Updating:
WP Champion Professional Theme Ver 3.4.2. has been released in our API for updating by way of the theme internal update function – please remember it can take up to one day for the propagation message to show up in your dashboard!
If you have any questions your welcome to contact the support team for guidance prior to updating.
Customers of our “Total Managed” hosting platform at 247wphosting.com 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.
- If you have not previously done so go ahead and update your WordPress to Ver 5.8.2
- 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:
- Plugins Updated: Revolution Slider, Essential Grid & Element Pack
- New Theme Feature - Thumbnail Image for Taxonomies: Usefull if using a widget to display taxonomies and for SEO. More discussion below.
- Core Theme: Confirmed WP 5.8.2, Woo 6.0, Easy Digital Downloads 2.11.4, WPML 4.5.2 and Elementor Pro 3.5.2 compatibility.
- Woocommerce Features: We only have one minor adjustment related to Woo. We are up-to-date on template compatibility.
- New Settings: Many new settings for the Masonry Shortcode, new page specific settings for fancybox and RSS speciific improvements for single blog posts.
- Tweaks and Fixes: The usual mix of tweaking and fixes with some emphasis on improving the on-th-fly resizing script and eliminating niggly conflicts with plugins.
WP Champion Professional Theme Ver 3.4.2 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. This is for those who have a deep interest in java and php – not necessarily good for your mental health!!
There are 2 theme files that are deleted (related to the past removal of the roundabout slider from the theme), and 38 new theme files for the new page loading animation ability. Over 70 existing core theme files are modified in this release!
Raw Log:
PLUGINS UPDATED:
Updated: Revslider to 6.5.12
Updated: Element Pack to version 5.15.0
Updated: Essential Grid to version 3.0.13
ADDED/UPDATED:
001) NEW FEATURE – Thumbnail image for taxonomies. Setting in Theme Image settings to enable Thumbnails for categories, tags and other taxonomies..
002) NEW SETTING – Widget Categories Thumbnail Image Support for Taxonomies.
003) NEW SETTING – Fancybox override settings in page options for fancybox skin, fancybox title type, caption shadow color.
004) NEW SETTINGS – Masonry gallery shortcode color options for bg color, text color, bordercolor & borderthickness. Added extra Title setting (Caption & Title). If the image has no caption the title is used.
005) NEW SETTING – Pagination settings to Theme Masonry shortcode.
006) NEW SETTING – Replacement RSS Image.
007) Added: Adaptive height image support for blog left / right float featured image.
008) Added: CSS to support UIPress plugin in the admin area.
009) Updated: Admin language file.
010) Updated: Frontend language pot file.
CHANGED/FIXED:
011) Changed – Check for post->id being empty in recent, popular en related post and portfolio widgets as wel as for the single post (popular and related) and portfolio (recent and related) items.
012) Changed: Disable Floc function to be compatible with php 5.6
013) Changed: Clear Theme Cache algorithm to speed up the process and to fix issues with the WPML plugin.
014) Changed: Replaced deprecated WPML function call for home url with new function name.
015) Changed: Image Resizing script will try to show original image if image meta data is not ok and width and height vales are missing or when resizing of image fails.
016) Changed: Added a code check for “delay” not being smaller then “speed” in some sliders (carousel, product carousel, nivo).
017) Changed: Image resizing js in custom.js. Providing the retina images by ajax.
018) Changed: Moved Page navigation icons into the theme icons file.
019) Changed: Responsive Menu Loading theme css/js code to not interfer with users that are using responsive menu version 4.x or above.
022)Changed: Split Guttenberg Editor & Gutenberg widgets ON/OFF in two seperate settings.
023) Changed: Adjusted the CSS for Theme Search Widget with button to prevent conflict with old bootstrap css loaded by some plugins.
024) Changed: Form field css to support elementor forms color overrides.
025) Changed: WordPress category and taxonomy post list to follow theme css as wp changed the class names to block widgets.
026) Fixed: Woocart alignment for products with variations.
027) Fixed: Theme Logo version alignment in admin area.
028) Fixed: Thumnail portfolio en slider items not resizing properly on page resize in admin area.
029) Fixed: RSS resizing image problem.
030) Fixed: Fancybox Caption Float setting not wrapping long titles within the caption box on smaller screens.
031) Fixed: Broken Missing images when resized images have been deleted manually in the theme cache folder by ftp or file manager and not using the theme clear cache function. We are now regenerating the resized image if it already existed before based on image size information stored in the image meta_data table.
032) Fixed: Issues with filesystem being wrong initialized and set in the global $wp_filesystem variable not being equal to filesystem that wordpress thinks it is using and is returning when calling get_filesystem_method. Causing all kind of issues on filehandlings. This is happening on a synology drive https://kaptinlin.com/support/discussion/13428/updating-version-1-3-0-1-2-1-7/p1
Plugins Updated:
The following are updated.
- Revolution Slider : To Version 6.5.12 – minor fixes and tweaks.
- Essential Grid: to 3.0.13 – bug fixes (we hope!).
- Element Pack: to Ver 5.15.0 which is continuing its track record of introducing new Elementor Widgets and adding more functionality for 3rd party plugins. It is confirmed compatible to the latest Elementor/Elementor Pro releases..
