If you’re not familiar with Gutenberg, it’s the brand new editor experience coming to WordPress 5.0. (We’re on 4.9.8 now.) Theme developers are feeling the pressure to get their themes updated so they’re Gutenberg-compatible. Cover2 is free and developed in my free time, but I use it too, so I want to get it ready before the big push.
Aside from Gutenberg support, there’s a new feature I’d like to talk about.
Front page content
As with any WordPress theme, you can pick whether the homepage shows the latest posts or a static page. Taking inspiration from Twenty Seventeen, when you pick a static page, the theme now allows you to optionally select up to four other pages (not posts) to display on the homepage.
Each static page you select is displayed as a section on the homepage. (I call them panels.) Note that the page title of each panel is hidden. The featured image will serve as the panel’s background, similar to how the featured image behaves for pages and posts.
If you happen to select the page designated as the site’s blog, then the latest posts will be displayed in that page’s panel. The number of posts can be controlled in the same section of the Customizer.
Fixes and updates
I’ve removed most of the float usage in favor of using Flexbox. This includes page navigation on search results (in both vanilla and Algolia templates), the navbar, and the full-page headers.
The Algolia search result template had an non-printable character separating the author and timestamp. I changed it to the character entity —.
The aspect ratio was incorrect when the Jetpack site logo was using a non-SVG image.
I’ve adjusted the navbar icons’ line width from 3 to 2. They shouldn’t look blurry anymore.
For some reason, support for the gallery post format was missing. Now it’s not.
The bookmark icon (shown when using Aesop Story Engine’s chapter components) is no longer a three-dot icon () — it is now a bookmark icon (), which makes a lot more sense, visually. (For an example, check out Namine’s story.)
I’ve improved the Aesop Story Engine detection logic for when the Gutenberg plugin is active. (This is useful for the aforementioned chapter component functionality, especially with WP 5.0 on the horizon.)
In version 1.4, I had added the ability to display the latest posts on the static home page. This option has been removed in favor of the homepage panels.
I’ve replaced the icons in Jetpack’s full-screen carousel gallery to match the rest of the theme’s iconography. It supports both the dark and light themes available within Jetpack’s options.
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