Hello fellow Wixers!
This year I am kicking off the newsletter a bit late—partially due to being swamped with some new accounts, consultations, and working on the Advanced Velo course, and partially due to January being a slow news month for the Wix Ecosystem. In 2025, we will be switching it up a bit and saying goodbye to our "No Code", "Low Code", etc. format in favor of a more conversational approach. In addition, I will be providing more insights into what's new with The Wix Wiz alongside the greater Wix World.
What's been happening with The Wix Wiz?
This past month we've been working on revamping our agency website, with a focus on modern, sleek design and making the core services and resources you are looking for more accessible. This is part of a broader rebranding that you may have noticed, including a new logo, color scheme, etc. We've also hired a great new content writer who will help make some of the YouTube tutorials more approachable with step-by-step instructions, code snippets, and bridging themes and concepts, such as in this new blog post about Wix Data Filters.
Based on your feedback, I've decided to change the composition of the weekly tutorials to include more basic/low-code demonstrations (such as datasets and custom forms) and eCom-related topics. Don't worry, we will still have the occasional code-along and dev deep dive tutorials that we all (or at least I) love. This is the roundup from last month in case you missed it:
You can also listen to the roundup in this AI generated podcast made with NotebookLM (which I just think is the coolest thing ever). In the podcast the hosts discuss everything above as well as some of the forum posts from the past month. I listened to the whole thing and found it fascinating and entertaining.
In addition to the regular video tutorials, next week we will finally have another livestream! It's a great way for us to connect, talk about what's new in Wix and answer burning questions about your site.
Finally, I wanted to share this Velo Code Audit tool again with some updates based on your feedback. You can use the tool to review some or all of the code on your Wix website and catch bugs and deviations from best practices. (It's on a free server so may take a moment to warm up.)
What's been happening on Wix?
Wix has announced a bunch of interesting updates towards the end of January. Here are a few that caught my eye:
Improvements to the Wix Store Mini-Cart (Side Cart)
The Mini Cart, a panel that opens when you add something to cart and displays it's contents. Has always been one of the clunkier, less customizable parts of Wix (second only to the Checkout page). This may be the begining of a new era though with the announcement of the new and enhanced "Side Cart"!
New Side Cart settings - Find the side cart in the Wix Stores pages. From the peeking around that I've done this includes customizing what's included in the display and the overall design. The new Side Cart acts as a lightbox, so you could drag and place elements into it the will appear and disappear along with it. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there are any new Velo API's for accessing the Side Carts elements (though they should still work integrally with the general cart APIs such as onCartUpdated)
2. New Member Authentication APIs
Wix has released another wave of methods available in the 'wix-members-frontend' module. Notably the changePassword method which allows us to allow users to change their password programmatically from a custom portal without taking them through the undesignable Wix portal.
Dynamic repeaters are now available in Blocks.
This was just announced so I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it yet but it seems like one of the strongest pain points in Wix might be nearing it's end. "Repeaters in repeaters" (or more accurately the lack of) has been a big issue for many website builders trying to nest content. While these new dynamic repeaters are only available in Blocks at the moment, there is hope that this is a soft launch for a more development savvy sector of the community prior to a release to the general public.
Finally I'll end off with a heads up:
Start familiarizing yourself with the Wix SDKs. This wrapper for the REST APIs is primarily for use in Wix Headless and Wix Apps (at the moment) but I have heard some whispers of a greater focus on these packages as part of a unification process with Velo. That's all I'll say in writing as it is still far off and I have been assured that it has no breaking consequences (i.e Velo as it is will always work). For those who want to discuss more, I'll bring it up on our upcoming livestream.
Have a great month and remember -
Every large feature was once a small bug
Eitan & the Wix Wiz team It's a wrap!
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