Jump Start 2.0 Beta (Page 2)

[Jason Bobich]

Hi everyone!

I’m posting to let you know that you’re all free to download the Jump Start 2.0 beta from your My Account > Downloads page here on the support site, if you’re wanting to play around with it.

I’ve still got a lot of boring sort of details ahead before I can officially release it; so I wanted to make sure it’s out there for you guys to play with. The good news is a lot has changed and there are some very cool new things. The bad news is… well, a lot has changed, and this will inevitably effect your child themes, which is why I wanted to make sure it’s available early.

See the working 2.0 change log:

http://themeblvd.com/changelog/?theme=jumpstart

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Layout Builder 2.0

Once you’ve got the Jump Start v2.0 beta and the Layout Builder plugin v2.0 paired together, you’ll notice that things with the Builder work a bit different than before. Custom layouts are now built and saved into pages. Additionally, there is now a separation between “Layouts” and “Templates”.

The following new, quick videos I made today will give you the gist of how the overall system now works.

1. Overview: https://vimeo.com/70256816
2. Homepage: https://vimeo.com/70256799
3. Sample Layouts: https://vimeo.com/112117385
4. Templates: https://vimeo.com/112117384

Here’s the full change log for the Layout Builder:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-blvd-layout-builder/changelog/

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Cool things you should know

1. There is now a feature where you can select a “Theme Base” — Check it out at Appearance > Theme Base. For the non-developers, checkout the new “Super User” theme base.
2. Theme options are very different. Make sure to go through those after you’ve selected a theme base.
3. Experiment with mega menus. This’ll be more clear after I make a video tutorial, but this screenshot shows an example of a 4-column mega menu under Appearance > Menus.
4. When editing a page, checkout the new “Banner” meta box.
5. Also with editing a page, checkout the “Theme Layout” meta box. Try the “suck up” feature here, which will suck the content of your banner up into the header of the page, and display the “Transparent Header” logo from your theme options.
6. There are new options for you blog authors to show your info on your blog posts. Configure this from the Edit Profile page in your WP admin, along with how posts are displayed on your author archive.
7. Post formats are now fully supported by default. So play around with those. If you’re curious about how to utilize any formats, just ask.
8. How posts are displayed has gotten a bit of a revamp. The new default way of displaying posts is called “Blog.” Then, your Post List and Post Grid have been re-tooled. And there’s now a new display called Post Showcase.
9. If you edit a category or tag in your WP Admin, you’ll see we’ve added some options here. You can actually assign a specific post display for an individual category or tag archive.
10. A small detail, that might go unnoticed — check out the new search results page when you do a search on your site.
11. Any bbPress fans out there? Give bbPress a go with the theme!

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Important things you NEED to know

1. Make sure all of your Theme Blvd plugins are up-to-date.
2. The frontend styling and CSS has been completely redesigned. Make sure to take that into account in regards to any current child themes.
3. All main template files like header.php, footer.php, single.php, etc, have been changed. All template part files like content.php, content-list.php, etc, have been changed. So, make sure to account for this if you have copies of these files in your child theme.
4. Image crop sizes have very much changed. So make sure to run Regenerate Thumbnails plugin for images that are already uploaded to your site.
5. There is no more option on your Theme Options page for assigning a homepage layout. You must add your layout to a static page and set that as your front page from WP Admin > Settings > Reading > Front page displays.
6. DO use the current default “Blank Child Theme” from your Downloads; nothing has changed there in the basic setup of a child theme. DON’T use the other “Starter Child Themes”; these will no longer work right.

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My to-do list before the 2.0 release

1. I still need to setup a live online demo. I know it’s extremely difficult to show you all of the new features without this up. Setting these up are always very time consuming for me.
2. There’s currently a cool, new system that extends WP’s import tool to bring in all widgets and settings from the theme’s live demo with the standard import process. However, the data for this to operate still needs to be added to the theme after I’ve setup the live demo.
3. I’m planning to add another “theme base” (or maybe two) before the 2.0 release that change the structure of the default design.
4. I’m sure there are little Theme Blvd plugins out there that no longer work perfectly. If you find any, speak up! 😉 — For example, Portfolios and Image Sizes are ones that need to be addressed.
5. User docs, user docs, user docs — A lot of new video tutorials need to be made.

