Dear WP Champion Owners:

Welcome to the 75th release of WP Champion Professional Theme! The details of this milestone release are found below. Since 2014 the theme development team has been committed to providing you updates that affirm to the latest requirements of WordPress, PHP, security and functionality. Please enjoy the many facets of WP Champion and we look forward to your feedback about the theme functions and abilities.

As is our tradition we have waited for the dust to settle on the new WordPress core release before pushing out our theme update. Traditionally the initial WP update of a new series contains issues (which this one had many), and plugin builders are often having to scramble to adjust for last minute changes in core code. So we find waiting a period of time allows us to capture all the changes that occur in plugins we include in the theme and to allow for adjusting to the usual “surprises” in WordPress from the WordPress release candidates (the draft releases for developers prior to the official public release).

This release updates theme integrated premium WordPress plugin to their latest version available at the time of this theme release, and updates many of the plugin scripts we have integrated into the theme core code.

This release has many NEW FEATURES including:

• The Favicon upload functions are fully revised. Now you just upload a 512×512 image in png or .ico format, use the new selector to drag and drop all the sizes and types (apple, android, MS) of favicons you wish to create and save! No more having to create individual sizes and upload. The Microsoft Tile is new including setting the background color.
• We have integrated the Safe SVG plugin (for sanitizing) into the theme allowing safe use of SVG images in a variety of instances.
• New Sharpen Image settings (a retina replacement) for images in the Image, Easy Image, Blog and Portfolio shortcodes.
• New Comment control settings for controlling comment sanitization, such as disabling linking, html, etc
• New Gallery & Image shortcode settings

It has become more common for website owners to use Elementor to build their website content. However, our shortcodes remain an excellent way to build extremely fast webpages and a number of the theme tweaks focus on code and feature improvements for our core theme shortcodes. Many of the professionals who use WP Champion still build sites based primarily and sometimes exclusively based on shortcodes.

As long as you optimize your images and fonts such webpages will score well for speed, and if you employ any caching and other optimization resources so that you account for non-theme related loading factors your pagespeed scores should be excellent and normally in the 90s range. We strongly suggest a website be built with webp or AVIF images (both supported by our theme) and you losslessly compress every image for use on your website. We also recommend using the theme fontface functions instead of google fonts to avoid external font api calls that slow down webpage rendering. And remember, the more tracking scripts and external api calls you incorporate into your site the more you will impact its performance. These are not theme related!

We obviously have deep expertise in improving web speed, security, content design and SEO. If ever interested in any of this services please reach out to us at support@thethemebuilders.com. You will be dealing with a 1st world expert team with over 15 yrs WordPress experience that truly understands every facet of hosting and WordPress. We have one of the highest rated themes on ThemeForest for WordPress themes with over 10k sales (Striking MultiFlex) and it is the oldest still supported WP theme in that marketplace, reflecting our dedication to honest customer service. No website has ever been hacked in 12 yrs on our hosting platforms. Government and Institutional clients trust us for every facet of hosting, design, SEO and security. We can make a convincing case to all that you should consider us for your web services and support.

WP Champion Version 3.7.3 is:
– PHP 8.3 compatible
– WordPress 6.7+ compatible
– WooCommerce 9.4.2+ compatible
– Easy Digital Downloads 3.3.5.2 compatible
– WPML 4.6.14+ compatible.

In fact we develop to the latest edge builds of PHP and WordPress and are testing in a PHP 8.4 (dev) and WordPress 6.8 (dev) environment.

The changelog is very lengthy. As usual any security issues that we have become aware. We commenced a review of our code from a security perspective in in February this year and have implemented significant security oriented changes in the code to account for modern threats across the last 3 theme updates. An innovative feature in this build is we have added new comment control features such as stripping urls and/or html from comments (various levels of sanitizing) if so desired.

In this release are:
10 new php/js/css files (excludes the count for the files for the SVG functions)
200+ php/css files edited for code (plus a hodgepodge of other file types)
17 deleted files from the last release to this one

The update mechanism in WP Champion (Advanced Settings Panel->Update Your Champion Theme tab) automatically installs the new files, changes only the modified files, and deletes the files no longer needed. All other files are untouched by the internal update function. So if you have custom code in the theme functions.php file (theme root) it will not be touched: although you should always have an offline backup of all files that contain custom code.

To visually view the changed/added/deleted files and every single line of adjusted code copy and paste the following link into your browser. We have our own api servers (rare among WP developers) which both serve the updates to you in the theme update function and also give you a record of what has changed from the last release. You should review carefully the updated files if you have modded any theme files for custom functions in your website:

https://api-champion.thethemebuilders.net/themes/champion/compare/from/3.7.2/to/3.7.3

SPECIAL UPDATE NOTES:

Note: After installing the theme & theme plugins clearing theme cache folder is required (Advanced Settings panel/Clear Cache setting) as well as ctrl+f5 on page load to load the new customcombine.js

Note: Next save the following theme settings => slideshow, color & font settings. They are all impacted by changes in the theme and resaving reaffirms their settings in mysql.

Note: Champion Users using the Retina logo need to set a width or height for the normal / mobile logo and go into the media library select the retina logo image they had previously used for the retina settings and use it for normal or mobile logo. The retina settings are no longer needed in Champion. You now use just the normal log settings and you can “sharpen it” via a new Sharpen Image settings.

Note: Users using the Advanced Child-Theme need to update the child theme first prior to updating the Theme as otherwise they will see a fatal error because the chart.php and twitter.php have been deleted from the theme. The Advanced Child-Theme needs to be updated by ftp upload. Alternate they can swap to the parent theme, update the parent theme and then the advanced child-theme and then swap back to the advanced child-theme.