We have just released version 1.4 of our WordPress theme framework, Bootplate.  As the fourth post-production release of Bootplate, we included a little more than just some bug fixes.  Here’s a quick overview of what’s included in this latest release.

New Customizer Options

In this latest release, you’ll find a handful of new options in the customizer.  For one, we split Navigation TYPE and Navigation STYLE into two different fields giving Admins even more control over how their main navigation bar and logo look and perform.

You’ll also notice a new “Back to Top” enable/disable option for a CSS back-to-top link displayed after the user has scrolled more than 500px.  Clicking it (drum roll please) scrolls you to the top of the page smoothly.

Performance Improvements

We’ve also included pre-minified and/or CDN-hosted versions of all the JavaScript and CSS included in Bootplate and built-in better fallbacks for poorly coded child themes.  This (and a few more fancy things) resulted in up to a 12% performance increase.  Not too shabby given that v1.2 already included a huge performance boost.

Updated Help Text

After getting feedback from WordPress theme designers using Bootplate in the wild, we realized some of our help text wasn’t, well, all that helpful.  In v1.4, we re-wrote it all and updated all the MO/PO files as well.

Version 1.5?

We’ve got lots of ideas for version 1.5 (including some awesome frontend editing capabilities), but we’re interested to hear your ideas.  Post them in comments below, or submit them as “Issues” on the GitHub repo.

Download the latest version from GitHub. We’re just getting warmed up.