It’s been more than a couple of months since my last update and there is a reason for that, I’ve been extremely busy. You can find a list of the new changes below:
Major surgery to the admin
Based on feedback and support requests from users I have noticed two things.
The display of admin items looks extremely different on peoples browsers and select boxes get cut off.
To counteract this I have now implemented and use the Bootstrap CSS framework for the admin area. My thinking here is that this will give more continuity for users across all browsers and devices. It also means that the design is no longer based on WordPress own styling which means if I port this to other systems in future then there will be a seamless user experience.
Some hard to debug issues with CSS being displayed on the front end have come up due to invalid inputs being inserted to some inputs.
In regards the invalid inputs issue I have now added validation logic to the admin. Now, if you enter an incorrect colour value for example your settings won’t be saved and you will be presented with a validation error message. Clicking on this message will then automatically scroll you to the invalid option which will be highlighted in red. Yay for UX! An example of a validation message can be seen below:
Adjust for WP Admin Bar
Another common issue I see is people not adjusting their menus for the WP Admin Bar or getting confused about why items are not showing when really they are just hidden behind the WP Admin Bar. To counteract this I have added a new Adjust for WP Admin Bar option which is a simple On/Off switch and can be found under the Menu > Sizing section as below:
Customise the text for the Slide Effect
The slide effect text can now be edited and defaults simply to the word “Back”. The option can be found under the Sub-Menus > Slide Effect Options > Back Text option as shown below:
Speed Improvements
I have also done lots of work under the hood to improve performance. This includes switching away from on the fly SASS compilation to straightforward flat CSS and implementing the TWIG templating engine for all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript rendering.
You probably don’t need to know how it all works but you will be happy with the improvements!
Bug fixes and minor improvements
Normal bug fixes and minor improvements yadda yadda spiel but hey I have to put it here because it’s true!
Please let me know if you like the updates (or hate them) and if you have any further improvements to suggest please let me know!
See you all soon!
Peter