Category Archives: Blog

Meet Smart, The Most Versatile WordPress Theme Ever

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We’re introducing Smart, our largest and best WordPress Theme ever released. If you are looking for the ultimate WordPress theme then Smart just might be it.

Page Builder

Smart is a powerful, stylish and completely customizable multi-purpose WordPress theme. It comes packaged with an implementation of an extremely flexible and popular WordPress Theme Page Builder and an extensive and powerful set of features and functionality.

It has an advanced drag-and-drop page builder together with a robust collection of elements that let you create truly unique and dynamic pages from the ground up, giving you complete control of the layout and design of your site without needing to learn code.

There are no limitations as to how builder elements can be customized and arranged, giving anyone the ability to create truly dynamic websites with ease.

Demo Importer

The Demo Importer let you the any of the Smart packed demo content and choose from a selection of hundreds of amazing pre-designed layouts.

The theme gives you complete creative control to build countless layouts any type of mobile-friendly website you want. Even for navigation layouts.

WooCommerce Integration

It also comes with Ecommerce Integration, including WooCommerce support, a couple of premade store layouts, and special functionalities to create a unique and complete web shop in minutes.

Responsive & Retina Ready

Responsive Design is crucial these days. Smart is responsive and the layout has been designed with mobile devices in mind. No matter how you use it your website will be accessible and readable on all devices.

Theme Options Panel

The powerful and intuitive theme options panel will let you customize your entire site style with a few clicks. The Theme Options Panel allows you to toggle on and off features, adjust your layout,  control colors, optimize for search engines, performance and more.

Thousands of Features

With unlimited options, and hundreds of features (like picking your own fonts, CSS animations, thousands of icons, translation and RTL support), Smart is your best ally to create a fantastic WordPress website.

 

Start creating with Smart

 

Hello New Site!

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Hey there, it’s been a while since the last post! In the past few days we’ve been updating our website, and this is not just an aesthetic change, but the most significant changes were done behind the scene. We’ve completely switched our managing platform and we are now proudly using Easy Digital Downloads as the main engine of our site store.

At the same time we’ve been including some new features with a renovated look. We hope you like them!

Stay tuned for some awesomeness coming soon 🙂

What’s new in WordPress 4.1?

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Differently from version 4.0, WordPress 4.1 aims up the ante in bringing a majority of the WP users to the center stage, offering a number of new features that promise to make their lives easier in their day to day interactions. This version will be released in mid December with the following prominent feature upgrades from its previous iterations:

Distraction Free Writing Mode

Focus on your writing, and nothing else. This new feature enables efficient switching between normal writing mode and distraction free editor for WordPress bloggers to ensure hassle-free and productive blogging capabilities. It’s something similar to the current full screen distraction free writing mode, which lacks the necessary features and tools such as quick access to all meta boxes within a single toolbar included in this new “Distraction Free Writing Mode”.

WordPress 4.1 Distraction Free Writing Mode

Twenty Fifteen – The New Default Theme

The nicest WordPress default theme so far. Perhaps the most significant leap toward beautifying the WordPress platform for end users is the inclusion of the Twenty Fifteen theme by default in the 4.1 release. The blog-focused theme is developed with a particular attention to the typography, with the main navigation menu and logo within the sidebar, further emphasising on the content. It comes with a variety of different color schemes and it is really flexible when it comes to customisation. You can change colors, backgrounds for different sections and much more.

The Twenty Fifteen theme, customised with a nice background image

Twenty Fifteen comes with a variety of different color schemes

Select2 inclusion for Drop-down lists

WordPress 4.1 will offer to include Select2 directly from core. Select2 is a popular script to create drop down lists that supports searching, remote data sets, and infinite scrolling of results. If you’re a WooCommerce user, you may have seen this popular select tool within the options panel, or during checkout for the country selection. One of the good features of this module is that the contents for the drop-down list can be loaded to the browser only when required and will therefore save chunks from the overall weight of the website. This new feature might be invisible to users, but for sure will benefit both: developers and users.

Install New Language Packs from the Dashboard

2014 has been the year in which non-english WordPress downloads surpased english downloads.WordPress adoption is expanding exponentially across the globe, and the upcoming iteration will include additional language installation packs available via dashboard. This functionality will further shrink the language barrier to WP adoption in a bid to improve convenience for end users. With the 4.1 installed, you can select from a range of language options available in the Site Language section of the Admin area.

You can install new language packs directly from the dashboard

Automated Image Formatting

Another step forward on the quest for simplifying the process of writing for everybody. Often, WordPress newbies find formatting images an arduous task due to the complex image alignment functionality for earlier versions of the platform. WordPress 4.1 boasts inline image editing capabilities to automate the process of image formatting and alignment with a few quick clicks and without having to open the image editor, but inline.

