This Newspaper 6.6+ update brings some major under the hood improvements in preparation for a bigger update. We always like to periodically take a step back, look at the big picture and if we see something that can be improved we do it! Even if in some cases nobody will ever see the improvement we like to make software that is polished even under the hood.
Due to the refactoring of core components we are now able to load a lot of the code only when needed. This alone brings performance gains and lower memory usage because the theme does not have to interpret all the code with each request.
We also took another step to our goal of having 100% of the JavaScript jshint compliant, now the majority of the theme’s JavaScript passes jshint, we expect to see a more stable JavaScript code that it’s easier minified by third party tools.
Social counter 3.1
In Newspaper 6.6 we improved the social counter for Google Plus, now instead of showing the +1’s it shows the followers count. We found that the followers count is the number that is shown on all the google plus pages. Version 3.1 also fixes the Facebook issue, on some servers the counter was unable to download the number of followers due to captchas shown by Facebook :).
Please update the plugin by deleting the old one and installing the new one from the theme panel. You can follow this tutorial about plugin update (It’s for visual composer but the same steps are used for the social counter as well).
New custom code panel
We moved all the custom code to one panel and we added auto complete and error detection to it. The code editor works with CSS, JavaScript and HTML and it detects common errors, like wrong selectors, broken HTML tags or JS code errors… it’s awesome.
Performance improvements
- the following modules of the theme are loaded on demand now: td_log, td_remote_http, td_remote_video, td_data_source, td_video_support, td_more_article_box, td_page_views, td_review, td_ajax. This means that the theme loads them only when needed. We mesured a 10% faster load time after this tweak.
- Before this update, the editor style sheet used in tinyMCE was dynamically compiled from less on each request. In this update we managed to use a single css file that is precompiled while still providing the WYSIWYG feeling of tinyMCE and Newspaper.
- Each demo now also has a custom CSS compiler. This compiler is used when you change the theme color or other settings that affect the appearance of the front end and with the new system each demo can load only the required css, without selectors or aditional css for other demos.
New Visual Composer version
We know you guys want the latest visual composer as soon as it comes out but we always test the plugin before we release an update to be sure that everything works as expected.
Newspaper 6.6.5 update – February 1th, 2016
- fix: WooCommerce 2.5 compatibility + various styling issues
- Visual Composer plugin updated to the latest version
- Revolution slider updated to the latest version
- Theme panel status now shows the loaded demo information
- Footer logo title and alt attribute is now configurable from the theme panel
- Faster servers that serve the files for the one click demos
Newspaper 6.6.4 update – January 8th, 2016
- fix: homepage pagination issue with WordPress 4.4.1
Newspaper 6.6.3 update – December 23th, 2015
- new: visual composer was updated to the latest version 4.9
- new: revolution slider was updated to the latest version 5.1.5
- fix: modified structured data to comply with Google’s new requirements
Newspaper 6.6.2 update – December 12th, 2015
- fix: pagination was not working on categories with big grid disabled on WordPress 4.4
Newspaper 6.6.1 update – December 3th, 2015
- new social counter version. Facebook requires now an API key, read more here: http://forum.tagdiv.com/tagdiv-social-counter-tutorial/
Newspaper 6.6 update
New:
- Custom code panel. We realized that all the custom css, html and javascript should be in one panel. We also added a custom HTML code section. All the input areas from this panel have autocomplete (ctrl+space) and error checking.
- Whatsapp share for article on mobile devices
- Added http channel test status in the system status panel. You can now check if the theme is able to get the tweet count, like count etc from your host.
- Filter posts by ID in blocks. You can add/exclude specific posts on all the blocks now.
- The theme now has it’s own logging system. We can now debug hosting issues easier.
- A new self diagnosting and self configurating module that allows our theme to pull data from other sites more reliably.
Fixes:
- Smart list 7 and 8 – sometimes the content was doubled
- G+ new icon
- Theme animations where incompatible with some plugins and the visual composer gallery. The animations still worked but all of them looked a bit strange.
- Bug with the demo loader – the dinamic css for a specific demo was still loaded even after the demo was uninstall
- Header style 8 top submenu z-index fix
- Image aligment issue when using custom article paddings
- The documentation url for demos was wrong in wp-admin
- We updated the ads links to point to the right documentation
- Social counter now shows the followers instead of +1 on google plus. Please update your social counter to see the improvement.
- Styling issues with the latest version of BuddyPress
- On rare ocassions with some plugins the theme was emitting warnings in the server logs like: “Catchable fatal error: Object of class stdClass could not be converted to string”
- Error that was showing up in logs when the theme panel was saved
Improvements:
- Video playlist is now more reliable and all the code is loaded only when needed via autoload. The youtube videos information is now collected using just one API call instead of multiple API calls for each videos.
- Speedbooster 4.2 now supports woocommerce better and moves the style.css to the bottom
- The theme panel works better now when adblock is used
- All the ajax functionality of the theme is now loaded only when needed
- Better security checks on all the ajax requests
- HTML is allowed now in the copyright section of the footer
- Social counter button is clickable on the entire area
- Almost all the javascript code now passes jshint. We still have about 15-20% of the code to refactor to the new standards but with time we will get there.
- The theme’s data source class can now be overwritten from the child theme
- All the widgets from the theme are now optimized to work better. The widget_builder class is now deprecated and all the functionality was moved to td_block_widget
- The video playlist now downloads the videos metadata on render, not on save post. This allows us to use the playlist on the on click demos.
- The following modules of the theme are loaded on demand now: td_log, td_remote_http, td_remote_video, td_data_source, td_video_support, td_more_article_box, td_page_views, td_review, td_ajax. This means that the theme loads them only when needed. We mesured a 10% faster load time after this tweak.
The list of modified files | How to update the theme | Buy Newspaper