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WARNING

Please do not update to Jump Start 2.0 beta on your live site.

Aside from the obvious of this not being a stable release, the way data is handled in custom layouts is different and there is a process that happens when you update which updates the data in your database. So, if you decide to switch back to the older version of the theme, you may have issues.

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If you have any questions or comments about the new 2.0 beta, feel free to post here or start a new topic about it. 🙂

Topic

[elianab]

Under Typography, the Link colors are listed twice. It says Link Color, Link Hover Color, Link Color, Link Hover Color.

Under Main Menu, it would be nice to be able to select no button hover background color (transparent), and also select text hover color.

[askwpgirl]

I would very much like to put in my vote for updating the Portfolios plugin for JS 2.0. I use that pretty extensively. I work with a lot of artists, and that plugin comes in handy. I was hoping to teach a course to artists again this spring, so would love to see Portfolios working with 2.0. Thanks!

Image Sizes I do show to students quite frequently, but I usually encourage them to use the functions file to change and remove image sizes instead, since most sites get bogged down with too many image sizes being generated.

[askwpgirl]

OMG!!! Jason!!!!!!!! I am digging into 2.0. Did you not sleep at all for the past six months? This is like the most awesome upgrade ever. You have thought of everything. If you missed something, I’ll let you know 😉

I am so excited to show this to my students. Everything is so accessible. Here so far are some things I am loving, and I’m only just starting to get into it:

1 – Footer sync
2 – Sticky header
3 – Sidebar layouts for the different parts of the site
4 – Built-in social follows and social sharing
5 – All the archive display options
6 – Post grid and post list display options, including the read more (button, text, etc.) and the excerpts or no excerpts
7 – Masonry grid
8 – Columns and rows default for grid
9 – Showcase display

Not to mention the amazing templates and template sync. I am going to work on stretching the limits of this in the next few weeks and get back with you. I have a nice complicated site to code.

I am beyond impressed. This has exceeded my wildest imagination. Not only does it compete with all the fancy theme builders out there, but it does so much more gracefully and with smarter, more easily customized code for when you do need to go into “developer” mode, which is simply no the case with the other builder themes.

Thank you!!! Angela

[Jason Bobich]

@askwpgirl Thanks! I’m really glad to hear it was worth the wait for you. Hopefully now you understand why this kept getting pushed further and further from when I was originally planning to release.

I’ve actually have a working version of the Portfolios plugin locally that I’ve been updating along the way here and there. So, with probably a day of work here in the next week or so, I’ll have an update to that plugin. It shouldn’t really be a big deal. Pretty much what I have left there is to add some sort of set of options to the Theme Options page with the other Archive options are, so you can pick a display style for the posts, opposed to previously, it just made everything use “post grid”.

And for the Image Sizes plugin, it’s just a matter of going in and putting in a bunch of new values, and switching between them depending on the version of the theme. A tedious day of work.

[mizzinc]

Using section labels might be one way. With each section of elements, you can write a custom label. The ID of the section will then section_ plus the label turned into an ID. For example, if your section was “Contact Info” you’d link your menu button to #section_contact_info

Just checked the generated source code of the theme page and the section label is being added to the class. Which I can make unique and use. ID’s however are not being generated. I am using a Template Sync to a page.

[Joseph Sellers]

@themeblvd

I really(!) like the way that bbPress is styled in the new beta.

However, I would like to bring back the timestamps on the main forum listings page. Is there a way to do that?

Thanks in advance.

[mizzinc]

Re: Section ids.

I have amended the following file.

