It’s time to add some fancy features to SWIFT

Hello Swiftler’s,

How are you guys doing.It’s been quite a time since SWIFT was updated. Last 2 months have been very tough for me ( toughest in my life 🙁  ). But  now it’s time to get my controls back and do some serious coding. I have planned some nice additions for SWIFT, if you have any suggestions, want to request a new feature or report bugs now is the right time to do.

Here are the list of features to be added in SWIFT

  • Twitter widget
  • Option to display links to your social media profiles in the RSS subscription widget. I’m going to add the following sites,let me know if you want me to add any other sites.
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Digg
    • Stumbleupon
    • Linkedin
    • delicious
    • Flickr
    • Youtube
  • Width of narrow sidebar in SWIFT is 160px, with 10px padding it doesn’t have enough room for the popular 160px wide banner/text/link ads. In the next version of SWIFT I’m going to add a special widget for these ads, this widget will have no paddings and border and fit perfectly in the space available.
  • Option to specify the post ID for full length post on home page.
  • Tabber widget and the slider needs some improvement, may be I will provide an option to choose between 2 sliders.
  • Option to specify the font size of post content.
  • Some default colour schemes.
  • I will  try to make the theme translation ready.
  • Write a support guide for the new version, 30% done. It’s a boring task :(, not sure how long it’s gonna take.
  • Three column layout, most probably this will be released as a premium version to raise funds to buy a macbook and furnish my work space. ( I’m already using the three column version on this blog 🙂 )

Thats all for now, I will update the post if I get any new ideas.

PS: 2 Million ( yeah 2 followed by 6 zeroes) pages are powered by SWIFT, thanks to everyone who is using SWIFT.

Check here

Some random post from my random blog From my Lens

40 Replies to “It’s time to add some fancy features to SWIFT”

  1. I like the overall features.
    But is there anyway I can add a you tube video gallery into this theme? It would really suit my site…

  2. I  am coming onto the Swift theme buliding an online news site. The news site was established December ’09 and now recieves a lot of hits.
    The problem was how to be able to carry unique advertising and comments on each writer’s page.
    The solution has been to get each writer a seperate blog with a seperate address as an add-on to the parent site.
    Now, it would be really cool if the were a way so that when the columnist posted, it could connect and update their magazine box on the parent page.
    It would also be cool if their individual magazine box could show a comment count on their most recent post. 
    Hope that made sense. It’s like this: You go to the homepage Newport News Politics Scroll down until you see a writer’s name in a magazine box. Click on the writer. You actually go to the writer’s blog which is an add-on to Newport News Politics and carries the Swift theme. 
    It would be really cool if someone could figure out a way so that when the writer posts, it would automatically update the box on the Newport News Politics homepage. – Just like with the feature story up top. 
    By the time we finish the design work, we are going to have a lot of writers. It would be cool of we didn’t have to update everyone manually on the homepage.
    Thanks.

  3. I’m using v5.25.
    When I post a entry, I do not see Author Bio at the end the entry. Besides, the SWIFT Popular Post widget does not update new articles and display thumbnail image. In previous version, I did not get the same problems. Can you give me a instruction , please ?
    Thanks for your good job.

  4. Dear Admin,
    I hope my email find you well,
    I like to convert your blog to Arabic blog is it possible. if you can help
    thanks in advance.
    Said

    1. Sorry. The correct is:
      Please, separate (dismember, break down) the tags and Author Biography.
      Thanks for your good job.
       

  5. Hello,
    As I have wrote in your testimonial, I have customized your theme a bit. Though my site is in french, you can still go for a walk on it to see what I have changed. I could give you ideas.
    Keep on good working ! I’d like to use your theme for my next website too 😉

    1. WOW! your site is beautiful! I just wanna say things I noticed, that I would love/hope to see.
      1.  Author Avatar on top right of each post.
      2. Color of Post changes upon scrolling over it.
      3.  wider/and Images in navigation bar
      4.  The colors you chose are beautiful.
      5.  Name of author is in each post exert at the top. Very nicely done.
      I’m personally a big fan of Satish and Swift themes. It makes me wish I could understand php/html more.  (Maybe this summer) I will say one thing I would recommend for you.  The Main Image you are using, has all the (circles/ universes) whatever they are with Bulles, Actualities, Environment, – You could easily make this image a html Map where I could click those (Circles) and goto that part of your website, instead of just your home page.

      1. Thanks mymorningstory, it was a lot of work to do all this, and I forgot all the things I’ve done to get to what I have.
        For the idea you said, I wanted to do it. I know myself how to do html maps, but I’ve used Satish’s header logo.
        I’d like to thank Satish, by the way, for having done such a easy to understand and powerful theme. I would not succed the edition otherwise.

