Salient 18.1 is a minor release with three additions you will notice while building: drag-to-reorder in the front-end Element Navigator, deep links that open a specific Toggle panel from the URL, and a per-device switch that disables the Sticky Scroll Pinned Sections effect on phones. Behind them sit WooCommerce 10.5 support and about ten fixes. Nothing you have already built changes when you update.
If you work in the front-end editor or ship long client pages, this one earns its ten minutes. The reordering alone turns a fiddly drag across a cramped live canvas into moving a row in a list. It builds on the Salient 18 redesign.
Drag to reorder in the Element Navigator
The front-end editor’s Element Navigator, the tree panel that lists every element on the page, now reorders by dragging. Click Element Navigator in the editor toolbar and the panel shows your rows, columns, and elements as a nested tree. Grab any row and drop it somewhere new, and a blue insertion line marks where it will land before you release.
The drag respects structure. Rows, columns, and sections can only move within their own parent and cannot be dropped inside another element, so you will not accidentally bury a section three levels deep. Regular elements go anywhere their type is allowed, and Escape cancels a drag mid-move. It is the fastest way to reorganize a page that has outgrown one screen.
Link straight to an open Toggle
Toggle Panels, Salient’s accordion element, can now be opened straight from a URL. Add a ?toggle= parameter to the page address and the matching panel opens on load. There are two ways to point at a panel:
- By position:
?toggle=2opens the second Toggle panel on the page. - By title: a panel titled “Shipping and returns” opens with
?toggle=shipping-and-returns, its title lowercased with spaces turned to hyphens.
Add &focus=true and the page also scrolls the panel into view, offset for a fixed header, rather than just opening it in place. It works on in-page links too: a menu item or button whose link carries ?toggle= opens the target panel without a full reload. Existing Toggle elements need no changes.
Turn off pinned-section scrolling on phones
The Sticky Content Sections element has a type called Sticky Scroll Pinned Sections, where each section pins to the viewport while the next scrolls up over it. It reads well on a wide screen and gets cramped on a narrow one. 18.1 adds an Effect Enabled control that sets the effect per device.
Edit a Sticky Content Sections element on that type and you get an Effect Enabled row with Desktop, Tablet, and Phone, each Enabled or Disabled. Set Phone to Disabled and, below 690px, the pinning drops: the sections unstack into an ordinary vertical column that scrolls like any other content, while desktop and tablet keep the effect. The same control covers the Layered Card Reveal type. Reach for it when a layout that sings on a laptop becomes a pile of overlapping cards on a phone.
Everything else in 18.1
18.1 adds WooCommerce 10.5.x support, so stores on current WooCommerce keep Salient’s shop styling, and it exposes the woocommerce_output_related_products_args filter for changing how related products are chosen and ordered. A logo can now carry custom alt text, buttons take a minimum size for their arrow icon, and a new nectar_prefer_svh filter forces viewport-height units to convert to svh where you want small-viewport behaviour.
The release also clears about ten bug reports, most around WooCommerce setups, sticky sidebar and fixed-section positioning, and a Chrome 145 scrollbar-width change. The full 18.1 changelog has the line-by-line.
How to update
Update the theme and its bundled plugins together. In the WordPress admin, update the Salient theme first, then let it prompt you for the bundled plugins, or run them from the Salient control panel. 18.1 ships Salient Core 3.1.3 and Salient WPBakery 8.7.2, and moving them as a set keeps the editor and front end in sync.
The release is tested against WordPress 6.9, so current WordPress is fine. On a live client site, update on staging first and keep a backup, though a minor like this rarely needs more than the standard update steps and a look at the front end afterward.
Should you update to 18.1?
Yes, and it is a quick one. If you live in the front-end editor, the Element Navigator reordering is reason enough to do it today; the rest you will be glad of the next time a client asks why the homepage feels broken on their phone. Update, then go move a few sections around without touching the canvas.
