So I’m just a little excited to be sharing this with you, but there has been some major rework done to the layout renderer, which we are now going to call it the grid renderer. If you’ve ever had a layout you thought was possible prior to 3.1, I encourage you to give it a try when you get your hands on 3.1. I’m constantly amazed at the layouts I’ve tested that work with it. There’s a little finessing you need to do sometimes, but we can all live with a little pain to see what we gain. Alright, I don’t want to spoil it too much, so here’s the screencast. I’ll wait till you’ve seen that!

Not only is the grid renderer getting some much needed love, but the navigation block has also gotten some love so that it will work better in all of our supported browsers, but also for those users that have long menu items or a large top level menu. We still want to do a little more testing on it, but we hope you will enjoy the updates coming out in this version. Again, this is what we are considering a major release!! Keep your eyes open for the release later this week so you can take a look at all of the new features and bug fixes that will be included!!

As always, the update is available via the automatic updater in the WordPress Admin panel. Or, if you wish, you can upgrade by download Headway 3.0.4 from the Members’ Dashboard and uploading it via FTP or the WordPress theme update. Please remember to backup before updating your site. If you’re looking for a great, reliable solution for backups, we highly recommend BackupBuddy.

Ah, yes… the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Headway 3.0 Beta release. With that release, more features of the completely rewritten fast-as-hell code base are available for developer license-holders to play around with and provide feedback on.

In this video (which is longer than the previous ones I did for the beta at nearly 30 minutes) we cover in more depth some of the settings and design features:

• Global design settings, and how to switch between global and page-specific settings (this is a totally genius feature)
• How to create an image header
• Design controls for the background, the “wrapper” (what constitutes the “page” of a web page) and the navigation bar

I’m going to say something here and I want to you know this is for real and not some “I’m on the Headway team rah-rah-rah” thing: I knew Headway 3.0 was going to be good. But I had no idea it was going to be this good. This is the very first beta release and even though there is stuff that doesn’t work (which you expect in a beta), I am far more impressed than I expected to be. Will you agree? Watch the video and ask yourself if any other commercial WordPress theme even comes close to this.

The only place I ever heard anyone called a blockhead was a fictional one: the world of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the Peanuts kids. Did anyone ever really call people blockheads outside of a comic strip?

Anyway…

Here’s the second video of my little Headway 3.0 Beta tour. If you can’t see it (you may be reading this in your email or a reader) then head directly to the blog to watch it!

Playing with Blocks

As you can see, the main content “unit” of Headway is now called a block. It used to be called a leaf, which lead to all kinds of fun explanations and discussions, like this:

Me: You add leafs.

Other Person: A what?

Me: A leaf. You know, like a table leaf.

Other Person: Shouldn’t that be leaves?

Me: (Forcing a smile) No, the kind that go into tables are called “leafs” not “leaves.”

Other Person: Oh… (you can tell they’re not sure about this and I resist the urge to tell them to look it up)

So… yeah. Now they’re called blocks and everybody’s happy: confusion eliminated!

If you’ve ever played with Legos or other snap-together style of blocks, you immediately get the idea.

The Headway 3.0 Layout Grid in the Visual Editor is like having one of those big flat “land” bases upon which you would build your block houses, space stations or castles (I loved the moon ones that had craters in them). Only you’re building with website blocks. It’s ridiculously easy.

You just click and drag to draw a block and then a menu thingy pops up (we get real technical around here) so you can choose what kind of block it’s going to be. Then you enter your settings… and that’s it.

Later you go into the Design tab and make it look all pretty.

Beta Status

While there is enough work done on the beta for me to make a video like this for you, obviously it hasn’t been released yet. Rest assured that Grant, Clay and AJ aren’t just sitting around sipping merlot from the hollowed-out skulls of their former competition. Why not? Because Clay’s not old enough to drink.

Oh, yeah… they’re also BUSTING THEIR BUTTS to get the 3.0 ready for beta release.

More like what’s probably happening is that Clay and AJ are busting their butts and Grant is yelling at them to bust ‘em a little harder.

So it will be ready when it’s ready, and not before. Yes, I know we said “Monday.” That was silly of us, now, wasn’t it? Thanks for your patience and to tide you over, do please watch, share and comment on this video! I’m trying to sate your appetite for beta information and string you along mercilessly at the same time (insert evil laugh here).

Let me know if it’s working.

We pride ourselves on providing a secure product so when we find a security issue, we fix it immediately.

Our friends over at Sucuri recently came across a security bug in Headway 1.6.3 – 1.6.6  Which of course is over 13 revision ago.  However, we know there are a fair number of our community members still running this older version.  As Dre pointed out in his post.

