full colour palette, so picking one on a site that already had brand colours silently overwrote them. Every pack now comes in two forms: the full pack, and a “shape only” twin that changes spacing, type, corners and depth while leaving your palette exactly as it is.
• If your site has a brand, use the shape-only version. If you are starting from nothing, the full pack dresses the site in one step.
• Style packs also reach considerably more of the page than before — section rhythm, text width, muted text, and the treatment of highlighted and gradient words — so switching between them changes the design rather than just the colours.

Your pages now carry their own text.

• GF Builder blocks used to keep everything you wrote in a hidden data field. The page displayed perfectly and read as empty to every other piece of software: excerpts came back blank, SEO plugins scored a full page at zero words, and translation and site-search plugins had nothing to work with. Every block that holds words now writes them into the page itself.
• Excerpts work everywhere they are used — the cards in a Post Loop, RSS, the summary under a search result, and the description shown when someone shares a link. All of those previously fell back to nothing.
• Yoast SEO and Rank Math read your pages properly now, including your headings and image alt text, so their scores describe what you actually wrote rather than an empty page.
• Pages you have already published are brought up to date as you edit them. To update them all in one go, a site administrator can run `wp gf-builder migrate-markup` with WP-CLI, adding `--dry-run` first to see what would change.
• Nothing about how your pages look changes, either way.

Full-width headers really are full width now.

• Fixed: a header set to run the full width of the screen was rendering about 35px narrower than the screen on a phone, and about 64px narrower on a desktop. Because it fell short on one side rather than both, it also sat very slightly off-centre.
• Dropdown menus inside such a header inherited the same shortfall, which is where it showed most: an open menu looked clipped against the right-hand edge, as though it were sitting inside a container of its own.
• Every header now runs edge to edge as intended, and menus inside one sit with an even margin on both sides. Checked against all eight header layouts GF Builder ships, at phone, tablet and desktop widths.
• Worth taking if your header runs edge to edge, which most do.

Analytics, and pages your SEO plugin can finally read.

• New: GF Builder → Analytics. Add your Google Analytics measurement ID or your Tag Manager container, plus Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok pixels, and GF Builder places them correctly — in the right part of the page, in the right order, with no theme file to edit and no code to paste into a header.
• GF Builder does not add a cookie banner and does not decide whether your site needs one. It reads the answer from whichever consent plugin you already run. If you run none, you choose what should happen, and it will not save a tag until you have — nothing is assumed on your behalf.
• Google tags load without cookies for visitors in the EU, UK and Switzerland until consent is given, and normally everywhere else, so a site with no European visitors keeps complete reporting and a site with them does not collect what it should not. Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok have no equivalent, so you choose whether they wait for consent or run for everyone. The Analytics screen tells you in plain words what each tag is doing right now.
• Nothing is measured in the editor, in previews, or while you work in wp-admin, so your own page views never land in your reports.
• New: your pages are now visible to Yoast SEO and Rank Math. Because GF Builder blocks build the page at the moment it is viewed, both plugins previously saw an empty page and scored it as having no words, no headings and no keyphrase — however much you had written. They now read the real content, count it properly, and assess your headings and image alt text.
• Also included, from 0.14.7: navigation dropdowns set to the Dark surface opened as a black panel with black labels, so the menu looked empty. Dark dropdowns now paint their labels, descriptions and hover state correctly.

Dark navigation dropdowns show their menu items again.

• Fixed: a menu whose dropdown was set to the Dark surface opened as a black panel with nothing readable in it. The item labels and their descriptions were still there, in near-black text on a near-black panel, so the menu looked empty to anyone trying to use it.
• Nothing you could reach had any effect on it. Changing the palette, switching the colour scheme, and setting the header chrome all left the labels the same colour — which is why this read as a menu that simply did not work, rather than a colour that needed adjusting.
• Dark dropdowns now paint their labels, descriptions and hover state correctly. The Clean, Raised and Tint dropdown surfaces were never affected and are unchanged.
• Worth taking if any of your menus use a dark dropdown. That is the only place this was visible.

Two navigation fixes, for dark headers and tablet-width screens.

• Fixed: on a header set to a dark chrome, the mobile menu button rendered as a white button with dark text sitting on the dark bar. The dark treatment was only being applied when a dark colour scheme was set as well, which most sites do not do.
• Fixed: between roughly 768px and 1023px the navigation did not collapse. The header stacked into rows at that width but the menu button did not appear until 767px, so on a tablet a long menu ran down the page as a full-width list with no way to close it. The button now arrives as soon as the header stacks.
• Worth taking if your header is dark or your menu has more than a few items — those are the two cases where either fault was visible.

Setup can build you a site, not just style one.

