Distributing Page Builder styles and scripts

[jeffpaul]

I received the following feedback in one of my email conversations with someone who's tested Distributor, but ran into a limitation.

I gave the Distributor plugin a try for our corporate website to keep certain pages “synced” to our main versions across various regional sites in our network. Unfortunately it didn’t work as we use Elementor Page Builder and the distributed pages didn’t contain the needed styles/scripts to display as designed using Elementor – they showed up as just default WordPress based pages (as if the content had just been entered into the default WordPress editor).

I'm not initially certain how best to go about solving for this issue, but wanted to capture this here as a possible future iteration to consider styles/scripts and Page Builders in general. I'm not certain if Elementor is storing those styles/scripts as post meta or at a higher level applicable to all (or a set of) Elementor pages. This may also just be a case of a custom extension of Distributor relevant to specific a use case, so ensuring we have relevant hooks/filters to support this may also be the best option.

[jeffpaul]

Another respondent with essentially the same piece of feedback, but who otherwise has Distriburor working well for them:

I am using a secondary plugin called elementor. I haven’t got the plugin to work 100% with your plugin yet, its just a wysiwig editor. (It loses its formatting from the distributor pull page). Would love for this to be available in the future.

[Webtica]

Hi,

Is there any news regarding this issue?
We are using Elementor on a multisite network and would like to push pages to subsites.
When we push a page now it pushes the content but not the elementor styling.

[jeffpaul]

@Webtica this is a rather intricate issue and something we haven't yet shifted to fully research and confirm an approach to resolve. If you've done any research into this and have ideas on approach, please share that here. And if you're up for generating a PR to match your approach, please share that as well. I'll be happy to have our team review any research, approach, or PR you may be able to pull together on this topic... thanks!

[eduwass]

@Webtica this is a rather intricate issue and something we haven't yet shifted to fully research and confirm an approach to resolve. If you've done any research into this and have ideas on approach, please share that here. And if you're up for generating a PR to match your approach, please share that as well. I'll be happy to have our team review any research, approach, or PR you may be able to pull together on this topic... thanks!

Hi Jeff,

I've tested this locally and it seems like it is indeed a post meta issue.

I tried pulling one post and it was missing styling, when comparing the DB I noticed that the '_elementor_data' post meta wasn't exactly like the original. Manually copying the meta_value got the styles working again.

It was my understanding that Distributor does copy the post meta so I'm not sure why this is happening.

Do you think that is something on Distributor or Elementor's end? Any way to isolate this further? I'd like to keep investigating this but I'm not very sure where I should look, so any suggestions you have would be appreciated.

Cheers and great work!