The issues that were found with the release were patched well over a year ago, and notifications were sent via administrative alert.

That being said, if you are still running the older versions of Headway, please update to 2.0.12.  There are upgrade instructions for doing this located here. (The link requires you to login to the forums)

Please delete any version older than Headway 2.0  from the wp-content/themes You can also go to your Themes Panel in your WordPress Dashboard and remove those older versions.

Before you do any updates to either WordPress or Headway Themes, always, always backup.  There simply is no excuse for not having recent backups of your site available if you need them with tools like BackupBuddy available.

We’ve also updated TimThumb (our 3rd party image resizing library) who pushed out an updated yesterday as there was a potential security issue there.

As you can see with these two security features, we’ve taken great pride in making sure we have good clean code that’s error free.  As a WordPress theme/framework developer, we take serious the fact we are on the front lines of defense for just these types of matters.

However, if you as a user don’t keep WordPress up-to-date and Headway up-to-date, you run the risk of having issues.

We’ve also fixed some bugs and added a few new features with this release.

This is just a small list. To see the entire change log check the forums here.

• Saving and Linking improved
• Compatibility with Members v0.2 by Justin Tadlock
• Improved compatibility with multisite and Domain Mapping plugin for multisite
• HTML tags are stripped from the tag Changed Google Analytics message on Headway Configuration panel
• Support for custom post type and taxonomies as system pages (both single and archive)

Finally, we’re also hard at work on the next version of Headway and hope to have a beta out in the next few weeks.

There is a lot going on with Headway this summer and we encourage you to take part. Later today we’ll be releasing a survey that will help mold the future of Headway.

We encourage you to take a few minutes to fill out the survey and to help contribute your thoughts and ideas.

And if you are new to Headway, make sure you take the chance to use our 2 year anniversary discount that will save you 30%. The code is Headway2years.

As always, if you have any questions, please drop me an email.  Grant@headwaythemes.com

Here are the changes in Headway 2.0.9:

Bug Fixes

• SEO title, description, and keyword issues with linking resolved
• Column resizing issues fixed
• Leaf template issues addessed
• Quirks with leaf heights have been solved
• i18n issues have been addressed

Features

• Many, many, many visual editor optimizations. The visual editor is now faster and more solid than ever. Absolutely no plugins should cause conflicts with it.
• The visual editor title will now inform you when it’s loading and publishing
• If you’re not logged in and try to access the visual editor, you will be redirected to the login screen and after a successful login, you will be redirected back to the visual editor.
• A new style named Blue and Red has been added
• WPML compatibility
• Page slug added to body class
• Edit: Swedish translation kindly provided by Tomas Lindhoff

Changes

• Visual editor safe mode removed
• Save All Changes renamed to Publish in visual editor
• Skin panel removed from visual editor. To activate a skin, use the Headway configuration panel in the WordPress dashboard

What is new to Headway 2.0

Here is a list of the major features you will find in the biggest update we have released since Headway first came about over a year ago.

Quick Start Wizard

Starting from a fresh install, the quick start wizard will show immediately after loading the visual editor. Otherwise, you can run the wizard through the Tools menu in the visual editor.

The wizard will guide you step-by-step through choosing your layout, uploading your header image, building your site’s color scheme (it’ll even detect colors from your header image!), and selecting fonts. At the end, you’ll click a button to build your site and it’ll all be done in a snap!

Column System For Leafs

Those who have a more column-based layout will find the new columns system to be incredibly beneficial. Instead of jogging all of your leafs around, you can put them into columns and move and resize the entire columns with ease. Don’t fret, the previous layout system is still present. You can specify whether or not you want columns for the particular page in the visual editor.

Styles Manager

Before Headway 2.0, Headway came with 1 layout and you had to work from there. Headway 2.0 comes with 4 pre-loaded styles in the new Styles Manager, which allows you to save and load styles. You can also import and export styles just like before, but in a much more organized way!

Leaf Templates

Instead of linking pages and being locked into the layout of the page you are linking to, you can now save your leafs (and columns) into Leaf Templates. Leaf Templates can be loaded onto any page. Once a template is loaded, you can modify it just like any regular page.

Automatic Upgrades

Even though we think all of the other features in 2.0 are incredibly cool, we REALLY think this one is cool . No longer do you have to go to the Headway site, download the latest version, upload it, and activate it. Oh, and if you ever did any custom.css or used the custom folder in Headway, you won’t have to worry about transferring that to the new installation either. The automatic upgrader does it all with only a few clicks!

