HTML 5 version of Swift, v6.0 is here

It’s been almost six months since there has been any major updates to SwiftPremium or any noise on this blog. After launching version 0.6 of SwiftPremium, I was planning the development for a new version with hooks and filters giving more flexibility to the child theme developers.

3 things happened during this time…

I found a js script to make HTML5 pages backward compatible.
I came across Golden Ratio and it very quickly became an obsession.
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

Line height is phi times font size.
Slider image width to height ratio is equal to phi
Content to sidebar width ratio is phi
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..

A complete proper HTML5 theme.
Developer friendly with hooks and filters.
Variable site width, you can now set the site width and even have fluid width layout.
Improved NEWS paper layout with easy setup.
Option to set post meta around post titles with easy drag and drop interface.
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.
Dynamic generation of thumbnails using WordPress core functions, you no longer have to worry about hacking attacks due to flaws in third-party scripts.
New comment styling.
Delayed loading of the Gravatar in comments to add to SPEED of the site and USER EXPERIENCE.
Improved font and color options.
Adjustable slider speed.
Support to the newly introduced author tag.
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.
Help page included with in the WP dashboard.
Easily import/export and share color schemes and font settings between your blogs and friends.

[button link=”http://demos.swiftthemes.com/” color=”blue” text=”light”]Demo of Swift-v6.0[/button]

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

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.

SwiftThemes