Flat Bootstrap, our parent theme that powers all of our XtremelySocial WordPress themes, has been updated to version 1.6. This update ended up including more than originally planned, but I think you’ll appreciate the features. Bootstrap and other components have been updated, the visual editor now looks more like how your pages / posts will look, the widget areas are now more useful, and many other things.

Flat Bootstrap Screenshot

If you are already using Flat Bootstrap or one of my child themes, you should see the update in your WordPress admin. If you are new to theme, you can download the latest version from WordPress.org.

Specifically, the following enhancements and fixes are included:

  • Set lists in the Page Top and Page Bottom widget areas to be horizontal without bullets or numbers. This lets you add custom menus, category lists, and other widgets and they will look good full-width.
  • Now loading our fonts in the WordPress visual editor (Raleway, Lato, and Font-Awesome).
  • Theme Customizer now refreshes the page when making changes to the header so you have a more accurate representation of what it will look like on your site.
  • For full-width custom page templates, plugins that add content will have that content moved to the end of the page. Eg) Jetpack sharing buttons will now appear below the sub-pages listing, site index content, etc.
  • Removed extra padding between content and collapsed sidebar on smaller screens.
  • Added separate <span> tags around the footer copyright and “theme by” text so either can easily be hidden via custom CSS as opposed to editing PHP files.
  • Change body classes to only indicate has-header-image if there is not a wide featured image being displayed instead
  • Changed up the style of gallery captions (text)
  • Fixed an issue on archive pages where a subtitle was appearing in the page header (it was pulling the subtitle from the first post on the archive page)
  • Updated the language translation file (.pot) to add new text phrases
  • Fixed language translation issue in the Site Index page template (also on the 404 page).
  • Updated Bootstrap components to v3.3.2. Now includes config.json so you can customize Bootstrap starting with our default values.
  • Updated Font-Awesome to v4.3.0.
  • Updated jQuery mobile to v1.4.5.
  • Added Danish language support thanks to René Reinar Svendsen <rrs@reinar-svendsen.dk>
  • Added some PHP and adjusted some CSS in preparation for a future version that supports upload of a custom site logo (using the Jetpack plugin).
  • Added experimental no-gutter CSS style for possible future use with galleries and/or portfolios

If you run into any problems or have any suggestions for future enhancements, please let me know. I always have a steady stream of ideas, but would love to hear what is important to all of you.

The full change log for Flat Bootstrap is in the readme.txt file. However, since I haven’t been posting about each update, here is the full listing of changes.

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.5

  • More changes to the header text. For child themes, if a custom header is uploaded, the front page will display the site title and description.
  • Change “smooth scroll” arrow on home page with featured image to scroll to the next section, whether that is a Page Top widget or the page content itself.
  • Site index page template (and 404 page) now supports Jetpack Portfolios and Testimonials. Displays links in the Site Content (pages) section. Also lists portfolio types and tag cloud if there are any.

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.4.4

  • If no title and caption on a featured image, get the title (and optional subtitle) from the page itself.

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.4.3

  • Change title and subtitle on a static home page to come from the featured image itself instead of the site title and tagline. This provides more flexibility to display the text that you want.
  • Changed the Full Width with Subpages page template to put the title of the page before the featured image.

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.4.2

  • Fixed a bug where static home pages were displaying the page title and it looked ugly. The idea is that you’ll have whatever content on your home page that you want.
  • Fixed a bug where category and tag archives were displaying the page title without formatting

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.4.1

  • Updated screenshots to use a GPL image from unsplash.com
  • Updated licensing information to reflect screenshot image is GPL
  • Bumped version number

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.4

  • Significantly expanded the color palette to include more blues, yellows, oranges, reds, and even added purples. These are all color-matched to look great together when used for colored sections in your content.
  • Changed the automatic cropping of the custom header image to crop from the center. This way if your image has the center as focus, that center is what will be displayed on smaller screens. If you need to change it back to crop top left, then add custom CSS of .custom-header-image { background-position: top left; }
  • Added new $xsbf_theme_option for whether the custom header displays above or below the navbar. Rewrote header.php (if header above nav) and content-header.php (if header below nav). This consolidates our code, so child themes do not need to include these files anymore.
  • Simplified the code in custom-header.php related to above as well, so less code overrides are needed in functions.php in the child themes.
  • Enhanced the Page – With Subpages template to display links to next and previous sibling pages. This lets users easily page through all of the subpages without going back to the parent page.
  • Remove Jetpack (ShareDaddy) sharing links from post excerpts which were hideously ugly and not useful.
  • Added basic support for the new Jetpack “Testimonials” post type. The title and description will display properly on the pages.
  • Cleaned up Jetpack infinite scroll feature so Page Bottom and Footer widgets don’t show until user reaches the last post.
  • Fixed logic to only load jQuery mobile touch support on individual pages and posts where a carousel might be placed. Touch support can now also be turned off in child theme’s functions.php by setting $xsbf_theme_options[‘touch_support’] = false.
  • Added French language translation thanks to Benoit Hamel <benoit.2.hamel@gmail.com>