HUGE Speed Improvements and Optimizations

In 2.0, we rethunk (hey, we’re from Kansas!) how many things were coded in Headway. We’ve made major improvements to the visual editor to drastically reduce the amount of conflicts from third-party plugins and also make loading the visual editor MUCH faster. Also, we completely rewrote the content leaf to be more efficient and more stable than before.

WordPress Multi-site Support

Headway 2.0 now fully supports the WordPress multi-site feature. This was something many of our users asked for and we felt Headway 2.0 was a logical time to bring it in.

Feature Removal: Photo Gallery Leaf

This was a difficult consensus to reach amongst the team here, but we decided it would be best to remove the Photo Gallery leaf from the Headway core. We felt that the leaf was too complex to be in core. Also, the photo gallery was the only leaf that used the advanced leafs panel, making that a waste of space in the admin panel. If you’re screaming at us now, don’t worry! If you use the Photo Gallery leaf on your website (or wish to use it anyway), you will be able to download the leaf from the Headway Marketplace for free.

The evolution of Headway 1.7 to 2.0

I thought it might be beneficial for all of you to see how this new Headway 2.0 came about and what features, enhancements and fixes Clay and his team pushed out over the last few months.  This list is long and I for one if very excited about what was accomplished on this new version of Headway, Headway 2.0

Headway 1.7 Beta 2

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed Style Importing
• Visual Editor will now run properly if developer mode is enabled
• Fixes to JavaScript in so featured leaf and rotator leaf will properly work
• Wizard layout creator will now take the wrapper width and use percentages rather than use pixel values and expect a wrapper width of 960 Changes
• .po file added to theme directory for internalization/localization
• Magazine style will now have black/grey links instead of blue

Headway 1.7 Beta 3

Bug Fixes:

• Featured leaf would cutoff at wrong point, this has been addressed
• Certain fonts would not stick (Trebuchet MS, Arial Narrow, Arial Black, etc) and would revert after saving. That has also been fixed.

Changes:

• The .po file for translating has been expanding immensely to allow the visual editor to be translated.
• There’s now a nag that will show up in the WordPress admin if the Headway folder has the wrong permissions (including cache folder)
• The column styling has been moved to the design editor to keep things consistent. You can also choose to have no border for all containers and columns.
• You can add background colors for columns and containers using the design editor.
• When adding a leaf to a site using columns, the leaf is added to the top instead of the bottom.
• The gaps between the columns, containers, and footer have been removed.
• Equal column heights are back!
• The automatic upgrader is now known as the automatic updater everywhere to avoid confusion.

Headway 1.7 Beta 4

Bug Fixes

• •The meta boxes (SEO, alternate title, etc) would not display the proper value on the post and page write panel.
• All navigation filters/hooks should now properly work.

Changes

• Equal column heights are now controlled by JS rather than a CSS hack. The JS is extremely lightweight and can be disabled if you wish. This eliminates many bugs such as the post content not displaying if you click the comment link.
• The content leaf options have been shuffled a bit to be easier to use. You can also filter by custom post types now and hide the post meta.
• Text leaf will now parse WordPress shortcodes.
• You can now enter exact numbers for the column widths rather than having a read-only input to show the width.

Headway 2.0 Beta 1

New Features

• Live SEO preview for posts and pages
• Ability to hide header, footer, navigation for specific pages right in visual editor
• Many new elements can now have their hover styles edited
• Ability to underline certain elements
• Content leafs are now “splittable” on single post templates. Basically, by hiding the content or comments, you can have one content leaf that displays the content and another that displays the comments. Imagine being able to put leafs in between the content leafs .
• Added support in visual editor to modify the layouts for single views of custom post types

Enhancements

• More organized HTML • Ability to hide featured post images on a per post basis
• Ability to hide featured post images on featured posts, excerpts, and small excerpts in the Headway configuration panel
• Ability to show/hide small excerpts on a per leaf basis
• Ability to make links in image rotator open in new window
• Added version number to the Headway module in the admin panel

Changes

• Aligned precise resize with other leaf controls
• The color picker has been modified slightly to improve usability and fix a bug
• Custom meta on featured leaf will only show the left
• You cannot use the preview functionality on the theme to prevent accidental upgrade

Bug Fixes

• Tagline changed to a span from an H1
• noindex should now properly work on pages
• Headway will now play nice with the Scribe SEO plugin again
• Custom copyright producing odd characters is addressed

Headway 2.0 Beta 2

New Features

• WordPress multi-site support

Enhancements

• Completely new upload system. Much faster, doesn’t rely upon Flash and is all around better.
• Optimized the size of Headway by removing many deprecated files, optimizing images, and so on.

