What is a true responsive theme

There are many responsive themes in the market, but most of them fail when you add a leadboard ad. In Swift we added an option to enter ad code specific to mobiles, this will be served when the site is viewed on mobile. This version also includes a smart text widget, which magically disappears when viewed on mobile and a flexible slider.

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Installation and upgrade

If you are a new user or upgrading from Swift Basic, use it like any other WordPress theme. If you are upgrading from versions between 6.0.0 and 6.0.9 follow the instructions here

Improvements in this version are …

New tabs widget in Swift

RSS Subscribe widget and the new smart text widget

RSS links in the top navigation replaced by icons

Improvements to our support system

We now have active Facebook and twitter pages. If you have any high priority problem or if I missed your question on the forum, you can now use facebook or twitter to notify me. These two accounts are continuously monitored, you will get quicker response to your questions.

If you are using the free version, and if you have a question that’s not already been covered on the forum, you can ask it on our fb page. We will try to answer your questions in our free time.

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The future …

Swift is now very stable and inline with the latest trends. So we will now take some time of from the regular coding and will be concentrating on improving the inline documentation and preparing some tutorials for hard core developers.

Submit your site to Swift Showcase

If you want to include your site in the showcase below reply to this email or use this contact form.

I started working on the next version of Swift, and this is the list of things I plan to do. If you need anything that’s not in the list, drop a comment.

• Separate color and font options for above logo and below logo navigation menus.
• Tabs widget.
• Icons for RSS links in navigation above logo.
• Stacked magazine layout.
• We will probably switching to flex slider so that we can include slider in mobile layouts.
• Some tweaks to the news paper layout and short code buttons.
• Option to add notes to the options pages.
• Option to disable ad’s on individual posts.
• Option to disable image, forms  and table styling to use styling included by plugins.

The mobile version of the theme categorizes all the available devices into 4 groups and styles the page based on the device.

1. Screens less than 400px wide, covers lower end smartphones, portrait orientation on older generation iPhone’s and iPod touches.
2. Screen between 400 to 640px, covers landscape orientation on older generation iPhone’s and iPod touches, portrait on premium smartphones, iphone4 and 4s, and tablets.
3. Screens less than 850px wide, covers tablet and high-end phones landscape.
4. greater than 850px wide, that will be desktops and tablets with high resolutions.

While making Swift responsive, there were two principles guiding the development

1. Keep your site identity and feel intact.
2. Make the information easily accessible.

Large search box and navigation menu links with enough room around them to make the taps accurate are the results of the former.

Why not plugins

Here is how mobile version of Swift is different from plugins available, and why you should use it

• Your site unique, it is a brand, it has an identity. Plugins won’t preserve identity and feel of your site. Swift does.
• Most plugins work only on  iOS. Swift works like a charm on all devices.
• They don’t look good on tablets. Swift has a layout designed specifically for tablets.

How to download

This update is free and available for all the users, login to the members area to download the latest version. If you haven’t bought the theme yet, you can buy it here

Usage

After updating the theme, goto design options -> layout options and enable mobile layout.

Note: On some installations, check boxes in the options page are reset during the update. Make sure you update them.

There are lot of new and exiting things coming up , will announce the details very soon. Stay tuned !

• User friendly error pages.
• Added box shadow option for comments, and navigation after post.

Other changes to this version are listed below

• Further enhanced captioned images styling.
• Changed the shortcodes download icon.
• Increased the size of comments submit buttons.
• Some refinements to buttons.
• Fixed the bug causing flicker in magazine layout.
• Reduced three HTTP requests by using base64 images for RSS subscribe widget, breadcrumbs icon and comment icon.

New comments styling

Complete list of changes to this version are listed below

• Added RSS subscribe widget, and more social media options to compliment it.
• Added new page template ( check the screenshot below)
• Changed the comments icon on blog page, single page and magazine page
• Changed the nav search and captioned image styling a little.
• Few performance tweaks.
• Updated the help page.

There will be another update in the first week of February. If you have any suggestions or need any new feature, post theme in comments.

3 things happened during this time…

1. I found a js script to make HTML5 pages backward compatible.
2. I came across Golden Ratio and it very quickly became an obsession.
3. I got my hands on an awesome book named “Professional WordPress Plugin Development“.

JS script to make HTML5 pages backward compatible

With the improved semantics in HTML5, it will be easy for search engines to rank your pages for the right keyword

HTML5 brings a lot of new features and standards, one thing that stands out the most is the IMPROVED SEMANTICS. There are many black hat SEO techniques, but they are all dangerous, they can bite you back anytime and you will have nowhere to go. A better way to move up in search rankings is to help the robots understand your page better, help them rank you for the right keyword. Problem with the earlier versions of HTML was, there was no way to tell the robots which part of the page has valuable content. For example… Consider you write about dogs, and a user with alias “Bond007″ is a regular commentor on your blog and on one post he has written over 10 comments. Now the density of the word Bond007 is higher than any other word on that page. If you don’t tell the robots which part of the page has the most important content, they will rank the page higher for the keywords bond, bond007, james bond etc and thus lowering the importance of the actual keyword. The traffic you get for that particular post is uses less, as the user was looking for info on james bond and seeing the posts about dogs he will leave the site immediately. The new improved semantics will help us help the robots to understand the page better and rank for the right keyword. When you are ranked for the right keyword, you get quality traffic.

