Feature suggestions for EasyLayouts

By Guest on Thursday, 29 January 2026

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Hi,
I’d like to suggest a few features for EasyLayouts. These are inspired by the Astroid framework and I think they would be really useful:

Toggle Visibility in Layout Grid: It would be great to have an option (like an eye icon) to hide specific elements directly in the layout grid. This would allow us to test the page with or without certain elements without having to manually add `display: none` in the CSS. While the `?elspreview=1` method is useful for testing the whole page, hiding elements "on the fly" would be a great addition.

Responsive Visibility Settings: Taking this a step further, it would be amazing to have a list of media queries inside the element's popup settings. This way, we could choose to show or hide specific elements based on the screen size (breakpoints).

Code Editor & SCSS: Finally, a real code editor in the "CSS and JS Options" tab would be much appreciated. Also, I noticed that SCSS seems to be accepted, could you confirm if it's fully supported?

Thanks for your time and for this great tool

Lorenzo

These are really interesting ideas. I was wondering about a type of 'live preview' option so that you could have 2 browser tabs or browser windows so you could be editing a layout on one tab/window and you could see the changes being applied in a second. Adding a 'hide' option would be a neat feature for this.

We don't currently process SCSS and convert to CSS so its possible this could be your browser being able to parse and process it?

Guest

3 days ago

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#6127

Hi,

The dual-window "live preview" is a great idea and definitely welcome!

Regarding SCSS, you're right: it must be the browser itself handling the nesting.

I really hope you can consider my proposals for your roadmap, especially the toggle visibility and responsive settings.

Thanks again
Lorenzo

Guest

3 days ago

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#6129

The visibility toggle is a sort of publish/unpublish feature for rows within the layouts?

Regarding the 'device visibility' we could also add permission controls too so that certain elements/rows are only visible for certain types of user??

Guest

3 days ago

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#6130

The visibility toggle is a sort of publish/unpublish feature for rows within the layouts?

Yes, the toggle would act as a publish/unpublish feature. However, limiting this to rows would be too restrictive; it should definitely be extended to individual elements as well, otherwise hiding specific content becomes difficult.

Regarding the UI: currently, elements within a row are quite small and sometimes difficult to drag or manage. It would be much better to have a larger, fixed-size representation (fixed width/height) for these elements. This extra space would allow you to fit more icons, not just the "eye" for visibility, but perhaps also a "duplicate" icon, which would be very useful.

Regarding the 'device visibility' we could also add permission controls too so that certain elements/rows are only visible for certain types of user??

As for the device visibility combined with permission controls, I think that’s another excellent idea!

Guest

3 days ago

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#6131

There is a complication with published/unpublished state and permissions on columns in that we currently count an check them and check consistency within the row. Not impossible to deal with but something we'd need to take account of.

Regarding the sizing - a few days ago I was looking at the backend of someone's site (not sure if it was yours) and the backend template was making everything smaller and positioning was a bit strange. Was this yours?

What I may do to start with is implement these features for rows (adding in an easy option to clone/copy a row and all its content) and then look at extending it later.

Guest

2 days ago

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#6133

There is a complication with published/unpublished state and permissions on columns in that we currently count an check them and check consistency within the row. Not impossible to deal with but something we'd need to take account of.

I’m not sure I follow the relationship between elements and columns you mentioned. Are you referring to the items under "Page Structure Elements"? For other sections like "Core Content Fields" or "Images and Links", I don't see where the element/column conflict would arise.

Regarding the sizing - a few days ago I was looking at the backend of someone's site (not sure if it was yours) and the backend template was making everything smaller and positioning was a bit strange. Was this yours?

Yes, that might be my site. I use a user.css file for the Joomla backend because I find the default font sizes way too large for my taste.

However, I don't think that's related to the small elements in EasyLayouts. Even when I disable /media/templates/administrator/atum/css/user.css, those elements remain very small and sometimes hard to handle.

What I may do to start with is implement these features for rows (adding in an easy option to clone/copy a row and all its content) and then look at extending it later.

I understand the technical challenge, but I hope you can implement it at the element level, as that's where the real layout control is. There is no immediate rush, but I wanted to share these thoughts to help improve the tool's flexibility in the long run.

Guest

2 days ago

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#6136