Reply To: Divi Gallery Module and ACF

• prowebassist

• July 3, 2020 at 12:10 am

Hi Kevin,

Was searching for different stuff on the forum, but stumbled onto your post, so thought I’d give my 2c on the topic. Not even sure if you are still looking for input..

TLDR: definitely drop Divi & go with Oxygen. At the very least, it’s gonna make you a better web dev. Also, no matter what, you final website IS GUARANTEED be lighter, faster & more efficient with Oxygen than anything you can achieve with Divi. Oxygen also has integration with ACF and it’s handy (Divi has it too as you are aware), but it’s only useful for simple ACF field types. So I don’t use ACF integration features at all in Oxygen – I just use a raw PHP code block inside Oxygen (it’s a special core builder element) to define the EXACT HTML output I want, no matter what types of ACF fields I use: simple, dynamic/complex – it doesn’t matter, since I code how to retrieve & manipulate the data. Divi doesn’t let you do that. Oxygen does.

I’ve used Divi for years, so I know it inside and out. It’s a decent tool for marketers, who need to spit out quick landing pages without having to call their dev all the time. But it just doesn’t cut it for “real” websites, in my opinion. If you are gonna try to build anything remotely custom or tailored to your client, you are gonna end up jumping through so many hoops with Divi, that you might as well build the site from scratch.

With Oxygen, you are sort-of creating it from scratch to begin with, but it gives you complete creative freedom to build EXACTLY what you want. And, if you know what you are doing, it will result in a much cleaner, faster, more efficient website, that also feels bespoke to your client (combo of Oxygen + ACF + CPT UI/custom post types). You just can’t get that kind of quality out of Divi.

I also can’t believe how much faster my sites are now, when I’ve switched to Oxygen and away from Divi. It’s no joke. I couldn’t get these kinds of improvements with Divi, no matter what kind of server I had, optimisation I applied or caching plugin I’ve used. My bigger, more complex Oxygen sites run 10 times faster raw (i.e. un-optimised/un-cached), than my past small one-page Divi sites run with all compression/optimisation I could come up with. And that’s a really big deal. Google/SEO will reward you for that.

So, if you do it right with Oxygen, the resulting site will be just as good as a site that’s built completely from scratch using your own custom theme.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Alex