Hello, mega menu lovers. We are thrilled to bring you some exciting news. The beloved mega menu, previously limited to selective themes like Ultra and Shoppe, has now been seamlessly integrated with our Builder. The new mega menu feature has been designed for effortless usability and functionality. It uses the core WordPress menu admin to configure the mega menu, eliminating the need to start from scratch. Furthermore, this integration ensures backward compatibility—should you choose to disable the mega menu in the future, your existing menus remain intact.
Our mega menu isn't just versatile; it's also impeccably responsive on both desktop and mobile devices. This means that regardless of how your audience views your website, the mega menu will adapt seamlessly to provide a consistent, user-friendly experience.
For those managing extensive websites with an abundance of pages and links, the mega menu proves to be a handy tool. It allows you to showcase multi-column dropdowns that can feature links, textual content, or even widgets. Imagine presenting featured posts, WooCommerce products, and more, all neatly organized within the mega menu's expansive layout. Now that the mega menu has been incorporated into the Builder, you can use Builder Pro to start creating header templates with mega menus.
Today we are proud to announce the long anticipated v7 release! Since our last major update (v5), we've been planning to further improve the pagespeed and performance of our themes and the Builder. The v5 update focused on the frontend pagespeed, whereas v7 is for the backend performance. The main goal is to make our themes faster and with better stability. We've re-coded many components in the backend to optimize the overall code — less database queries and lighter code (PHP/Javascript/CSS). We are happy to see many of our user sites getting A+ score on Google Pagespeed Insights (see some of our featured user sites and showcase). This update will make our themes much faster and better!
A significant frontend change in v7 is the Builder row grid system. We've replaced the old CSS flexbox to CSS grid to handle the Builder grid system. Using the CSS grid gives more layout possibilities such as adding unlimited columns, column re-ordering, and creating tiled-like grids.
This is a big update, so we jumped from version 5 to 7. Due to the data structure and grid system changes, we highly recommend not to downgrade your theme once it is upgraded to v7 (read the important notes at the end of this post for more details). Please be advised that all Builder addons and Builder Pro must be updated as well in order to use with v7. Testing the theme update on a development/staging site is recommended.
AFTER UPDATE: If you have any cache plugin or server-side cache and CDN tools (eg. Cloudflare), please remember to clear their cache. If you have Cloudflare Rocket Loader, server cache and mod_pagespeed enabled and experiencing issues, try to disable them.
We might seem quiet lately, but we are actually working very hard on a major framework update. It is so BIG that we had to skip a version. We've jumped from version 5 to 7. The reason we skipped a version is because we don't recommend downgrading your Themify themes after upgrading to v7. For this reason, we are releasing a beta version so you can try it before updating your themes.
The last v5 update focused on the frontend performance and we are happy to see many of our users' sites getting A+ score on Google Pagespeed Insights. In this v7 update, we re-coded a lot of components in the backend to optimize the framework and Builder's performance. Another significant change in v7 is the Builder row grid. We've changed the Builder row to use CSS grid in replacement of flexbox in the old version. Using the CSS grid gives more layout possibilities such as adding unlimited columns, column reordering, and creating tiled grids.
The Beta theme is based on Ultra using the latest v7 framework. Please help us test it on your staging/development sites (do not use it on any live site). As a friendly reminder, the Beta theme doesn't work with any of the current Builder addons and Builder Pro yet (please disable them prior to your test). Have fun with the beta version and let us know what you find.
We are thrilled to announce more new features in the recent framework updates. In this round of updates, we've made the Builder's Post module more powerful and dynamic with the new hook content and query filter function. The tooltip feature has been requested by many users before and we are happy to fulfill that demand. Lastly, we have 2 new time saver features: a quick lightbox to add new Builder pages and a child theme generator. If you haven't updated your Themify theme yet, update it to the latest version to experience all these new features.
For any users creating a website, accessibility should always be prioritized as part of your process from the very beginning. Themify has put significant efforts to ensure that all of the themes are WCAG compliant, paying special attention to accessibility in theme design. By being compliant with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Standards), users using Themify themes can be assured that they can build and maintain a website that is compliant with the accessibility standards.
What Is WCAG and Why It Is Important
The WCAG is part of a series of accessibility guidelines which are published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consurtium (W3C) which is the leading standards making body for the Web. An overview of these guidelines can be accessed at W3C, explaining how to make web content more accessible to everyone, especially those with disabilities.
Although we know that the WCAG is the gold standard or benchmark in accessibility, it is also very important to understand that conforming with the WCAG may be required by the law and that site's owner may get fined if it fails to be compliant. The Standard on Web Accessibility in Canada requires the adoption of WCAG 2.0 across its websites and Web applications. The WCAG 2.0 states: "Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combination of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general."
Since the release of Themify v5, we have received an overwhelming amount of positive feedbacks about the pagespeed and performance improvements. We've helped many users achieve a 90+ pagespeed score on their sites, which they weren't able to with other themes. In this post, we will present a pagespeed comparison of Themify Ultra versus Divi, Elementor, Avada, Beaver, Astra, OceanWP, all of which are extremely popular themes and page builders in the WordPress market. We are presenting an unbiased comparison using the builtin features from each theme, without any third party cache or minify plugins. The pagespeed test was audited using Google Pagespeed Insights and we've recorded the whole process, which you can watch below. When it comes to pagespeed, we are thrilled to show how Themify outperforms other themes and builders.