File: theme-blvd-layout-builder/includes/general.php
Line: 84

printf( '<section id="%s" class="%s" data-parallax="%s">', strtolower($section_data[$section_id]['label']), $class, themeblvd_get_parallax_intensity($display) );

[Jason Bobich]

@rokesmith Thanks, glad you like it! Most of these little tweaks are just done with CSS. So, if use your inspector and just see what CSS is modifying (or hiding) something, you can re-tweak it from your child theme’s stylesheets. I can tell you that from doing this, the bbPress styles can get very, very convoluted. Styling bbPress was a very challenging task. I spent a week just doing bbPress compat for the theme.

So for example, this would get your freshness back:

.bbp-forums .bbp-forum-freshness {
	display: block;
}

… but now you’ve got other issues to deal with like the widths of the cells.

[Jason Bobich]

@mizzinc Yeah, I remember now some of the challenges I was facing with this. The problem is that the ID’s need to be unique. So, if it were done with labels, many people aren’t actually going to configure the labels, and so you’re going to end up with a bunch of duplicate ID’s, giving us invalid HTML markup.

For applying inline styling in the <head> to the sections, I needed some sort of unique selector. So I used the programmatically generated unique ID’s as a class. I will figure out some way to add a unique HTML ID, that doesn’t print out like gibberish. I’ll make them something like #{layout/page-slug}-section-1, #{layout-name}-section-2, etc.

I’ve got it on the todo for beta2. You’ll be able to have your one page site! 😉

[mizzinc]

Extremely valid point you make about the invalid HTML markup and your solution for naming could work well. Also the simplest solution.

Would it be feasible to add a check box (Use Section IDs? / default off) option under Template Information?

[Jason Bobich]

In all honesty, I’m really trying to avoid adding any more options, or at least I’m really cautious about each and every one. —

About a month ago another developer taught me something I wasn’t even aware of, which is that essentially the default setup for all PHP 5.3.9+ configurations is that there’s a limit of 1,000 inputs being submitted at any time, unless the user changes this configuration on their server, which is not realistic for the average user (a common issue with WooCommerce users).

With setting up just some of the sample layouts (so we’re not talking about unrealistically amounts of data), I was running an issue into where layouts were not getting fully saved. And it’s because the Builder with Edit Page screen was accumulating more than 1,000 input fields. So we went through and were able to cut back TONS of inputs by making a new system that renders all hidden inputs inactive with javascript (for example, you select to use bg texture, the bg image field becomes inactive).

Anyway, other than the obvious of just an over convoluted user experience, these types of issues are just some of the real-life consequences coming in to play with this whole concept of giving the user every option under the sun. So, I’m just trying to express why I’m being really anal about what kinds of things go in as options, and not adding things I don’t think are applicable to many users.

[mizzinc]

Wow, did not know that about the PHP5.3.9+ either. TOTALLY understand and respect your reasoning. Thanks Jason.

[mizzinc]

Seem to be having issues adding Partner Logos > Add Logos. Only tested in Firefox and Chrome.

Console window throws this error:
TypeError: m.sizes.tb_thumb is undefined
…=i.toJSON();o[l]={id:m.id,title:m.title,preview:m.sizes.tb_thumb.url};l++});k={a…

File: shared.min.js

Edit: Maybe the images I am uploading need to be a larger size so tb_thumb is generated.

[Todd Wilson]

Thanks for releasing the 2.0 Beta! I’ll be digging into this more over the holiday break this week but at first glance I ran into a problem trying to view the Appearance > “Theme Base” link.

As an admin user, I get the following error: http://local.wordpress.dev/wp-admin/themes.php?page=jumpstart2-base

You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.

[Jason Bobich]

@todoubled When I initially read your post, my first thought was that if maybe it had something to do with changing the directory of the theme to “jumpstart2” and thus changing the URL to the page. But I tried it on my end and looked closer, and this wouldn’t quite make sense.

So, I’ve tried that and a few things, but I cannot reproduce what you’re describing. Can you see if you can determine anything else about your situation that might clue me into reproducing the error on my end?

[Author]

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