bricks-floating-panels

Floating Panels for Bricks is a WordPress plugin for people who use the Bricks Builder page editor. Bricks is a visual website builder that runs inside WordPress, and by default its Settings and Structure panels are docked to the side of the screen, which takes up horizontal space and squeezes the canvas where you see your design. This plugin converts those panels into draggable, floating overlays so you can move them anywhere on screen or hide them entirely, giving the canvas more room.

Each panel can be in one of three states: locked to its original docked position, floating freely as a movable overlay, or hidden. You switch between states using a small control added to the builder's top toolbar. When a panel floats, you can drag it, resize it, snap it to an edge, and adjust its width using preset size options. Clicking a canvas element automatically opens the Settings panel, and clicking on empty canvas closes it again if it was opened that way. The position and size of each panel are remembered in the browser between sessions.

The plugin also includes some optional features that are off by default and marked as experimental. These include making floating panels semi-transparent so you can see the design underneath, automatically nudging a panel out of the way when you click an element it is covering, and a side-docking mode where both panels lock to one side and the canvas adjusts its width to make room rather than the panels floating on top of it.

The plugin loads only inside the Bricks builder interface and does not affect the public-facing pages of the website. It requires WordPress 5.8 or newer, PHP 7.4 or newer, and an active installation of Bricks Builder.

The repository includes a build script that produces two separate release versions: one for distribution directly from GitHub (which includes an auto-update mechanism), and one for submission to the WordPress.org plugin directory (which strips the update library as required by that platform).