When it comes to WordPress site builders, there’s a compromise between convenience of use and the level to which you can customize and control the elements on your page.
Generally, visual editing tools for WordPress give you control over the content within the body of your page, but fall short for customization beyond that.
Oxygen, a new WordPress plugin from the people at Soflyy, promises to give visual, real-time pixel-level control over all site elements.
Oxygen aims to make site building easy for beginners, but it also packs features that lets power users customize to their heart’s content.
In this review, we’ll take a look at the main features of Oxygen, how to set it up and get running with it, and tell you what we really think of it.
Does Oxygen fulfill its promise of offering a new way to build sites quickly, easily, and with unlimited customization? Read on to find out.
Oxygen’s Main Features
There are a lot of features in Oxygen, here’s a rundown of its main offerings:
• Visually design your site with pixel-level control of everything, using fundamental HTML elements and CSS properties. HTML elements include sections, columns, Div blocks, headings, text boxes, text links, images, icons, code blocks, and more.
Oxygen allows you to edit not only body content, but also sections such as menus, headers, sidebars, and footers.
• See live previews of your site as you edit in real-time, without needing to refresh content.
• Oxygen includes a variety of premade components. For example, Next, which is built into Oxygen, consists of 160+ components (premade page blocks), 50+ pages (combined components), and five prebuilt website demos—all fully responsive and customizable. These prebuilt items allow you to quickly and easily build pages and entire sites.
• Create mobile responsive designs with device-level CSS.
• Easily edit element states (e.g. hover, before, after, active) and custom pseudo-classes.
• Create templates and target designs for specific content: pages, posts, ecommerce, post types, archives, taxonomies, categories, tags, and more.
• Write code for custom functionality (CSS, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript), and see the results of that code live, without having to refresh your page. Run custom WordPress loops, use WordPress API functions, and more.
• Use prebuilt Code Blocks to display content from the WordPress database.
• Easily set up custom post types and custom fields with Oxygen. Use Oxygen templates to apply post types. Use shortcodes or code blocks to add fields to designs.
• Reusable Parts allow you to have the same content in more than one place, edit a single version, and have all versions automatically update everywhere. Reusable parts can be used for menus, headers, footers, sidebars, and call-to-actions—any element that’s needed throughout your site.
• Insert third-party plugin output (e.g., sliders, mega menus, ecommerce, forms) into your pages using shortcodes, widgets, and PHP. Then, style the plugin’s output with CSS.
• Add widgets wherever you want—not just in sidebars.
• Oxygen includes 800+ Google Fonts and 500 SVG icons (from FontAwesome and Linearicons). You can also upload your own SVG icon sets from IcoMoon with one click. Oxygen also works with Typekit, letting you import fonts from a variety of type foundries.
• Tint background images to improve text readability.
• Forget having to use child themes with Oxygen—site designs are stored in the WordPress database, so updates to Oxygen are safe without them.
• Oxygen is compatible with third-party plugins, including SEO plugins and even third-party page builders such as Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, and Elementor.
• Pages created with Oxygen are search engine friendly, clean, and use high-quality HTML and CSS. Unlike other page builders, Oxygen doesn’t rely on grids or frameworks that add extra bloat and slow down your site. It only adds code for the elements you add to your page.
• Easily export and import designs created with Oxygen between sites.