All PizazzWP blocks have been updated, with ExcerptsPlus, SliderPlus and Swiss Army Block all receiving significant upgrades.
Files have been sent to Headway for release, so keep an eye on the WP Admin Plugins page. Or you can download and install the updates manually from the PizazzWP menu page in your WP admin.
The biggest news is HeaderPlus is now part of the Swiss Army Block. Existing licences of HeaderPlus will be transferred to SAB and a link for SAB will be presented when you upgrade HeaderPlus.
Pizazz libs have been updated across all blocks to 1.3.5. This brings an update of the about page to reflect those changes; plus, a direct link to log support requests for Pizazz blocks and the Focal Point image cropping is now available to all the Pizazz blocks.
ExcerptsPlus 3.2.0
ExcerptsPlus has had over two dozen improvements, including:
- Now uses percentage based calculations, enabling much better responsiveness between screen size.
- “Single page behaviour” is now off by default. This may affect some existing layouts on single pages, so double check those, but it is more logical and will reduce the occurrence of empty default ExcerptsPlus blocks.
- Now defaults to use Headway’s Alternative Title if available
- Option to show an image in the entry title
- You can now choose how many excerpts to show before listing the remainder. (Was previously just one).
- Option to Respect Focal Point when cropping images
- Automatic ellipses trim your excerpts as necessary to fill the container and add the ellipses. Works best with fixed height text area.
- ExcerptPlus blocks can now be hidden if they have no content to display.
- When using the “Image Behind” display of images, the content can now be hidden until the reader hovers their mouse over the image, and the content will then slide into view.
- Many fixes including speed optimization, Gravity Forms CSS conflict resolved and missing text background colour fixed
SliderPlus 1.2.0
SliderPlus probably had the most sort after update of any of the blocks: Automatic pausing of videos when switch slides! Yes, it’s finally here in SliderPlus 1.2.0.
Other improvements are:
- Performance optimizations
- Greatly improved responsive scaling
- Option to use Focal Point cropping
- Custom navigation colours
- Content area is now fluid in height, up to the percent you set
- Switched to an icon font for the hover navigation, which lets you choose different styles and set the colours
Swiss Army Block 1.5.0
Swiss Army Block has seen the most changes of all. These include:
- HeaderPlus is now part of the Swiss Army Block set
- New Documents block for display a list of downloadable documents
- Added conditional display to the Sets blocks. Conditions can be a date range, days of the week and whether a reader is logged in or not.
- Greatly improved speed on display of Sets blocks
- News Widows extension enables prevention of lone words in wrapped titles
- Wings extension renamed Outer Space and now lets you place HTML or Headway blocks in the top and bottom space outside your page as well as the left and rights spaces.
- Added margins options to Sets blocks to make layout easier
- Titles block can now use the Headway Alternative Title
- Obfuscated email links in Author block
- Option to exclude some authors in Authors block
- Sets block now lets you sort the blocks in the set
Others
- GalleryPlus 1.6.3 “covers” shortcode can now display from NextGen galleries.
- TabsPlus 1.5.3 has some general code tweaks
Documentation
Keeping documentation abreast of the rapid changes to the blocks is a mighty challenge. My focus now will be to put general development on hold and work on geting the written documentation up to date, plus getting more video tutorials.
Support Update
Technical support for PizazzWP blocks is provided solely via the PizazzWP ZenDesk. Since switching to this service in March, Jaime and I have seen significant improvements to the efficiency of support to you guys. It has been a winner!
Some people have lamented the loss of technical support on the Pizazz section of the Headway Forums. Although this might feel like an easier way to get support, we have found it to be vastly more inefficient, as it lacks key support features like assignment, categorization, prioritization, escalation, reporting and general monitoring and management.
Having visited many forums this is clearly not unique to us. For example, unanswered questions on forums are the bane of forums everywhere.
Forums are great for small projects with few users, but PizazzWP has thousands of users across five separate products. Some large developers can afford to employ many support staff to monitor forums to make forums work, but PizazzWP isn’t in a position to do that.
I worked in support for over twenty years, so it is something I feel strongly about and stresses me immensely when I’m not providing the most efficient support to you. So, I’m always looking for ways to improve on that. Balancing a day job, family life, block development and support of those blocks certainly has put pressure on my philosophies on best support!
Forums are great as forums for community discussion. So certainly, continue to use the forums for user-to-user discussion and general support for each other; that’s what community is all about.
But for technical support, always use the PizazzWP support service. A link to it can now be found on the PizazzWP menu screen.
As I said at the top, there has been a lot of work involved in getting these updates out. Thanks for your patience, and I hope you find something in them to make your sites better.