Essential Grid Notes: We strongly recommend that one make a website backup, and futhermore we recommend you export all your essential grids, prior to updating. On some websites we manage we have experienced some unusual issues with the EG plugin, such as being unable to edit grids, after updates. We are still looking into the causes and this was with ver 3.0.12 and may no longer be an issue. But it never hurts to have backups…
Also a reminder that in recent Essential Grid updates its developers have removed from the extended license version (the version we are allowed to build into a theme) all grid skins but 4 basic starter skins. So we have added to our importable content setting in the Advanced Settings panel an option to import 72 skins being the ones removed plus a few extra.
We have tested this Champion release and its included Elementor plugins with Elementor 3.5.3 and Elementor Pro 5.15.0 (latest releases as of Jan 3, 2022) and insofar as we can determine everything is 100% compatible.
New Shortcodes and Settings:
New Feature: Thumbnail image for taxonomies. Setting in Theme Image settings to enable Thumbnails for categories, tags and other taxonomies.
New Setting: Widget Categories Thumbnail Image Support for Taxonomies.
New Setting: Fancybox override settings in page options for fancybox skin, fancybox title type, caption shadow color.
New Settings: Masonry gallery shortcode color options for bg color, text color, bordercolor & borderthickness. Added extra Title setting (Caption & Title). If the image has no caption the title is used.
New Setting: Pagination settings to Theme Masonry shortcode.
New Setting: Replacement RSS Image.
New Setting: Adaptive height image support for blog left / right float featured image.
Taxonomy Thumbnail Images
There are 2 steps to usage of taxonomy thumbnails: activation of the ability (slide #1) in the Champion Image settings panel, and then uploading an image for each taxonomy term (slide #2).
The reason for choosing where you activate is to reduce scripting burden.
Taxonomy featured images are useful for when you are displaying a list of categories via a Champion widget or an elementor post widget that supports displaying taxonomies. They are also very beneficial as part of an SEO strategy.
FancyBox Settings
3 new setting for those webpage specific instances when needed . The global facnybox settings are of course found in the Champion Advanced settings panel/Global Lightbox Settings, and the global fancybox color settings in Champion Color settings panel/Scroll to Top – FancyBox settings tab.
Replacement RSS Image
WP Champion is very likely the best RSS theme available anywhere. It appeared for a long time RSS was going to vanish but we are seeing a comeback in some tech and institutional settings, with a need to highly customize the appearance of your RSS feed and posts displayed in the feed.
The Champion Blog Panel has an RSS admin tab with many settings for customizing the overall layout of your RSS output. But at the post level we give you the ability to choose a different featured image and even 100% customize the feed content on a post by post basis!
Adaptive Height
We already had adaptive height for full width images. Recently we were asked to provide the setting for left/right aligned images when a post list.
Note that if your post featured images are different sizes you will end up with a post list that does not have uniform thumbnail images but sometimes the images you have to work with don’t give you much choice, and adaptive height will assist in avoiding image cropping and distortion.
Core Theme:
Changed: Check for post->id being empty in recent, popular en related post and portfolio widgets as wel as for the single post (popular and related) and portfolio (recent and related) items.
Changed: Disable Floc function to be compatible with php 5.6
Changed: Clear Theme Cache algorithm to speed up the process and to fix issues with the WPML plugin.
Changed: Replaced deprecated WPML function call for home url with new function name.
Changed: Image Resizing script will try to show original image if image meta data is not ok and width and height vales are missing or when resizing of image fails.
Changed: Added a code check for “delay” not being smaller then “speed” in some sliders (carousel, product carousel, nivo).
Changed: Image resizing js in custom.js. Providing the retina images by ajax.
Changed: Moved Page navigation icons into the theme icons file.
Changed: Responsive Menu Loading theme css/js code to not interfere with users that are using responsive menu version 4.x or above.
Changed: Split Guttenberg Editor & Gutenberg widgets ON/OFF in two seperate settings.
Changed: Adjusted the CSS for Theme Search Widget with button to prevent conflict with old bootstrap css loaded by some plugins.
Changed: Form field css to support elementor forms color overrides.
Changed: WordPress category and taxonomy post list to follow theme css as wp changed the class names to block widgets.
Fixed: Woocart alignment for products with variations.
Fixed: Theme Logo version alignment in admin area.
Fixed: Thumbnail portfolio en slider items not resizing properly on page resize in admin area.
Fixed: RSS resizing image problem.
Fixed: Fancybox Caption Float setting not wrapping long titles within the caption box on smaller screens.
Fixed:Broken Missing images when resized images have been deleted manually in the theme cache folder by ftp or file manager and not using the theme clear cache function. We are now regenerating the resized image if it already existed before based on image size information stored in the image meta_data table.
Fixed: Issues with filesystem being wrong initialized and set in the global $wp_filesystem variable not being equal to filesystem that wordpress thinks it is using and is returning when calling get_filesystem_method. Causing all kind of issues on filehandlings. This is happening on a synology drive https://kaptinlin.com/support/discussion/13428/updating-version-1-3-0-1-2-1-7/p1
All of the above is in the category of theme polishing and optimization. The practical outcome for owners is simply that everything works better.
.