Spectra is the new brand name of the Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg (UG) plugin, which is the world’s number 1 plugin supporting Gutenberg design – Block Editor. Launched by Brainstorm Force (Astra Agency) 4 years ago, Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg now has more than half a million actives and a total of 12 million downloads, no addons plugin for Gutenberg has achieved this number.
Introducing Spectra
In 2021, Astra Agency developers decided to rename Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg (UG) to Spectra – with the mission of turning it into the number 1 design tool for WordPress Block Editor, similar to what Elementor is doing.
Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg has such a large number of users for a very simple reason: it is extremely powerful and stable & completely free, there are few free addons with as many features and powerful as UG.
Spectra Pro is the commercial version that Astra Agency developers spent 2 years to continuously improve Spectra and quietly develop more advanced Pro features, like other famous brothers Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder (UB), Ultimate Addons for Visual Composer (UV) and Ultimate Addons for Elementor (UE).
Features of Spectra Pro
Globally linked styles.
Spectra Cloud: we already have a very delicious Spectra Free Templates Library, but the Pro version will add more professional web templates, including advanced Site Templates, Wireframes and Block Patterns.
Spectra AI: not a content creation style like ChatGPT, but a request sending feature (promt) for Spectra Pro to automatically perform designs and features, Elementor also just introduced the AI design support feature, very promising!
Dynamic Content is the ‘dynamic’ content of WordPress, for example, content belonging to posts such as Title, Featured Image, Author, Category… and including content from content extension plugins such as ACF, PODS or Meta Box.
The additional support feature of Dynamic Content will help us easily design complex websites, allowing the display of many types of content in an extremely flexible way.
The simplest example, you can display an article (or product, ..) anywhere on the page, according to your own design, regardless of the available attributes on the theme, by combining related dynamic content.
Loop Builder is the heart of WordPress, simply put, it is a conditional loop to display a list of content taken from the database: list of articles, list of products, list of hotels, tours, courses… .
The Loop Builder feature allows you to place the above lists anywhere on the website and, moreover, allows you to customize the list design (in list/grid format) and set related properties (such as quantity, filter by category/tag, etc.).
For example, on a certain page, you can drag and drop the Loop Builder block to display a list of the latest articles.
In fact, the Loop Builder feature extends the Query Loop feature available on Gutenberg – Block Editor, but Query Loop on Gutenberg only supports very basic design customization, if not poor. Compared to competing plugins such as WP Stackable, GenerateBlocks, the Loop Builder on Spectra Pro promises to be more powerful, especially in design support – which is the strength of the Astra theme and the products in the Astra Agency package in general.
Slider Pro is a Slider feature available on Spectra Free, and in the paid version Spectra Pro will allow you to create Sliders with more advanced customization features.
Allows changing slides for each view.
Focus mode to draw attention to the slide being shown.
Add a navigation bar for each slide.
Pop Builder Pro is even more important than Slider, this feature allows us to create advanced popups. For example:
Opt-in Popup connects to Mailchimp/ MailerLite,… to collect user emails (Mailing Lists).
Popup displays discount codes.
Notification Bar popup.
Pop Builder Pro allows creating popups with complex display conditions such as displaying by page/ by user action. With this feature, in many cases, you do not need to install a specialized Popup plugin like
ConvertPro or Ninja Popups anymore.
Modal: Although in UI/UX design, Modal and Popup are clearly distinguished according to the purpose of use, but in general, you can use either one as long as it solves the problem. Usually, Popup is used as Opt-in Form to create an email list, and Modal is used to display notifications, sub-menus or collect information. Modal features on Spectra Pro include:
Allows to display Modal in Off Canvas style (like Off Canvas Menu, on/off on mobile).
Allows to use Cookies to automatically activate Modal.
Allows to choose when to display Modal.
Animation Pro: motion effects are very trendy, using animation properly will support Storytelling in design extremely effectively. Spectra Pro supports you to create basic dynamic effects, enough for components on the website, allowing you to customize delay – duration & smoothness properties.
Countdown Timer Pro helps stimulate user interaction
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