Updating:
WP Champion Professional Theme Ver 3.1.5. has been released in our API for updating by way of the theme internal update function. If you have any questions your welcome to contact the support team for guidance prior to updating.
There is a specific order of updating and our advice is that you not update anything until you are certain all your most important plugins have indicated they have a WordPress 5.5 compatible release. We have noticed some plugins that are offering WP 5.5 updates are not backwards compatible. And if you update WordPress before you update the theme and plugins its guaranteed your going to break something, possibly the entire website!
Customers of our Total Managed hosting platform can leave every aspect of updating to our hosting team (headed by James!). But if you feel you would like professional assistance in updating we offer very reasonable update pricing – contact us by email at support@thethemebuilders.com or via our skype id: support-thethemebuilders.com.
The recommended order of updating is:
- Do a backup of your website. Its often useful to export your Rev Sliders, Essential Grids and you can also export your menus and even all your widgets. But at least run a full backup of your database and website.
- Update all plugins other then those that are included with WP Champion.
- Update WP Champion and then update all the theme included plugins
- Only then do you update your WordPress to Ver 5.5!
- MOST IMPORTANT: Once you start the updating don’t stop halfway to see if your site looks okay. Of course it does not as your only part of the way through the process!
The release today has several main goals:
- 3 Plugins Updated: Revolution Slider, Essential Grid and Element Pack
- Core Theme: Various tweaks of which the most notable is that we added the shortcode menu to the text widget, and you an make the 100% Width Page template the default page template of your website.
- WPML: Just the continuation of compatibility tweaks for the WPML MultiLanguage Plugin. WP Champion is 100% WPML compatible.
- Woocommerce Features: WPC has incredible Woo customization for both Shop and Single Product pages and we added 3 more settings/tweaks in this update.
- Portfolio: Portfolio Permalink settings are moved into the WordPress Permalinks Panel. SEE NOTES BELOW!!
- Widges: The Flickr widget is removed as Flickr no longer supports the badges api necessary for it.
- A few other Odds and Sods: This is only for the hardcore enthusiasts to peruse...
WP Champion Professional Theme Ver 3.1.5 Changelog:
Our API build webpage has a “Files” tab with a breakout of New, Different and Deleted Files.
The Detail tab in the API release webpage will present you with the actual edited code in each file. Please note its not the entire content of each file but the blocks of code in each file that were edited. Click on “highlight” and edited code will be highlighted with two colors: purple for old code and green for new code.
3 Plugins Updated:
The following are updated.
– Revolution Slider : Mainly bug fixes
– Essential Grid: From 3.0.3 to 3.0.7 which we hope resolves many issues this plugin has had recently
– Element Pack: which is continuing its track record of introducing new Elementor Widgets and adding more functionality for 3rd party plugins.
We would like to hear from any users who have not yet spoken with our support team on issues they may be having with the Essential Grid in particular.
Core Theme:
Updated: Admin language file.
Added: Shortcode menu to text widget text mode.
Added: 100% Fluid Width layout to Page options Layout Setting, Default Page layout setting in the various global options.
Added: Global setting to enable comments in pages and override in the page options. Default set to OFF. Leave it set to OFF if you are already using the Page template with comments.
Changed: Sidebar column css to width:50% as column css is throwing issues on ipad, iphone and old android os devices. Sliders and Gmaps were disappearing on page load and or turning of the device.
Changed: Home page option settings. On a clean install now the Title shows in the Featured header and not a slider which has not yet been created.
Changed: Empty Clean install now lists available posts on home page following the wordpress reading -> post pagination setting for paginating.
Removed: Flushing of permalinks in admin.php and child themes as it is no longer needed.
As most of you know our shortcodes work in the custom html and text widgets but if you wanted to use a theme shortcode you had to create it in a page elsewhere and copy and paste it into one of these widgets. We have added the shortcode menu to the text editor of each widget. It is not possible at this time to add it to the visual editor.
