Mantra 2.4 celebrates 4 years of existence

Mantra

It’s a time for joy and celebration, not just because a new Mantra update is here to correct and improve some long outstanding issues but also because this month, 4 years ago, our little Mantra opened its digital eyes and met with the Wordpress repository for the very first time. And boy what I ride it has been since…

Mantra is now 4 years old and although her little sisters are starting to surpass her, she’s still older, wiser and still has a few issues up her sleeves.

One of the most important changes in the latest update is the removal of shortcodes. The keep the [mantra] or [cryout] shortcodes working on your site, we’ve moved this functionality to a separate plugin…

Where is WordPress heading? To have or not have theme options…

WordPress Themes / Blog

Wordpress’ Theme Review Team seems to always be involved in a lot of decision making. That’s good, decisions have to be made and a direction needs to be set and maintained.

However lately the decisions seem to be taken hastily, without analysing all the effects (and maybe consequences) they have. We’ve had scuffles with Wordpress before, but we’ve moved on, adapted, clarified or changed things. But this new decision directly affects themes – meaning it touches us the most.

Tempera 1.2.7 wakes up from hibernation

Tempera

It’s been a long three months of freezing winter (with massive amounts of snow in places), but Tempera is now well rested and ready to return to fighting with the higher forces.

During this first round the fight consists of mostly localization and styling fixes, with a touch of Google fonts, new translations and some IE quirks. The pièce de résistance is, of course…

Nirvana 1.0.4 gets an A in math

Nirvana

Math – the cause of most horrific disasters in history… well not quite, but math is indeed the culprit for Nirvana’s last release’s failing settings page. Fortunately Nirvana 1.0.4 took a quick course in advanced mathematics and learned that the best solution to avoid any issues is to consider negative fractions as equal to zero (if that makes sense).

So here she is, proud to show off her best grade in math – A (or 10, or 5… depending on what region of the world you’re in)

Nirvana 1.0.1 learns to fight

Nirvana

No more mister nice guy (uhm… girl) Nirvana. In this new update she finally learned to fight (against poorly written plugins that load their code all over the dashboard and break key functionality).

But despite posing as a bad girl, Nirvana 1.0.1 also brings a lot of head-relaxing fixes (among which the long awaited Google fonts functionality). For everything else…

Nirvana 0.9.9.9/10/11 finds the right path

Nirvana

Not long after the Tempera quad-pack we’ve got the recipe right and used all that we’ve recently learnt to cook a brand new Nirvana update… or maybe two.

Nirvanas 0.9.9.9, 0.9.9.10 and 0.9.9.11 bring mostly fixes and tweaks, but you’ll learn all about that after the jump.

Tempera 1.2.3/4/5/6 fights the system

Tempera

No, we haven’t lost our mind; this is not a reverse countdown (a countup?). And we did not release a quadruple-update-in-one either.

This cryptic title deserves a decent explanation and it’s actually simpler than it seems: it appears I was overconfident on the Wordpress review process last time. While they did wonders then and managed to verify and approve two updates in the same day, the sun doesn’t always shine… in fact it got terribly dark after that. Worse still… the sun changed.

Never mess with mantra they say (or was it nirvana…)