Author Archives: Mady Cullen

What do I expect from WordPress 4.5?

What do I expect from WordPress 4.5?

Where quite a few content management software and content management platforms exist, we enjoy WordPress as always. Today when a responsive web design or a responsive website is looked upon as a must to impress Google, we are in an urge to the best of responsive web designs for a great ranking and better businesses. Let’s see how WordPress supports us in its new avatar.

While most features in the Beta WordPress 4.5 released around Feb week 3 would make it to the final, expected in April, some may or may not but it’s definitely exciting to know on what’s new. Isn’t it?

To talk on features in WordPress 4.5, the upcoming WordPress version , it adds the long awaited theme from customizer to the WordPress core. Rather than uploading custom logos using the options panel, the core support lets us do it from the theme customizer. Support for logos happens with the size values in the respective commands. Themes not supporting this wouldn’t be showing up in the customizer.

An enhancement to the visual editor which is of a great writing experience to users comes up as a wonder in the new WordPress version. Of the time saving shortcuts, CTRL+K or Command+K on Mac makes your link insertion into posts much easier. Pressing CTRL+K, typing the url and continuing writing the post without removing the hand off insert the link inline.

Quick shortcuts for inline texts that came up in WordPress 4.3 are ameliorated with more in the new one. However if you don’t like them, very well you can disable them in the editor.

Moderating comments eats up the time of bloggers when there’s a new comment submitted. WordPress usually sends an email notification that takes us to the page of comments where we can approve but not formatting or so. WordPress 4.5 comes up with the edit link to do the formatting.

Responsive preview in customizer is the next wonder which lets you click the device icon to switch between devices. Desktop, mobile and tablet previews available would give you an idea how the site would show your devices.

Optimized image size generation is an enhancement to the one in WordPress 4.4 where smaller screen users saw smaller images as suited. Now it comes with saving costs on data plans too without any quality loss. Saving images optimised for web is still recommended.

Allowing users to login using their email address is the next new feature so no more the pain of having to keep your user name by-heart!

For developers, Selective refresh in customizer lets developers make changes without having to reload the whole page making the process faster to do things better with live previews. Customizable embed templates lets one use posts from other sites or WordPress blogs where the embed templates are customizable for the custom displays we simply want! WP_Site Class for multisite WordPress installs is a feature to run and manage multiple WordPress sites from a single WordPress installation.

Having said these, we assure you we are up to the trends in the web designs, CMS and the expectations of Google in a website with respect to the design and customer experience. If you are looking for the best in the web design with all the aspects taken care diligently to suffice your worth, feel free to contact us.

Drupal 6 : End Of Life!

Drupal 6 : End Of Life!

Drupal is the content management software or content management platform for creating integrated digital frameworks with any number of add-ons to customize your content presentation.

What is it about drupal versioning? Of Feb 24th 2016, Drupal 6 is at EOL (End Of Life). What this means to you?

=> Drupal 6 would no longer be supported on a larger note; not used for creating new projects or documentations or modify the existing projects for bugs.

=> Core commits on Drupal 6 would be nil

=> Security advisories or support for Drupal 6 would be nil

=> Drupal 6 releases on project pages would be flagged as not supported

=> Update for Drupal sites would go antedated any sooner

Upgrading Drupal is definitely necessary but to which version you would want to upgrade depends on the complexity of your website and the modules contained in it. A lot of modules have been built in Drupal 8, as in Views and WYSWYG editor. Migration can be done as an experimental step from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 directly so upgrading would be simple using an interface or using Drush which is the command-line shell and scripting interface to make life easier for those who spend their working hours hacking away at the command prompt. Upgrading to Drupal 7 is as well possible using the core update aspect and this would be supported till Drupal 9 comes in.

Upgrading is a must; for sites that aren’t upgraded by now it is only the paid support that’s available from vendors for Drupal 6.

To mention on the support for the version upgrades, the community initiatives to support Composer is available on Drupal.org, taking the help of the community members and the maintainer of Composer and Packagist.org.

Support for the 2 Composer end points, which is for Drupal 7 projects and for the Drupal 8 projects is available with Drupal.org. These separate endpoints enable Drupal.org to translate Drupal-style version numbers into the true semantic versioning as per the expectations of Composer. Additionally supporting a transparent movement to a better semantic versioning for contrib projects on Drupal.org is also being aimed at. A beta of this Drupal.org Composer support in March might come up soon.

Drupal.org provides support allowing users to follow more content types, as in Forum Topics, Posts, Case Studies, documentation Book Pages and more. But then, email notification for any activity on a wide variety of content on Drupal.org is very much getting possible for the users, which forces us to provide some better tools for managing those notifications.

Having said these, we assure we are up to date with the software updates and the implications they have at any scale for any kind of business or website. If you are looking for the best content management system provider to handle your website content and system upgrades, feel free to contact us.