Golden ratio (1.618)

The golden rectangle or golden section is a visually pleasing geometric shape with specific proportions, when things are in this proportion it makes our brain feel comfortable. The number also appears in nature all the time!

If you take the ratio of males to females in a honeybee colony it will be 1.618!
Sunflower seeds grow in spirals. the ratio of each rotation’s diameter is… 1.618!
Measure the distance of the top of your head to the floor and divide the distance from your belly button to the floor.
Shoulder to you fingertips, then divide it by you elbow to your fingertips.
Hip to floor divided by knee to floor.
EVERYTHING IS EQUAL TO PHI, 1.618!!!

The golden ratio is used in swift 6.0

1. Line height is phi times font size.
2. Slider image width to height ratio is equal to phi
3. Content to sidebar width ratio is phi
4. Thumbnails are in this ratio

Professional WordPress plugin development

This is an awesome book by Justin Tadlock. After reading the first few chapters, I couldn’t continue the development until I read the entire book. This book showed me the mistakes I was doing, and taught me how to do things in a better and efficient way. The result being, a faster swift with cleaner code, lots of hooks and filters.

Major changes to the new version Include..

1. A complete proper HTML5 theme.
2. Developer friendly with hooks and filters.
3. Variable site width, you can now set the site width and even have fluid width layout.
4. Improved NEWS paper layout with easy setup.
5. Option to set post meta around post titles with easy drag and drop interface.
6. No more fiddling with file permissions. Swift takes care of them on its own using the WordPress file system API, a secure way of writing files inside WordPress.
7. Dynamic generation of thumbnails using WordPress core functions, you no longer have to worry about hacking attacks due to flaws in third-party scripts.
8. New comment styling.
9. Delayed loading of the Gravatar in comments to add to SPEED of the site and USER EXPERIENCE.
10. Improved font and color options.
11. Adjustable slider speed.
12. Support to the newly introduced author tag.
13. Option to disable WordPress tinymce smartness on pages, and custom CSS specific to pages. Both come in very handy when designing statics sites with WP as CMS.
14. Help page included with in the WP dashboard.
15. Easily import/export and share color schemes and font settings between your blogs and friends.

Demo of Swift-v6.0

Here are some of the beautiful sites built with Swift-v6.0

• http://careerology.co.nz
• http://TechBU.com
• http://www.facelinking.com/
• http://softwarebuzzer.com

Buy HTML5 Swift now

Note: Paid version of Swift will no longer be called SwiftPremium, it will be called Swift. Free version of Swift, SwiftLite will be released next week.

Highly Optimized SwiftPremium beats Google in page speed score

*Page Speed is an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Its a measure of how well the site and the code is optimized.

PS: You can buy this highly optimized theme in a few hours, stay tuned.

How this works

• Winners of the 10 free copies will b picked by draw.
• For the discount, coupon code will be included in the first news letter and will be active for 20 purchases.

Apart from being faster than the current free version, there are a lot of improvements in SWIFT premium both visually and technically.

The major ones are..

1. Integrated breadcrumbs for better SEO and navigation.
2. Thumbnails will be picked automatically. You dont have to set them manually.
3. The new NEWS paper layout. (demo, TechBU)
4. Archive listing at the bottom of the page. (check screenshot below)
5. Option to add your copyright information in the footer.
6. Option to remove credit links in the footer.
7. New related posts with thumbnails. (check screenshot below)
8. New highly optimized social media icons.
9. Integration of short code plugin  Ninja Short codes.
10. Added badge to comments by author.
11. Some small JS effects on the magazine boxes.

SEO enhancements

SWIFT is already highly Optimized for Search Engines, Premium version pushes the SEO even further

1. Google announced that it will consider page load time will be one of the several factors its going to use in its Search Engine ranking algorithm, so I optimized the page size by
2. Optimizing the sprites
3. CSS
4. HTML

Earlier we used a <h4> tags for the sidebar and footer heading, that’s a valuable resource for search engine optimization. Using h4 for sidebars isn’t a big mistake, lot of themes do it. But we

Technical improvements you may not notice.

• Child theme compatible.
• I’m going through all the code again to keep it up to WordPress standards.
• Setting up default values, which make more sense.
• Inline documentation to keep up with WordPress standards.
• Optimized code.

Apart from the above mentioned improvements, I’m gonna get the theme thoroughly checked by SEO experts, and improve the typography and default colour scheme with advice from experts in the field.

I have short listed few SEO experts, and high profile designers, I will tell you the name once I finalize.

Some screen shots from the premium version

New realted posts with thumbnails and author badge for comments in SWIFT premium

Archives in SWIFT premium, with customizable colours. ( Will be located just above the footer )

Sprites in free version vs Sprites in SWIFT premium.

Breadcrumbs integration in SwiftPremium

WPaddict.net tested 8 themes to find the fastest loading theme and confirmed that SWIFT is the fastest loading WordPress theme beating the popular premium themes.

http://wpaddict.net/is-the-swift-theme-really-swift/

An awesome customization of SWIFT I came across recently

http://www.jennyonthespot.com/