With some rewriting of theme code we were able to add the option of the 100% Fluid Width Page template to the Set a Default Page Template setting which you can find in the General Settings Panel ->Page Layout Settings Tab (last setting), Presets Panel, Bulk Editing of pages and posts, and several other places (Blog Settings, Portfolio settings…). Most new sites we create we now use the 100% Fluid Width Template for webpages more frequently then any other template and it made sense to wiggle it into these settings.
The other changes are housekeeping for WordPress desired standards and a fix as we noticed that widgets which contained sliders or gmaps had issues on some mobile devices if switching back and forth between portrait and landscape orientations.
Woocommerce
Added: Woocommerce Setting to hide categories and tags in single product page.
Added: Woocommerce Setting for columns layout below 480px
Added: Woocommerce setting for turning off images resizing in product listing pages, related, cross-sell, upsell, category and tags pages for faster loading of pages.
We had received several requests about how to hide the shop meta in the single product page as often stores are not using categories or tags or they simply did not want it displayed and they could only be removed via a php snippet in the functions.php file. So we created a setting!
Another annoying woo store page feature is that the store defaults to 2 columns in mobile viewports. But on a phone the items are squished in two columns. So you can now specify a 1 or 2 column layout below 480px viewport.
WP Champion has a separate settings panel for Woo integration with approx 150 settings. Furthermore when editing any single product you have yet another array of settings to control placement and display of elements in the single product display, and what is shown in a product list such as on the Shop Page. You can even build a 100% custom shop page and not use any of the default Woo list shortcodes which give very bland output.
Our Champion Woo integration is compatible with Fancy Product Designer which is perhaps the most advanced self hosted product design woo plugin available. But most importantly with WP Champion you can build, manipulate, and categorize in more ways then ever thought possible a store with Woo. Many woo plugins for styling are not necessary due to the abilities within WP Champion. We save you money!
WPML
Fixed: WPML Logo translation MD 5 issue which has never been reported to us. https://wpml.org/forums/topic/warning-md5-expects-parameter-1-to-be-string-array-given-in-var-www-walsted/
Fixed: WPML string registration for logo_2x.
Changed:: WPML string translation using new permalink settings in wordpress -> settings -> permalinks.
Thinking of a multi-language website? We are 100% compatible with WPML and have some nice WPML tweaks in our theme. We are also full RTL language compatible (Hebrew and Arab languages) with all our content having rtl css in place. We are almost certainly one of the best multi-language themes anywhere in the WordPress ecosystem.
Portfolio
Moved: portfolio permalink settings into the wordpress -> permalink settings.
IMPORTANT: Users installing champion 3.1.5 need to save the permalinks once!. Permalink settings for portfolio page, portfolio category and portfolio tags have been removed from the theme portfolio settings panel.
This work along with the portfolio updates in Ver 3.1 (tagging, archive support, alt text support, etc) completes our portfolio updates bringing this custom post type on par with blog posts for search and categorization. Also portfolio items along with say the Easy Paypal plugin button are an easy way to having a online store. Champion has a portfolio “html type” (meaning design the layout from scratch) that allows one to create a completely custom portfolio item in respect of layout and content, yet it can appear in lists, and can be organized by categories and tags. So the portfolio item can easily be used as a “product” item without having the need to load an ecommerce plugin if you are only desiring to sell a few items.
Widgets
Removed: Flickr Widget since flickr does not support the badges api url any longer.
Improved: Removed image resizing from portfolio-images widget. Now calculating optimum image size.
Added: .htacess to twitter feed plugin.
Flickr no longer maintains the badges api plugin necessary for our flickr script to function and we have not seen any sites using this widget in a long time so we have removed the widget.
Tweaks and Bug Fixes
This is the hodgepodge of everything else we remember (!) that we adjusted in the last few months. Some of it is not only “greek” to you but to us as well!!
Fixed: Spyglass browser plugin issue showing wrong theme information.
Fixed: Exclude posttype from search. Now checking if posttype_exist because posttype can be turned off.
Restored: Update message layout for wp 5.5
Fixed: Responsive menu target main navigation not showing at the correct location.