[Chapter-delegates] 1st week of December - Re: Warning - Advance notice about a new version v1.2.0 of the ISOC WordPress theme coming next week

[Dan York]

Chapter delegates,

Since I said I would be releasing a new version of the WordPress theme this week....  well, given that this ISOC WordPress theme is basically maintained by me on a volunteer basis (I.e. outside my regular ISOC work responsibilities) with the help of a few others, and given that I'm going to be away for the next few days for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I decided it wasn't a smart plan to formally "tag" the release and trigger any automatic update notices some of you might receive which might result in upgrade issues.

So I plan to do that next week when I'm back from the holiday.  I don't expect there to be any real upgrade issues for any of you using the WordPress theme, but as mentioned before, you will need to reconfigure your front page layout a bit by adding widgets to the appropriate columns.

The code is all done, though, so if any of you REALLY want to play with the updated theme in advance of the formal "release", you *can* go to https://github.com/InternetSociety/isoc-wp and click the "Download ZIP" button on the right side.  You can upload this zip file via the normal way to add a theme (note that it has a folder name "isoc-wp-master" that is different from the regular theme).

But, as I mentioned, I'll be offline eating turkey, spending time with my family and not really checking ISOC email.  So if there are any problems I can't really help you until next week. (But you can file issues at https://github.com/InternetSociety/isoc-wp/issues )

By the way, next week the formal "release" will appear at https://github.com/InternetSociety/isoc-wp/releases along with some release notes and a big blue button to download the theme files.

Regards,
Dan

P.S. Thank you all for your kind words. That feedback is very much appreciated.

From: Dan York <york at isoc.org<mailto:york at isoc.org>>
Date: Sat, 23 Nov 2013 03:30:31 +0000
To: ISOC Chapter Delegates <chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org<mailto:chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org>>
Subject: [Chapter-delegates] Warning - Advance notice about a new version v1.2.0 of the ISOC WordPress theme coming next week

Chapter delegates,

I wanted to give you all a heads-up that next week I plan to release a new version 1.2.0 of the ISOC WordPress theme.

WARNING!!!!   You *will* need to change the front page of your site after updating to this version!

The reason for the advance notice is that if you have your site configured for "automatic updates" using the "Theme Updater" plugin and you just do the automatic update and don't look at your site... your front page will be broken until you update it.

In the process of updating the Deploy360 site to be based on the standard ISOC WordPress theme, I made a great number of fixes, feature requests and changes to the theme.  The single biggest change was to get rid of the hard-coded "News" column on the left that many people (myself included) found annoying and restrictive.   Now instead the front "Home" page has three separate "widget-enabled" columns so you can set up those columns in whatever format you want (and you can also have a 2-column layout if you want).  You can still have a "News" area, but you now have the flexibility to NOT have that in the left column.

Those of you who want all the details of exactly what has changed can visit:

  https://github.com/internetsociety/isoc-wp/issues?milestone=7&page=1&state=closed

(And thanks to ISOC-PL's Marcin Cieslak for helping with a fix to one of the issues.)

You can see the new and improved theme in action at http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/

I'll send out a message next week when the new version is ready for usage.  I just wanted to give you an advance warning that you can't just update or upload this new version of the theme and expect it to work with no changes.

Regards,
Dan

P.S. There are still other bugs and feature requests pending on the theme but this release represents the major ones found to date. The full list of feature requests and bugs can be found at:

https://github.com/internetsociety/isoc-wp/issues

You're welcome to raise additional issues and feature requests there - and if you have any WordPress or PHP expertise you're welcome to contribute to the project as Marcin has done!

--
Dan York
Senior Content Strategist, Internet Society
york at isoc.org<mailto:york at isoc.org> <mailto:york at isoc.org>   +1-802-735-1624
Jabber: york at jabber.isoc.org<mailto:york at jabber.isoc.org> <mailto:york at jabber.isoc.org>
Skype: danyork   http://twitter.com/danyork

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/
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