The next generation of Jupiter WordPress themes has recently arrived with the launch of Jupiter X2. And we are as excited as you to see what the community thinks about it and what it will build. In the meantime, we wanted to address some of the questions asked in recent days that other community members may also have. This will definitely give you a better idea of the big picture we have about Jupiter at Artbees, its roadmap and what it means for your business.

In general, Jupiter X2 is designed with 5 main goals in mind:

• Native full site editing
• Minimizing the need for Elementor Pro
• Jupiter-only WooCommerce features and builders
• Introducing personalization to the WP theme industry

Let’s dig further to see how we have done this in practice.

Time for full site editing!

The new star feature of WordPress everyone is talking about these days is full site editing. We at Artbees believe that it is not just another feature but a big part of the future of WordPress. And the time for Jupiter to join this movement has now come.

We got some of our best developers to design and execute the implementation of such an integral feature for such a massive theme. This was no easy job, as you may guess, but we are sure the result fully pays off!

The new layout builder in X2 is what we think is the right way to implement full site editing in WordPress.

The Layout Builder makes it possible to create and manage every corner of your WordPress website without any need for Elementor Pro Theme Builder. We will also evaluate the WordPress native full site editor along the way and we will embrace the new standard even further if we see even grounds.

Widest criteria of conditional layout display

X2 Layout Builder also offers literally the widest criteria for conditional display of your templates, which is a leap ahead of similar features in Elementor Pro and Advada. It’s an ongoing effort to help you personalize your site based on dozens of user/customer visiting and shopping behaviour.

A more seamless building and styling experience

The fragmented styling between backend (Customizer) and frontend (Elementor) made styling for complex scenarios way too difficult—definitely not a pleasant ​​full site editing experience. So, following the Layout Builder, we wanted to give even further macro control over the website by focusing on the native WordPress Customizer.

Styling in the page builder level may give you control over a specific page or element, but with global styling using the native WordPress Customizer you can style all elements of the same kind at once in no time and without being dependent on third party plugins.

The new remastered Theme Styles in X2 shows a more efficient menu structure, less clicks and more real estate. It gives more and deeper styling control over the website, from general styling to templates to shop pages—all within WordPress Customizer and without the need for Elementor Theme Styles.

We wanted all the power of Elementor without the need for Elementor Pro

Elementor is a powerful page builder and a trendsetter in the WordPress page builder game in recent years. Our goal with moving Jupiter X to Elementor in 2018 was to empower our users with the great building experience that Elementor offers and amplify it with the massive 450+ template repository exclusively available in Jupiter.

However, we have always aimed to maximize the value customers get when they use Elementor as part of Jupiter X without necessarily using Elementor Pro.

With the new X2 we have enriched Jupiter more with features that replace Elementor Pro. Features like the new layout builder that replaces Elementor Pro Theme Builder, the remastered Theme Styles (Customizer) that replaces the Theme Styles in Elementor Pro as well as features such as Custom snippet, which replaces Custom Code, are all huge steps toward taking full advantage of Elementor as a powerful open source page builder without the need for recurring subscriptions.

This is just a beginning in this direction and In the next few months you will see major additions that will dispense you of even more Elementor Pro features such as Pro widgets, animations and more.

Although all the Jet plugins are bundled as before in the Jupiter X2 and you can continue using them, we also plan to introduce the native replacement for these plugins such as JetElements, JetTabs, JetPopups, JetTricks, JetWooBuilder in the upcoming months.

Jupiter X store features fell short of the demands of the e-commerce market

COVID-19 has transformed the world around us, formed new habits and demands, and pioneered new lines of products and markets. It has also resulted in a huge spike in interest in e-commerce. WooCommerce default shop features obviously fall short of competition with other ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and Wix. 

Jupiter X shop customization was also not enough to address the needs of an increasing number of people who wanted to open or expand their own online businesses. With X2 we have presented a whole new round of capabilities to build and customize your WooCommerce store. 

With X2 you have a lot more capabilities to build all your shop pages, including not just product loops and product pages but also checkout and thank you pages.

We have widgetized many features needed in shop pages so you can move beyond the customization of limited templates shipped by your theme and actually build the layout for normally hard-to-reach pages such as cart and checkout pages.

Also, continuing on our mission to reduce the plugin dependency to build your WooCommerce store, we added brand new features—some of which are unprecedented in ThemeForest—so you can add many advanced features to grow your store. For example, one function that WooCommerce stores normally use a third-party plugin for is product filtering. 

