🚀 Introducing: simplified page layout, chart component, and new CMS field types

This week, we’re excited to roll out a new set of features to improve your app and website building workflows:

• Simplified page layout with document layout mode

• Chart components

• New field types for CMS

Document layout mode

We’re introducing a significant step up in making Plasmic easier to build with: document layout mode. This new layout mode complements the existing layout modes like horizontal/vertical stacks and grids, but it makes authoring pages in Plasmic a bit more like layout in a word processor, where you just get good defaults without needing to think hard about layout.

In the dark past, you couldn’t just add content to a page. You had to put all your content in a container that has a max width, so that it doesn’t become too wide on larger screens. And then you had to apply either margin or padding around your containers to prevent content from running into the edges on smaller screens. At the same time you had to make sure to structure things to accommodate full-bleed sections that do span edge-to-edge on all screens.

With document layout, you just add content—and it will be a “standard width” by default, with spacing from the edges. Want a full-bleed section inside in that page? Just set the width to “full width” (or simply insert a “section,” now available in the insert menu). And finally, use “wide width” for any media that you do want to be a bit wider-than-standard width. You can define all these widths in the Default Styles panel. Last but not least, you can set things to be “hug” if you want them to wrap their content, and align them left/center/right.

Document layout is something that substitutes well for vertical stacks in most situations, and is now the default layout for all new blank pages.

Chart components

We’re excited to introduce a new built-in Chart component, which enables you to create interactive and customizable data visualizations quickly and easily.

You can draw from a variety of chart types—from simple bar/line/scatter plots, to stacked area charts, grouped bar charts, dual-axis line charts, and more.

This component is great for a wide range of use cases, from building sales analytics dashboards and financial planning apps to user-facing portals that display product usage. Just search for "chart" in the insert menu, and you're off!

New field types for CMS

A little while ago we’ve rolled out several new field types to the Plasmic CMS:

Lists. Now you can easily create collections of things, directly in your CMS models.

Reference types. You can create references to other entries that exist in the CMS, such as a Blog Post that links to an Author.

Nested objects. You can now have multi-level nested fields, so for instance an address field that’s an object with street, city, and state sub-fields.

Combine any of the above—create a Blog Post with a List referencing Authors, for instance.

That’s all for this episode. Go play with the latest changes and tell us what you think!