v7.1.4, A major update to Swift. New child theme and more.

This is the first major update since Swift v7. There are a lot of enhancements and new additions and a couple of features that were often requested.

The list of new features include

• New navigation style called Modern
• Useful info page under Swift menu, giving you useful info like your site layout, slider image size, media settings, ideal colours for Adsense etc..
• Option to toggle search and RSS links position. Will come in very handy when you are using only top navigation and want to use search there instead of the RSS links.
• You can now select the number of tiles you want next to slider in newspaper layout.

Enhancements

• Better control over layout widths with the improved layout width slider.
• Improved shortcodes. Demo here
• Added editor stylehseet, what you see in the editor is what the post looks like on the front end.
• Improved navigation menus, fixes problem with drop down menus closing when trying to move over them.
• Fixed duplicated posts issue in newspaper layout.

The first ever child theme of Swift is coming soon.

There have been lot of requests for a navigation like the one we have on this site (SwiftThemes.Com). I have thought of ways to included it in the theme, but the conditionals and checks to carry out it within the current theme was a  lot of overhead. So we decided to release it as a child theme, the first ever child theme of Swift.

The future of Swift

One of the major gripe about Swift is the lack of documentation. We tried to address through the inline documentation, but it wasn’t enough for users who aren’t techsavy. To address this issue, we are coming up with videos explaining various options in Swift.

To start with we will be releasing a video with through overview of  options in Swift. Next I’m thinking of two, 

1. How to build a business site with Swift
2. How to set up a store with Swift and WooCommerce.

I will get the above two videos done in the first week of August. If you need any specific tutorial feel free to ask.

What you can expect in future versions of Swift

• We will go through the entire code and shave as many bytes as possible.
• A customisable footer.
• News paper layout is fast compared to the similar layouts in other themes, but it’s not upto our standards. Will work on ways to improve it further.
• More color schemes to choose from.