The default product filtering is basic and shallow and does not address the needs of heavy-duty ecommerce stores. We developed a product filtering widget from scratch that makes easy filtering possible with lots of filter types, swatch attributes and a very fast response time.

Advanced product filter and attribute swatches are sold separately as a plugin in and outside of Envato.

Jupiter X2 not only builds your store–it optimizes, grows and measures it too!

Normally themes and plugins are used to do one thing: building your website or online store. You have to buy other extra plugins if you want to do more. For example, you might have to purchase a separate plugin to optimize your checkout, add advanced checkout features such as express checkout, a plugin or service to build sales funnels, show upselling offers to customers and more.

But this piecemeal approach to building a website as important as an online store negatively impacts the performance of your store and results in low performance, which means nothing but less business!

We wanted to make X2 a comprehensive package to answer all the needs of a WooCommerce online store without the need for extra services. And it is our goal to enrich it even further in the future.

Jupiter X2 disrupts this tradition in Themeforest and offers a vast range of industry-first features focused on optimizing, growing and measuring your WooCommerce store performance via analytics. All of these services are sold by our competitors as separate plugins and altogether could cost you some $950 per year.

Why do we sell a $950 value for $59? Are we doing charity work?
No!

The majority of new WooCommerce features, including the checkout optimizer, sales funnel builder, automated discounts, personalized coupons and smart notices, are part of our newly released independent plugin called SellKit, which was released alongside the Jupiter X2. 

These features are part of the premium plan, which costs $199 per year, but we are making them available to the Jupiter community for free as they have accompanied us on our WordPress journey since 2013. 

We believe this will add extra value to our product and shake up the pretty sleepy market traditions in Themeforest. We are hoping veteran e-commerce stores in our community can use these features and help us improve both Jupiter X and SellKit with their constructive feedback.

Introducing segmentation and personalization to the theme market

Our journey enabling you to create personalized content right from inside your theme without the need for any other third party plugins or service has begun with X2 and will continue in futurestages. 

X2 presents segmentation criteria in features such as layout builder, automated discounts, personalized coupons and checkout notices, which for the first time enable advanced capabilities like showing different variations of a layout in different sections (such as archives)and, for the first time ever in a WP theme, in and outside of Envato marketplaces: 

• Showing personalized content to different audiences (such as user roles), 
• Showing personalized product loops based on customer shopping behavior 
• Applying automated discounts during checkout based on shopping behavior
• Serving personalized upsell/downsell offers based on cart items and other shopping details
• Showing personalized coupons while checking out based on customer shopping behavior.

In upcoming stages we will add more segmentation criteria to enable you to personalize different sections of your website for even more specific audiences.

All these new features needed a powerful new core, too 

The new features called for a robust control panel. We redefined the X2 control panel to be more capable but less crowded. You will see more relevant information in the dashboard and can easily find all the settings you want for different parts of the website, from daily to advanced.

What’s next?

Needless to say, our journey to improve Jupiter X with more exclusive features will continue. In the next stages of X2 we will introduce even better performance standards. We will remove dependency to even less essential plugins and develop native replacements for some of the bundled plugins. This will assure an even more streamlined code-behind and superb elevated performance.

And you!

With X2 we have started a new chapter in the Jupiter journey, one that definitely does not involve short-sighted financial goals in Themeforest. After almost a decade in the Themeforest top sellers chart, our new strategy is to immediately benefit existing and new users with real value, not by offering a higher number of elements, templates and styles as is common in the theme market. 

We believe this—the real value to users—is the only way the theme market can sustain and thrive in the dawn of the new decade.

In the end, we cannot thank our community of users enough for using Jupiter for years and relying on it to start and run businesses. We have always been humbled by our precious community, not only because of warm reviews and messages but because our customers have stuck with us when something has gone wrong or not as expected with an update. 

We hope the Jupiter community will like this new chapter in Jupiter’s journey and continue to fuel it with their support and feedback. Without you all, Jupiter wouldn’t be Jupiter!

While we are working hard on bringing even more to the table in our next iterations, we can’t wait to see what our community of over 160,000 users creates with Jupiter X2 and we rely on the precious feedback from our community about X2 the same way they have have driven us forward after all releases from Jupiter V1 to V5, V6 and X.