Kahuna 1.6.3 tricks or treats

Is this a trick or is this a treat? You get to decide with this update that has been too long in the making…

Image credit: Benjamin Balazs / Pixabay

I know we’ve been slower with updates lately —slower than our usual slow, which was already slow enough to begin with— but we prefer stability over speed so we kind of leave things piling up until they reach critical mass. Then we have no choice but work to avoid a criticality event.

With a global pandemic going on, then some personal matters, now a madman raging a war just one or two borders away (depending on how you measure distances on a map), somehow messing around with WordPress and sites in general starts to feel… less important. Things are simpler to ignore when they happen in a place far far away that most can’t even pinpoint on the map. And the continuous state of change WordPress.org radiates with every major release isn’t helping.

We’ve almost had a fall out with WordPress back when they banned settings pages for themes and decided to enforce the customizer. We felt that really put a stop in our options development, but we couldn’t just abandon all the work we’ve put into our creations. So we continued supporting the old themes (by splitting part of the old settings page to a separate plugin – a procedure confusingly acceptable for WordPress.org) and adapted —read that as downsized— the options for new themes. And compensated that with more frontend functionality.

It now almost feels like we’re about to have a second fall out, this time thanks to WordPress’ blocky features and their continuous push. Don’t get me wrong, blocks are good usable building… blocks (wink), but the way they are implemented and their one-size-fits-all requirement seems to take everything out of a theme, stripping it down to basically  just a colours (and perhaps typography) framework. To account for all blocks and their infinite configuration choices and combinations the theme needs to become as impersonal as dry wall. Dry walls can turn to masterpiece paintings, but that requires a painter – which not everyone is. Having everything generically editable and customizable doesn’t leave room for much personality. And it’s personality we worked most in giving our themes.

Fear not, with or without a second Chernobyl looming in the distance we’ll stick around to take care of our beloved (old and even older) creations and update them when necessary (while electricity lasts). As for new creations, for now we’ll wait for the dust to settle and see what remains in the aftermath of the blocks assault.

Changelog:

  • Added kahuna_box_readmore filter for landing page featured boxes read more texts
  • Added support for using the associated featured images as header images on the static home and blog pages
  • Added graceful fallback for ‘menu-over-header’ when no header image is present
  • Improved JS compatibility with ShiftNav plugin
  • Improved single posts fixed next/previous navigation by moving it to hookable kahuna_fixed_nav_links() function and limiting links to same taxonomy
  • Improved compatibility with script name collision in deferring check by increasing specificity
  • Improved compatibility with sub-optimal SSI configurations
  • Fixed isinViewport() is undefined error since 1.6.2
  • Fixed portfolio type lists displaying slugs instead of properly formatted names
  • Fixed featured images using the incorrect width in 3 post columns / left sidebar only configuration
  • Fixed a typo in the font weight selectors
  • Updated to Cryout Framework 0.8.6.3:
    • Improved Safari mobile browser detection for iPhones and iPads (for better handling of rendering quirks in social apps)
    • Fixed fatal error on Customize screen due to inconsistent handling of empty categories since WordPress 6.0
    • Fixed ‘Disable’ and ‘All Categories’ options not available in category selector options on sites with no categories defined
    • Added static blog page detection function (for featured images in header)
    • Added Polylang support for featured boxes category filtering (thanks to espasso)
    • Improved PHP 8 compatibility

Plus changelog:

  • Added type filter visibility option to landing page portfolio section
  • Added count, columns, order, sort and type filter visibility meta options for Portfolio page template
  • Added support for using the assigned custom layout on the static home and blog pages
  • Fixed meta options unable to be unset in some instances
  • Fixed header image hide option applying to posts’ container category/blog
  • Fixed portfolio section random sorting not working
  • Fixed Team Member images invisible since 1.6.2
  • Fixed an “Undefined” error in shortcodes initialization with PHP 8 and Site Origin Builder plugin
Kahuna is the big kahuna among WordPress themes. For more info check out the theme's page.