After several months of hard development work, I finally have a brand new version of Weaver, called Weaver II, ready for beta testing.
What is Weaver II? It is nothing less than an almost total re-write of Weaver. It is now based on the Twenty Eleven code base, but that was only the starting point. Some of the key features of Weaver II:
- Redesigned Admin Interface – You will find the new admin interface familiar, but it has been carefully reorganized so that almost all options are now grouped by the region of the site page they affect.
- Redesigned Sidebars – There are now three widget areas for the sidebars which allows a wide widget area above or below two side by side sidebars. These can also be arranged in left or right vertical areas, or as split left and right areas. But the big news is that any sidebar layout can be used on any page, including no sidebars at all. This includes all the special archive-like pages such as categories, author, etc. And the layouts can be selected globally for general design, as well as on a per page basis for special needs. The new design even allows the sidebar background color to extend all the way to the bottom of the page.
- Full HTML 5 support. Pages and post are organized with new HTML 5 tags which helps SEO.
- The flexible sidebar layout options has allowed for the simplification of the page templates.
- There is new and better support for background images
- There is built in support for mobile devices. Now your theme will match your main theme on mobile devices.
- Simplified Save/Restore
- Fresh, new Comments layout
- New Info Bar with breadcrumbs and paged navigation
- Better integration for the Pro version
All the new features, especially the new sidebars, mean that Weaver II is not 100% compatible with the old Weaver. While almost all styling and custom CSS will transfer to Weaver II, conversion will require manual reorganization of your widgets. But that should just take a few minutes.
Weaver II comes in two editions, the totally free Weaver II Base version, and a premium Weaver II Pro edition. The basic version remains one of the most flexible and easy to use customizable themes available for WordPress. The Pro version includes advanced features for those who need the ultimate ability to customize their theme.
While Weaver II is not quite ready for final release, it is still pretty robust, and ready for some beta testing. If you would like to have a look at the Weaver II Pro beta version, please send an e-mail via the About:Contact form. I would appreciate at least a minimal commitment to provide at least some feedback on the new version.
This is really exciting, and I’m happy to finally be able to share the result of some very hard work.
