Release
Notes

This update was mostly geared towards the WordPress backend and some considerable improvements we've made towards your experience with the Customizer specifically. The Customizer in and of itself has been completely overhauled in an effort to start start introducing true “live preview” capabilities as you make changes to your theme with certain settings.

By default, the Customizer works to show you a preview of your settings by going through a few different steps (broken down a bit for the sake of brevity):

1. Rendering an initial preview of your site when you load the Customizer in an <iframe>.
2. Upon making a change to any setting in the Customizer, these new settings are sent to the server.
3. These new settings are used to generate an updated preview in a second <iframe>.
4. Once the new preview has been fully rendered, the initial <iframe> is removed, leaving only the newest version.

While this process works seamlessly behind the scenes, updates aren't always seen in “real time” based on a myriad of reasons (i.e. bandwidth, server configuration, et cetera). Because of this, it's normal to sometimes experience a second or two of a delay as you make changes to the various settings in the Customizer. This is leaps and bounds better than having a separate admin panel completely contained within the backend and no preview, but we felt we could make it better. The overhaul of the Customizer was the necessary foundation for us to begin implementing true “live preview” options that utilize JavaScript to reflect changes in the browser in lieu of the system outlined above. So instead of waiting a second or two to see your changes reflected back to you, these settings will be reflected back to you instantaneously, like the example below:

We'll be rolling out more additions to these “live preview” settings in the coming weeks as we release new features with the theme. While it isn't possible to have every feature function as a true “live preview” setting (i.e. Stack selection), we are going to work our hardest to switch over as much as we can to the new system as quickly as possible. At the time of this release, the following options are what has switched over to the new system:

• Any setting under the Integrity, Renew, or Icon sections that is now utilizing a slider (as seen in the video above) instead of a standard input. Note that you can still place any value you want in the input to the left of the slider; however, the min/max values of the slider should definitely be utilized as good guidelines to follow.
• Any setting under the Integrity, Renew, or Icon sections is used to output text (i.e. blog title, shop title, et cetera).
• The initial button colors under the Button section in the Customizer. Hover colors were not added in this update as including inline :hover styles via JavaScript is not possible and the other methods we experimented with didn't yield the best results. We'll continue to look into this going forward, but it is likely that no :hover styles will be able to be included with these methods going forward for the reasons previously mentioned. Fortunately, this shouldn't be a huge concern as you wouldn't be able to see the :hover styles instantly anyway due to the fact that it they require a cursor to activate them.

Beyond the Customizer updates with this release, we've also included the latest version of Revolution Slider (v4.3.3) and Visual Composer (v4.0.4). It should be noted that we have implemented all of the necessary changes to accommodate the newest offerings from the Visual Composer plugin, but much to our chagrin have had to disable the frontend editing ability at this time due to a few developmental nuances of the plugin itself. We spent a considerable amount of time investigating how other other theme providers are dealing with these same realities and they all seem to fall into one of three camps: they're still not using v4.0+, they are using v4.0+ but have disabled the frontend editor, or they are using v4.0+ but have bugs with how the frontend editor operates with theme integration. Because we wanted to get the ball rolling on this update, we've gone ahead and worked on everything we can at this point and are personally working with the Visual Composer team to address the various bugs we've found while working with the frontend editor. As soon as these issues can be addressed by their team, we will be quick to add back in the frontend editing capabilities as soon as possible.

Finally, we've included some general bug fixes and maintenance to the theme. One of the more notable ones is that we've updated how the Disable Page Title meta option works while using Renew. Before, disabling the page title simply removed the title from the header area of Renew, but many of our users noted that they felt the entire header area should be removed as this is what they expected. After receiving some additional feedback on this, we decided to update this feature to reflect these expected behaviors. Now, selecting Disable Page Title when using Renew will completely remove this header region, affording a greater deal of flexibility when working with pages.