Updates for improved navigation menus

With the development of our latest theme Harrison we have completely redesigned our navigation script to improve usability and accessibility of the WordPress menus. We are now upgrading many of our older themes and Pro-Add-ons to bring these resulting learning effects and more robust technology to them. All navigation menus have been completely re-created from scratch, i.e. the HTML, JavaScript and CSS have changed.

The corresponding updates will be available soon in your WordPress backend.

The new Theme Navigation

Here is a brief overview of the individual improvements:

  • Mobile First approach with a stronger focus on optimal mobile navigation.
  • Improved handling of navigation via keyboard. Our old script was a bit error-prone with deep nested submenus.
  • Change from floats to flexbox for a more robust design. Especially when changing fonts, the drop-down toggles were often shifted.
  • Better handling of the desktop menus on large screens that are operated with touch screen (e.g. tablets with high resolution).
  • Removal of the sliding effects for drop-down menus. This animation often felt a bit sluggish and cumbersome, especially on mobile devices.
  • Added menu labels and aria attributes for screen readers.
  • Use of SVG icons instead of icon fonts.
  • Introduced a close icon in the mobile menus for improved usability.

Many of these changes are not obvious at first glance, but they significantly improve the accessibility and usability of our themes.

Please note: Changes to the previous menus

The updates are relatively large and complex, because the navigation is the heart of the themes. Unfortunately, this also results in some critical changes, which have to be considered when updating the themes and plugins:

  • Changed template files: When using child themes, overwritten templates must be checked and possibly adjusted. Especially pay attention to the header.php, because in most cases it contains the main navigation.
  • Changed CSS properties: If the styling of the existing navigation menus was changed manually with CSS, these CSS snippets must be adapted. Our support is of course happy to help you with this.
  • No more fallback menu: Until now, our themes displayed all static pages if no WordPress menu was assigned. Hiding the menu was a frequently expressed wish of many users, which is why we have removed the function for the default menu.

In addition, please make sure that you install both the updates for the Theme and Pro Version Add-on, not just one product. Theme and plugin are very closely intertwined here, so both updates should be run.

Please make sure to clear your WordPress caching plugins and reset any CSS & JS minification plugins after installing the update! Then everything should run smoothly.

Updated Themes

The following themes support the newly developed navigation menus:

  • Chronus
  • Donovan
  • Gridbox
  • Harrison
  • Maxwell
  • Mercia
  • Napoli
  • Poseidon
  • Tortuga
  • Treville
  • Wellington

We limit new features to our newest and most popular themes. But also our older themes will of course still get bugfixes and will be kept compatible with the current WordPress core version.