Bug Fixes

• Single postproperly closed.
• If anyone has the messed up line height, it will automatically reset to a reasonable line height.
• Skins API: Added stripslashes PHP function to the text inputs and text areas that developers can add.
• SEO settings should no longer be brought in from the page another page is linked to.

Headway 2.0 RC

New Features

• The new Text leaf with WISIWIG feature built in.

I think that is all as far as new features, enhancements and fixes for Headway 2.0

The Headway Website and Blog

If you have looked around the new Headway site, I hope you noticed all of the new stuff there.  From the new design to the new logo and branding.  We are also going to ramp up the blog posting on the Headway site. In fact, we already have a great list of Headway users who are going to be contributing on a regular basis to the blog content. And if you would like to do the same, please let me know.

We have also completely rebuilt and changed the Headway support system.  Since we have been offering email support almost from day one, we wanted to make it easier for both you and us.  As before, we do offer email support if you happen to run into something where help is not readily available on the forums.  And of course, there is still the community based forums and lots and lots of tutorials and videos provided right in the support system.  Just a reminder, the Headway email address is support@headwaythemes.com

Headway Documentation has also been completely redone which was required by Headway 2.0  And this was made possible by all of the hard work from our own Caitlin (a.k.a. MommyGeekology). Caitlin did a great job and spend a lot of time nailing the documentation.

You will also see some brand new videos from Michael Martine too.  Plus Headway community member AJ Morris has been doing some great videos which are included in the support area.

Our plan is to continue to build out tutorials and videos.  In fact, with Screensteps for the Mac and Zendesk, our new support system, we will be able to easily answer some questions and support inquires with tutorials. Which will only add to the knowledge of the Headway support area.

Last but not least for support, make sure you follow the Headway twitter account @headwaythemes as we will continue to provide answers to simple questions. Keeping in mind the limitations of only having 140 characters to work with.

Final Thoughts

Let us know what you think and if you do run into any questions, use your community support.  We look forward to a great future here at Headway Themes and know Headway 2.0 certainly gives us all a bright one too.

You can access the documentation by clicking here.

Headway 1.6 brings many new features to the table including a skins and leafs API, importing and exporting of “styles”, body background images, and much more.

New Features

• All Headway features in the WordPress admin have been moved from the Appearance module to Headway’s own module.
• Administration panels have been redesigned.
• Skins and Leafs API.  If you’re a developer, please refer the documentation on how to use the new APIs.
• You can now add a background image to your site with a simple image uploader.
• Ability to import and export design settings via Styles in the Templates panel in the visual editor.
• Default leaf sets.  You can now set a default leaf set that will be applied to every new page you make.
• Ability to reset leafs on page.
• Faster and easier saving in the visual editor.
• Many speed improvements.  CSS is auto-cached and the amount of queries have been reduced tenfold.
• Ability to load JavaScript libraries in the Headway Configuration panel.
• SEO: Automatic page and post slug cleanup.
• Live CSS Editor. Edit your CSS and see the changes right before your eyes.

Developer Notes

• All leafs have the CSS class of headway-leaf instead of box.
• Added headway_below_leaf action.

Besides the new features, there have been many, many bug fixes.

Download Now

You can download Headway 1.6.1 in the members’ panel.  For skins, leafs, and styles, go to the Headway support forums.  If you do not own Headway, click here to purchase Headway.

Upgrading:

• If you’re already running Headway 1.5.1, just upload and activate.
• If you’re on 1.0.1, you must use the Headway widgets preparation plugin prior to upgrading. For more, please see the documentation.

Besides having bug fixes, Headway has a new visual editor interface. The complete list of changes are below.

Changelog

Bug Fixes:

• PHP 4 COMPATIBILITY
• Invisible visual editor bug fixed. No more creating new admin user.
• Switching to tags system page from the layout chooser shouldn’t lead you to nowhere now.
• Letter spacing of none/0 will save now.
• A few easy hooks were messed up. Those should be fixed now.
• Twitter Leaf/Feeds Optimized
• Duplicate header/navigation all fixed.
• Header upload and gallery upload should work now.

New Features:

• Completely new interface! Already? Yes…
• Visual editor speed.
• Site Title: There have been numerous sites not using a tagline, thus having a title like “| Site Name”. I’ve added an if statement to remove that pipe character if the have no tagline.
• Header link image URL: If the image uploader fails, you now have the ability to manually type in the URL to your header.
• Mass Font Change: With one click of the mouse, you can change every single font on your site .