Three years ago (almost to the day) we were taunting you with our (then) brand new theme. In the meantime dust has settled, scratches appeared, but the bookmark was never removed. It took three years of learning and studying its younger siblings for Parabola 1.7 to gather all the knowledge and code to grow further.
With this release we want to thank our (veteran) Parabola users by bringing two heavily requested features in the biggest update yet…
Being older and wiser, we have tried to spare Parabola for as long as possible the pain of having part of her soul ripped out and removed like a piece of defective code. But unfortunately things need to evolve, bugs need to be fixed and improvements added, so the time has come for Parabola to lose her settings options as well.
Just like with her sisters we have prepared for this moment and set up an alternative solution…
For accessibility reasons, Wordpress 4.4 changes the HTML markup of the settings sections in an way that’s incompatible with our theme settings pages. As a result, our themes will fail to display the settings sections once you update to 4.4.
To solve this…
As you might know by now, themes in the official repository are no longer allowed to implement a theme options page. All new themes were required since early this year to implement support for the Customizer and some weeks ago this rule became mandatory for themes already published in the repository as well.
We’ve given this a great deal of thought and we decided not to transfer theme options to the Customizer interface. We built our themes settings to fit and work in a certain way and we feel the Customizer structure just isn’t right for them.
To be able to continue providing theme updates…
Parabola learned from experience to circumvent her younger sisters’ critical mistakes and brings you only the desert in this round of themes updates.
Among the most important additions are support for WPML and Polylang multilingualism in custom content areas and her newly achieved skills in the commerce sector with the inclusion of the WooCommerce compatibility (child theme) code and styling. For everything else…
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.
This is not Parabola 1.4 and a half although the title may lead you into thinking that. This is a double release post and we sure did miss doing one of these.
Why? Follow us after the jump and find out.
