Please visit our Divi page for tutorials and tweaks.

The wait is finally over! Elegant Themes has just released their much anticipated theme, Divi. For those of you unfamiliar with the buildup to this theme, here’s some background. A sneak peek of the theme had been shown on ET’s blog several weeks ago, promising the most powerful and flexible theme to date and giving a few screenshots of its layout options. Not only did it look impressive, but it looked like a game changer for Elegant Themes.

What makes Divi so different?

The premise of Divi is a complete drag and drop page builder, something a lot of website owners would probably love to have. Here’s a screenshot of the page builder:

After playing around with it for a few minutes, I was able to quickly add a pretty nice page with a background image and a few bells and whistles.

 

The page above was created using two page “sections”. Each section allows you to insert a combination of one or more columns. Once you’ve decided how many columns you want in your section, you can add a module to each column. Here’s a screenshot of possible modules:

 

As you can see there are lots of modules to choose from. Each module can be further customized based on your needs. Once each column has been filled with a module, you can either add a row or add a new section. In my example page from earlier, I noticed if I added a new row of modules within the first section it maintained the background image. But if I created a new section, the background image ended and I was able to start from scratch again.

What’s the catch?

Anyone who has any experience with drag and drop knows there is almost always a catch. While I think Elegant Themes has done an incredible job, there are a few things to think about. The first thing you’ll notice is that when you click on the “X” to delete a module, you won’t receive a verification pop up asking if you’re sure you want to delete that section. Luckily for me I was only making a sample page. If I had been working on a section for the past two hours only to accidentally click the X and lose all my work, probably wouldn’t be too happy about it. Hopefully they come up with a fix soon.

The other caveat is that you cannot use the page builder on posts, only pages. This isn’t a big deal because for most people a blog post is going to be text and images, which are still easy to do. But if you had big plans for customizing every post, hold that thought.

Who is Divi for?

After my initial dry run of Divi, I think some people are going to like it a lot and some are going to love it. If you are not that experienced with web design and html or need to design lots of sites and quickly, you’re going to love it. This is pretty much Elegant Theme’s target audience so I think most people are going to love Divi. There are lots of options and they seemed to work really well.

If you’re a developer or designer that requires lots of customization, you’re probably not going to love the new builder. You’ll probably still get a lot of use out of it for your pages and for doing quick layout designs, but it’s only going to take you so far. That’s expected of any drag and drop though so nothing against ET. I think overall it will receive a warm welcome.

So head on over to Elegant Themes and check out much anticipated Divi theme. If you don’t have an account, I highly recommend them and use them for all of my websites. When it comes to beauty and simplicity, I don’t think anything beats ET. And if you have any problems, you can lean on their support or come back here to Elegant Tweaks for any customizations.