Version .93 is now complete. This release is mostly about refinement, I guess. It touches on a number of things that I found myself digging into. For starters, I removed the shortcodes from the theme and moved them to a plugin. This allows for changing themes without losing access to content created by shortcodes. If you’re using shortcodes, you must download the Alien Ship Shortcodes Plugin and activate it. I also removed old javascript code that wasn’t being used – Google’s prettify script and the less.js script. I also did some minor cleanup in the templates and CSS.
Thanks to Klaus Mohn we now have a German translation. While I was at it, I added translation support to the Theme Options page and regenerated the alienship.pot file. If you’re a translator, you might want to update your translation now that the theme options are accessible.
New in this release are a Marketing page template, a Status Posts page template, and a new Custom Menu widget that uses the Bootstrap nav-list styling. The Marketing page template mimics the new “Narrow marketing” example included in the Bootstrap library. The Status Posts page template displays all posts of the “Status” post format. This template will be refined to provide a nice way of displaying status updates for those who like to do such things. The new “Custom Menu: Nav List” widget is a variation of the default “Custom Menu” widget that displays menus as widgets. This widget was written by Andrey Savchenko (Rarst) and I’d like to say thanks to him for such a great little widget.
Hi John,
Thank you indeed for your excellent work with the AlienShip framework. I was wondering if you are planning going on with further development since you didn’t actualize since last year. I’ve been using Alienship for a project lately, and was just wondering.
Thank you in advance
Yes, I will be continuing development. I’m waiting on the next major Bootstrap release before I do any additional major work. They’re moving to a mobile first design in 3.0, and I want to redo some things when that comes out.
I plan to simplify the CSS in style.css at that point too, so that there’s less code required to do something that looks completely different. In other words, no overwriting styles.
From a feature perspective, the theme feels pretty complete. I have a few ideas, but will wait until BS 3.0 comes out to work with them. I figure with 3.0 being a major rewrite, there’s no sense in me putting a bunch of time just to have to do it again soon.
Do you have any specific things in mind you’d like to see?
Oh great good news !
No I don’t have any special feature in mind, actually I like it to be the simpliest possible, I like the idea you mentioned of simplifying the css. I felt there was too much loading because bootstrap’s one is there and is already huge.
As a matter of fact I chose Alienship not so because of bootstrap , (which I like anyway) but because I found it was a very solid and convenient framework to work with and I like it to be as flexible and “slim” as posible.
Thanks again !
Agreed. The Bootstrap library is a bit heavy. When I deploy a site, I do a custom BS build and drop it in the child theme’s css folder so it doesn’t load the full library included in Alien Ship.
I’m actually looking forward to stripping down style.css. When BS3 gets near release I’ll start working on it.
Thanks for that tip ! I didn’t realise you could do this, wonderful !