After getting Arras initially stabilized for use with WP 3.9, work on bringing the Arras theme fully up to date continues.
We hope to release Arras version 1.6 in July of 2014
Arras 1.6 will bring the theme into compliance with WP 3.9.1 theme standards, fixing more than 25 bugs and other theme compliance issues. While you won’t see most of these changes on the front end, they will ensure that Arras will provide a stable and error-free experience and play well with an even wider range of plug-ins.
With version 1.6, Arras will be updated to the HTML5 doctype, making all the latest semantic markup available to Arras users. (Depending on your geekness quotient, you may or may not notice this.)
Additionally, Arras 1.6 will include a few changes you will notice:
- Combine all Arras options onto a single options page in the WordPress admin.
- Add new customization options in the header, including:
- Custom header background colors,
- Theme compatibility with WordPress’s built-in header customization will replace the old Arras Logo feature for more flexibility,
- A new widget area in the header will replace the search bar (you can always put a search bar in the widget)
- Add “Previous” and “Next” links to single posts display.
Arras 1.6 also lays the groundwork for moving toward encouraging the use of child themes for user customization. Arras has always been useable with child themes. Future versions will make more and more of Arras’s functionality available to customization by child themes.
Finally with that in mind, with version 1.6 Arras will be deprecating (phasing out) the current use of user.css for adding custom stylesheets. There are now several fine plug-ins that provide custom styles to override theme defaults, including John Regan’s Simple Custom Styles, and Automattic’s popular Jetpack (among others).
Arras 1.6 will still make user.css available. However, future versions will not. I recommend beginning now to move any custom styles you may have in your user.css either to a CSS plugin or to the style.css file in a child theme. (A starter Arras child theme style.css will continue to be provided with all Arras downloads.)
As always, bug reports, questions and suggestions for future development are welcome.
(Photo by Olibac, by permission Creative Commons.)
Good!
Does hello theme will be compatible mobile
Unfortunately this version will not be fully mobile-ready. We’ve only added the features listed above and brought the theme up to date (as opposed to merely operational) with WordPress 3.9. We’re looking at extending Arras to mobile-readiness in future versions.
I have been using this theme for a long time and i will be very happy with new releases. For me should be very very very important for new releases:
1- pagination included
2- most popular and most viewed posts included
3- user should be abble to resize Widget Area ( widht) and article area ( width )
4- Optional static home page with most recent, most popular and most viewed posts
5- Social icons included ( even in the head area )
5- mobil ready
all of this with no need of using external plugins. Google hates external plugins !!!
Pagination is already included. To paginate your posts, simply use WordPress’s Quicktag.
Social Icons are already included. If you enter your info in the Arras settings for twitter, facebook, etc, the icons will appear to the right of the main menu. If you need them in the header, version 1.6 has replaced the search box with a widget area so you can customize.
Mobile-ready is definitely on the top of the list for future releases. We’ll see about resizing widths of the columns.
Please, can anyone help?
I am using Arras and am struggling to achieve this:
Homepage with NO sidebars
Pages and Posts with ONE sidebar
How to achieve this ?
You’ll have to modify the
home.phptheme file.At the very beginning add the following line:
<?php define('ARRAS_FORCE_LAYOUT', '1c-fixed'); ?>Then on the next to the last line, replace:
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>with
</div><!-- #container -->Now, if you go to Arras Options > Design > Overall Layout, you can pick any column setting you like for posts and pages, but the home page will remain one column.
Hi Caspar, thank you for picking up Arras and continuing it’s development! It is one of my favorite themes and I am looking forward to many of the planned changes coming soon (especially the responsive design).
I updated from 1.5.2 without much issue (I need to re-do the padding tweak I made to remove the gap between the header and main content area). I did notice that when I uploaded my header image, it would crop it and force me to have it be 200px tall (mine is only 160 IIRC) even if I selected skip cropping when selecting the image. I was able to use the custom logo functionality in Arras Options to get the header image back for now though… I would like the theme to not require a 200px tall image though, IMO that is too tall.
Anyway, I did have one question. In my old Arras theme, I had placed the search box to the left of the social icons in the header, but I don’t remember how I did it ;). Is there an easy way to do this in Arras 1.6.2?
Thanks, I really appreciate what you are doing in supporting this theme!
Hi Tim. Yes, the header image and the logo image are two different things. The header image is more for the background that comes with WP’s native background support option in the customizer. The Logo image you can upload from the Arras Options page is the same Arras Logo you’ve always had.
The search box in the header was there by default in Arras 1.5.2. Some folks didn’t want it there, and others wanted to be able to put other stuff there, so in Arras 1.6.2, the search box has been updated to a new widget area. So just drag a search widget into the “Header Widgets” area. (Appearance > Widgets)