K2 1.1 RC1

Published by Heilemann 2 years, 4 months ago. Closed.

Well that took longer than first anticipated. Originally we meant to make 1.1 ‘merely’ an update for translations, but somewhere along the line it grew into something considerably bigger. In fact, had we not already settled on 1.1, I think calling this a 1.5 release would probably be more in tune with the changes within.

  • Updated inline documentation throughout.
  • Complete simplification and re-cajiggering of HTML structure and class and ID names. This is likely to screw up your existing child themes. Beware.
  • Speed and logic optimizations all around, including minified and combined javascript (reversable with the ‘debug’ option).
  • Permalinks for Rolling Archives and livesearch (finally).
  • Rolling Archives now caches 5 pages to either side of its position for faster navigation.
  • Configuration of amount of widget containers (thus sidebars) is now automatic, depending on whether they are active or not.
  • Added ‘Below Page Header’, ‘After Posts’ and ‘Page Footer’ widget areas.
  • WP media manager’s horrible embedded CSS is now removed by K2.
  • Cleaned up the options page.
  • Support for WordPress 3.0: Multi-sites, the menu system and custom backgrounds.
  • Removed various deprecated functions.
  • Removed our styles sub-system entirely. Use child-themes instead.
  • Single attachments, shown with image.php, have been updated.
  • Option to disable K2′s styling (style.css), for more control and much nicer child theme CSS.
  • Automatically resizes the smallest of the large YouTube embeds (560px wide) to 500px width (to cancel, remove/overwrite k2_resize_embeds() in your child theme).
  • Added support for using k2-loop-category-<slug>.php
  • Added option to use the page name when page is selected for home.
  • Removed asides functionality (use semantic class, CSS and plugins instead).
  • Added styling for the visual editor in the admin.
  • Added comments pagination.
  • Moved ping- and trackbacks inline with comments.
  • Check to see if a version of jQuery later than the one we ship with (1.4.2) has been registered and don’t overwrite it. This really ought to be native to WP.
  • A plethora of bug fixes and compatibility tweaks.

Go get it and let us know if it breaks. Meanwhile we’re on the brink of locking localization strings for the translators (the .pot has been updated, and we will do our utmost to not change any strings between now and 1.1, so you should be safe).

Did I mention K2 now supports twenty different languages!?

Important: This release contains significant changes to… well, everything. Backup your database, just to be on the safe side. We haven’t seen any wonky behavior, but on the other hand we won’t be held responsible if it kills you kitten either, so…

Post vs. Entry

Published by Heilemann 2 years, 6 months ago. Closed.

Nevermind the semantic differences between ‘post’ and ‘entry’ in relation to blogging, there’s a much more real problem in determining which of the two to go with when you’re designing a theme framework like K2.

WordPress uses ‘post’, and so of course it makes sense when designing classes for the title of a post to name it ‘post-title’ and for the content to be named ‘post-content’, right? Well until you want to add support for the hatom microformat, which has chosen ‘entry’ to denote an article (oh, there’s another one) and so uses ‘entry-title’ and ‘entry-content’.

Which one to choose? Yes, you could go with both, but that’s rather inelegant, and feels a bit like sitting between two chairs.

I chose to go with the hatom naming and trust that people can figure it out on their own, even though it pains me a bit to not conform to the ‘mother’ platforms naming conventions, I think the gain of hatom compatibility is worth it.

Here Be Dragons

Published by Heilemann 2 years, 9 months ago. Closed.

Eric mentioned something that I think is worth re-communicating here.

K2 hasn’t always been the most frequently updated theme in the official sense of us putting out releases. We’ve often poured changes into the repository and fed people the latest nightlies if they wanted to stay up-to-date. And by doing so we ‘trained’ everyone to think of the nightlies and subversion in general as place for (mostly) stable updates.

And we try to keep it that way.

But.

The new course is to instead be more rigorous with actual releases and in turn ween everyone off of using the nightlies and subversion for production purposes. This is important, because we’re already in the midst of some sweeping changes, and they will mean broken sites if you rely blindly on subversion or nightlies.

K2 1.0.3

Published by Heilemann 2 years, 9 months ago. 14 Comments.

This release contains only a single extremely minor fix to a relatively rare but highly annoying problem concerning long titles wrapping around in the navigation area of permalinks, causing the headlines to be dislocated.

PS: I’ve set up K2 on Twitter, as that seems to be what all the youngsters are raving about these days.

How to Update Your Translation

Published by Heilemann 2 years, 9 months ago. 2 Comments.

For those of you wondering, here’s a quick tutorial on how to update your translation when we put up a new POT file.