      2. For the “Color of Post changes upon scrolling over it.” it was an idea to make the post “a bubble” since my posts are bubbles in the theme of my website.

        1. Neptune – I was wondering if you could send me the modified theme that you made to the *Swift Themes* i was planning on incorporating a few of your customizations into my site.  I really liked your (bubble post) feature and the author information on each post.
          email me ** mymorningstory at gmail.com **
          I hope to hear from you soon 🙂

  6. Hi I had sent you an email via your contact form.. re; your services.
    also where is the option for a 3 column( narrow on either side)
    saw something in widgets, but couldn’t figure it out. P.S hope things are sorted out in your life. 🙂
     

  7. It can be useful to have separated settings for font’s size, especially for the navigation bars because if I want to increase the paragraph font size, the navigation bars font increases also. Thanks for your fantastic theme and good work!

    1. Another useful feature can be the possibility to set different services for the newsletter widget, such as aweber.com or mailchimp.com or with a wordpress plugin such as SendIt! or MailPress. Thanks again!

  8. I’m using  v5.25.
    But  when I select another category whose posts  to have displayed in the Featured Posts slider on  home page.It still shows the posts belong to the category the first time I selected.
    By the way,the language of the categories is Chinese.

  9. Btw, I’ve installed the latest version of Swift (5.25) and while on the Magazine layout, if I make a new post and mark it as featured, it won’t appear on the main page posts. It only shows on the featured box. With 5.17 that didn’t happened to me. Is there anything I’m missing?
    Thanks for the answer in advance.

    1. Hi piZZero… I got the same problem with the slide show box when “recent posts” are selected. Have you found any workarounds? Much appreciated.

    2. Posts shown in slider are skipped from the regular loop for SEO reasons, I will provide an option to override that in the next release.

  10. Hopefully, I can explain this right:
    some type of navigation bar @ the bottom of the website so people can goto the *obscure* pages .. Such as:
    Contacts info, Copyright info, Advertising, FAQ, etc..
    Basically the things that are vital to each and every growing blog that typical users don’t care to look at, but there for the people that really want to contact the site owner.
    This would be helpful for my site anyways.

  11. I’d suggest adding, on the main page and when using the magazine style, the amount of comments each post has before you actually click on “Full Story”. You know like (0 comments, or 4 comments, etc…).
    That way you can track easily those posts who get new comments on the main page, and you can save some space on the sidebars by not using the comments widget.
    I don’t know if I made myself clear :S I’m not a pro, but I’d love to see this implemented some day.
    Thanks for your great work!!! Feel free to visit my blog and check my own customization of the swift theme 🙂
    Cheers!

  12. Great job as always!
    I’m a version behind because the timthumb wasn’t working exactly correct in the last version!
    I’ve been super bogged down with life or I’d be helping you out more Satish!
    A+ job as usually, cheers to Swift, the Best “Freeium” Theme our there!

    1. This can not be included into the theme. There should be some plugins to do this, I will create one if there is none available after the theme update.

  13. Oh, I remembered another:
    d) Better separation between comments paragraphs. The comments text editor shows paragraphs slightly separated, so it’s not clear for first time comments they’ll end up “glued” to each other, becoming a kind of wall of text.
    On the previous comment I pressed Enter twice between paragraphs because I knew of this. On this one only once. The difference is quite noticeable. 😉

  14. Some suggestions:
     
    a) I’d love to have an optional WPML-compatible language selector that could be enabled on the second toolbar, to the left of the search box. Right now I’ve added WPML’s own widget to the sidebar, but it doesn’t look quite right there.
     
    b) Talking about WPML, I noticed a small bug when it is enabled in Swift: an extra slash gets added between the host and first folder/file name, so that dynamic URLs end up looking (and linking) like this: hxxp://www.example.com//example. While this doesn’t affect functionality (the links still work), it makes things a little confusing. And as I haven’t seen this happen on other themes, I guess it’s a Swift-related thing.
     
    c) The no-border-no-padding narrow sidebar widget will be quite cool! But please also add such a widget for the wide sidebars, or make the original generic, so it can be added on either narrow or wide sidebars. There are lots of buttons, chicklets and similar things that can be added to the sidebar but that don’t sit well within the border. Having a no-border-no-padding solution would make it very easy to position them the best way.
     
    That’s what I can think of right now.
     
    Oh, and the 3-column version looks pretty good. Kudos! 🙂

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