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.3.1

  • Fix for recommended plugin installation which was throwing errors
  • Fix Page template for full-width with recent posts and no header (page-fullpostsnoheader.php) to put content embedded by plugins into a container
  • Style Jetpack contact form so email body text is the same width as the other fields
  • Use bold font for active navigation tab so its easier to distinguish from the other tabs

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.3

  • Added responsive video! This works automatically as long as the Jetpack plugin is active.
  • Added basic support for the new Jetpack “Portfolio” post type. The title and description will display properly on the pages.
  • Changed Google fonts to load more efficiently from functions.php instead of using @import in the stylesheet. This also makes it easier to override the fonts in child themes.
  • Removed background color from the page as this was overriding the user’s chosen background color in the Theme Customizer
  • Update page-fullwithposts.php and page-fullwithsubpages.php to put the page meta and comment section after the recent posts. This looks much nicer.
  • Several fixes for multiple language support (fixed mismatched text domains, added some strings that were previously hard-coded, cleaned up some existing text strings, generated .pot translation file in the /languages directory)
  • Added Spanish language support thanks to Carlos Folch <8tintin@gmail.com>
  •  Added search field and login/logout link to the site-index page template
  • Moved Page Top widget area below the full-width page header
  • Since the footer menu doesn’t allow submenus, display only the top-level menu items
  • Display a default footer when previewing the theme and upon initial installation of the theme
  • Display a default Page Bottom widget when previewing the theme and upon initial installation of the theme
  • Updated readme.txt to include instructions about removing these default widgets
  • Added icon-xlg CSS class to easily make even larger icons for Font Awesome and Glyphicons
  • Moved flat-bootstrap-child from being a submodule to included and managed directly by github in this parent theme

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.2

  • Lined up fields on comment entry form. Set comment text box to not expand and shrink when it gains and loses focus.
  • Added padding to carousel captions
  • Set gray background on cover and section images so can see white text until image loads
  • Enhanced stripping of comments and empty <p> tags from content
  • Fix to page-fullwidthsubpages to display them all instead of just the first 6
  • Added page-postsnoheader page template
  • Moved page-top widget area to below the feature image as this looks nicer
  • Set a default footer nav menu to a smoothscroll to the Top and a link to Home. Can override by specifying your own footer nav menu.
  • Used WordPress v3.9 enhancement to specify crop on images and use alternate thumbnail sizes if our custom size not generated for a particular post/page
  • Changed readme.md to readme.txt for better compatibility with possible future WordPress theme directory features
  • Deprecated $theme_options and replaced it with $xsbf_theme_options. Please update your child themes as soon as possible.
  • Deprecated xsbf_theme_preview function as recommended by the WordPress theme review team
  • Bumped version on css and js that was changed
  • Updated child theme
  • Updated screenshot

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.1

  • Added a child theme for easy customization (see the flat-bootstrap-child directory)
  • Renamed readme.txt to readme.md to reflect the use of markdown in this file. Updated this file to explain the child theme provided.
  • Fixed nasty bug preventing full-width stories (posts) from displaying properly
  • Simplified the header and footer by moving sidebar logic to sidebar-footer.php, sidebar-pagetop.php, and sidebar-pagebottom.php
  • Changed default nav bar to show the first 4 pages on the site so it looks better until the user adds an actual menu
  • Added Regenerate Thumbnails to the recommended plugins to optimize images for the theme
  • Changed text domain to “flat-bootstrap” to match the theme name
  • Removed a reference to the TwentyThirteen theme in the CSS for the customer header feature
  • Updated TGM-Plugin-Activation to the latest version

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.0.1

  • Changes required for approval to the WordPress Theme Directory. Yay!

Flat Bootstrap Version 1.0.0 

  • Initial submission to the WordPress Theme Directory. Enjoy!