WordPress 4.1 Image Formatting Tool

New Session Management Options

In context of the ongoing security concerns haunting WP users, the WordPress 4.1 version will introduce a new session management function to monitor and keep track of user session activities. The system will show valuable information such as log-in time, originating IP address and session expiry date and time. Users can also log out all session from a single interface in the new beta version.

WordPress 4.1 Session Manager

If you are willing to test the new version, you can use the Beta Tester plugin to install WP 4.1 Beta before the final release, which is planned for December 16th. The upcoming iteration promises new capabilities and features that are relevant to average WordPress users, developers and should improve productivity with the most popular CMS and blogging platform.

Upcoming changes, goodbye Timthumb

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When we made our first approach to design the structure of our theme framework, we decided that the best way to handle images would be using the timthumb script. It is widely used by loads of WordPress theme developers. We considered that it was really powerful in the sense that it can dynamically change the size of any image, even making them bigger in size, crop them, etc. Now that we have a customer base, and our themes are used in – we can gladly say – thousands of websites, the common denominator across our support base was problems with images.

On our previous theme releases – since the framework version 1.0.5 – we’ve included an option to pick the WordPress native image functions to handle images, instead of the timthumb script. The intention of this was to prepare the field for our next step, which will be removing timthumb from all our themes.

So we highly recommend that, in case you’re still managing images with timthumb on your site, you update the option to the WordPress native functionalities in order to prepare for the upcoming changes in both theme and framework versions.

To achieve this, first make sure that your theme is up to date. Then, just go to your Theme Options Panel and find the “Images” section on the left hand menu.

Pick the WP Dynamic Resizing and the Image cropping option.

If you get to see that your site’s images look awkward, you must regenerate the thumbnails. You can simply get this done by using the “Regenerate thumbnails” plugin.

 Thanks for stopping by.

Some nice updates, presenting the new Twitter Widget.

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We would like to thank our growing community for the continuous amazing feedback, support and patience while we were setting up some of the new features and updates.

Since last week, after the launch of Paeon, we’ve been working hard in order to release several updates regarding some fixes for our current themes. The main fix, and actually the most important one for our users – the one most people had been asking for – is the Twitter Widget update.

Some time ago, Twitter announced that they are officially turning off version 1.0 of their API. In plain english, this means they change the rules for developers in order to communicate with their services. They moved to version 1.1 of their API (unfortunately, this is out of our control). Technically speaking, this new version requires authentication for any request made to the Twitter servers, which means that all Twitter applications and code snippets would need to be updated to use this new version.

Today, we’d like to inform you that BBQ, Netelier and Bref have been updated, and this new update includes support for Twitter API version 1.1

This new version of the Widget requires some configuration regarding authentication as previously mentioned in this post. So, I will try to explain what you need to do in order to have the new widget working. If you find any difficulty, please feel free to post a new topic in our forums.

How do I set up my Twitter Widget?

The setup process may seem a bit confusing at first, but it only takes a few minutes and is a one-time configuration.

In order to configure the Twitter Widget you need to do the following:

  1. Visit http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
  2. Login or make sure to login as Twitter account used on website to display tweets
  3. Type the following on input fields:

    Name: [Your Site Name] Twitter Widget
    Description: Display twitter feeds on website
    Website: [Your website URL]
    Callback URL: (leave blank)

  4. Check on “Yes, I agree” and fill the CAPTCHA
  5. Once the application is setup, copy and paste the application OAuth settings into your Twitter Widget Configuration. (Consumer and Consumer Key)
  6. Back on Twitter click “Create my access token”, then copy and paste the recently created Access Token into your widget configuration back on your website.
  7. On the Widget Configuration on your website, change the Username name to your Twitter ID without @ symbol. Complete the other fields if necessary (Include Retweets, Exclude Replies & the number of tweets to show).
  8. Save the Widget settings.
  9. Voilá, your tweets should be displaying by now.

Some nice updates

Besides the already mentioned Twitter widget update, we’ve been working on adding and fixing several technical issues across the themes. On top of solutions to technical issues you’ll find out that:

  • On BBQ and Netelier there’s a new “Back to top” functionality that you can activate from the Theme Options.
  • There’s a renovated experience on the managing of custom post types (Slides, Info Boxes, Menus, Portfolios, etc).
  • On BBQ there’s a nice effect for the home page, and the gallery templates.
  • You can now use .ico files for your favicon, not just PNGs

NOTE: You can check all the updates in the changelog.txt file within your theme folder.

We hope you enjoy these new features and updates. That’s all for now, stay tuned

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