• GF Builder → Setup now starts with a site. Choose a complete seven-page site or three essentials, and it creates the pages, sets the front page and builds the menu — so the rest of setup has something real to apply to instead of an empty Pages screen.
• Every page it creates is ordinary content. Edit it, rename it, delete it, or start again from a blank one; nothing about those pages is special or locked.
• It only runs when you ask for it, only once, and it leaves a front page you have already chosen alone. Existing pages and menus are untouched.
• Fixed: text disappearing on dark backgrounds in fifteen more places, including the mobile menu button, the slide-out panel, avatars, tabs, pagination and pill links. If your site uses the dark colour scheme, several things that were previously unreadable are now readable.

Video, designable archives, and a mobile menu that was invisible.

• Fixed: on a site with a dark header, the mobile menu opened as a blank white panel. The links were all there, in white, on white — so anyone browsing on a phone could not navigate the site at all. If your header is dark, this is the reason to update today.
• A new Video block shows a poster and a play button, and only loads YouTube or Vimeo once a visitor presses play. A page with a video on it no longer costs every visitor about a megabyte of someone else's code, or sets their cookies before they have watched anything.
• Posts can now have a featured video. Add one and it appears in place of the featured image wherever the post shows up in a list, using that image as its poster — for work you would rather show than describe.
• Heroes can carry a background video, or rotate through several background images, while the headline, text and buttons stay exactly where they are. Phones and visitors who prefer reduced motion get a still image and download nothing extra.
• Carousels can fade, crossfade or slide between slides, and can advance on their own. A pause button is added automatically when they do.
• Archive, blog and search pages can be designed with GF blocks at last. The post loop can follow the page it is on, so a category page shows that category. Until now those pages were plain titles and excerpts with no way to style them.
• Fixed: animations on full-width sections travelled the whole height of the band and left a gap above it. Sections can also stagger their children now, so a row of cards arrives one after another instead of all at once.
• Also fixed: a sticky header that scrolled away immediately, a hero animation that played in the editor and did nothing on the published page, a logo big enough to swallow the header, arrows sitting on top of carousel text, a label above a heading that ran outside its column, and text disappearing on dark backgrounds in several places.
• Two visual changes worth knowing before you update: the mobile menu button is now an icon on its own, without the word “Menu”, and sections no longer carry an automatic 24px gap between them.

Your blocks get the styling they were always meant to have.

• Fixed: most of the styling never loaded. Blocks arrived with their content and layout intact but almost none of the CSS that draws them — so pages looked flat and a little plain rather than obviously broken, which is why this went unnoticed. It affected every installed copy of 0.13.0 and 0.14.0. After updating, expect your pages to look considerably more finished.
• Fixed: GF Base Theme was never offered an update. A site kept whichever theme files it first installed, so improvements to the page templates, the header and footer, and the style packs never reached it. WordPress does not check for theme updates outside its own directory, so the plugin now does it.
• GF Builder → Setup, and a notice on your dashboard, will now tell you when the theme carried inside the plugin is newer than the one your site is running, and offer to update it for you.
• Fixed: sections started with spacing nobody asked for. Every section after the first carried a 24px gap above it, inherited from a WordPress default — present between sections but absent above the top one, which is what made it look uneven. Sections now start at zero and you add spacing yourself, in the block's Dimensions panel.
• Because of that last change, pages will close up by 24px between sections. If a layout depended on the old automatic gap, add it back deliberately where you want it.

The base theme now comes inside the download, and your licence has a home.

• GF Base Theme travels inside the plugin. One file is the whole product — there is no second download, and nothing to go and find.
• A new first step in GF Builder → Setup installs and activates the theme for you. It asks rather than acts: if your site already runs a block theme you want to keep, it tells you what the theme adds and leaves your site exactly as it is.
• This matters more than it sounds. WordPress will only read style packs from the active theme, so a site without GF Base Theme had none of Material, Modern or Flat, and the style pack step opened empty with no way to tell that a download was missing.
• GF Builder → Licence is where your key lives. Paste it once and WordPress will tell you when a new version is available, the same way it does for every other plugin.
• Fixed: a mistyped licence key was told the licence had expired, and invited to renew. A key that is simply wrong now says so.
• GF Builder → Tools can copy a single summary of your site — versions, active theme, server — for when you write to us. It answers in one paste what support would otherwise have to ask for four times.

The first release.

• 65 Gutenberg blocks, registered into the block editor you already have — tabs, accordions, sliders, pop-ups, countdowns, star ratings, pricing tables, galleries, navigation menus and forms among them.
• 164 ready-made block patterns: heroes, pricing tables, team grids, testimonial rows, FAQs and contact sections, each arriving already laid out rather than as a blank canvas.
• Three style packs — Material, Modern and Flat — shipped as real theme.json style variations against the official WordPress schema, so they appear in the Styles panel of your own site editor.
• Your brand colour and typeface are global styles, so changing one changes every heading, button, badge and card across every page at once.
• Dark mode is handled for you. Visitors who prefer dark screens get a dark site in every pack, with nothing to design or maintain twice.
• A base block theme is included, and it is optional — GF Builder works with any block theme.
• Requires WordPress 6.8 or newer and PHP 8.0 or newer.