This update is a waking nightmare, everything is worse

I feel your pain. I didn’t use the Advanced Columns much but I did make heavy use of their Section block which has had similar breaking changes.

I’ve dealt with their support though in the past and in general they do address every concern – so I have restored my affected sites to their previous state and will just wait until more updates are released. I’m confident they will make it work – just will take some time and we need to provide detailed feedback on what we’re seeing so they have all the information they need.

Thanks for the reply CGS, that does help some but honestly they’ve lost my trust at this point. I have so many blocks I have to convert now! I’m hoping this gets fixed anyway, for now I’ve notified all of my clients to not update from 1.x until they hear back from me.

I’m hoping you don’t have to convert anything – the general consensus in the forums seems to be that a lot is messed up. The Section and Advanced Column blocks were really front and center for a LOT of websites – I’m not sure what BSF had in mind when it came to deprecating them, but I think it’s pretty obvious at this point, they may need to backtrack.

And honestly, from a critical eye… do you really trust ANY developer to not make breaking changes? That’s like a feature of developers is that they break stuff lol! You can go through all the effort of finding something new, but at the end of the day it’s just another developer who will one day make a major release version that kills everything.

I’m hoping that as well!

You’re right it’s a risk we take but in 15+ years of WordPress design I’ve never had the rug pulled quite like this. I have to wonder, if they’d been charging for it all along, would they have released something that breaks this many sites? I would have paid for a Pro version. And then I’d be even more angry ??

But I will be keeping as many sites on version 1.x as possible until this is resolved in the hope that genuine backwards compatibility gets added to a future release.

in 15+ years of WordPress design I’ve never had the rug pulled quite like this

I guess you’ve never used Elementor huh? ??

This is one of the reasons why I try to vary my site builds. It’s easy to fall into a flexible theme like Astra and UAG and then build everything with it… but then if you have to manage all those sites, all your eggs are in a single basket. It’s best to get your site builds split between different themes and block plugins sometimes so that maybe when the rug pulls, only half your customers are affected – and it helps keep your skills from getting stale using the same tools over and over.

Ha, you’re right, I’ve dodged that. I had to use Divi once and it put me off builders forever. Good point on the skills, half my problem is now I’ve gotta learn a new interface to do the same thing, and who’s got time for that?

If ACF ever screws me, I’m just gonna fold up shop and try raising alpacas instead.

Hello @cmerrick

We’re sad that this update has caused you issues. Our team worked hard, tried its best to make it a smooth transition from prior versions to 2.0, and ran an extensive public beta testing program for several weeks. However, it seems we could not test all these possibilities. We’re so sorry for the trouble.

It seems you have reported 4 issues that you are facing; I will reply to each of those one by one.

# Option for choosing whether to stack on a tablet or not.

This can be done in three steps. Please see this screenshot: https://share.bsf.io/DOurR7Kz

Select the device from the settings
You can set the direction of your content on each device
And apply the wrap setting as per your need.

We have an article in our knowledge base that provides more details: https://wpspectra.com/docs/spectra-container-flex-property/

And we’re working on creating some video tutorials that would elaborate on how to use the container block properly.

# When the columns do stack — the right column drops below the left at tablet size, but neither column gets any wider until it gets to mobile size

By default, columns stack only on mobile devices and not tablets. I understand in your case, you need columns to stack on tablet devices. You can follow the steps above in the 1st reply.

If you want to make it wider, just update their widths to 100% each.

I recorded a quick video for your reference – https://share.bsf.io/Jru8PRWY

# All the elements within a single column have 20px top and bottom margins.

Thank you for the feedback. We have shared it with our team.

Defaults aren’t right

Thank you for the feedback. We have shared it with our team, and we will be back with a solution shortly.

Thanks for the response. It would be ideal if the Convert to Container function could implement the tablet settings I’d already chosen, rather than have to manually do the same correction again and again for every 2-column set. But it’s good to know how to do it.

The default row-padding in the Container I find completely baffling. At the very least, something converted from Advanced Columns (where there was no such setting) should default to zero.

I understand you can’t test for every possible scenario, but “I have a deprecated but totally normal two-column layout that I need to convert to a Container” does not strike me as an edge case.

Thanks again for responding, I do appreciate it.

Hello @cmerrick,

I would like you to know that there is a new release of Spectra 2.0.3 that has fixed most issues that came up with the latest updates. Please update to Spectra version 2.0.3. After updating, please be sure to regenerate the assets. We do this automatically after the plugin is updated, but just to be sure, go to “Spectra > Settings > Asset Generation > Regenerate Assets” and press the button.

Regards.
Judith.

Hello @cmerrick,

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.

Thank you!