Time to update! WordPress 4.5 is here (and MP Stacks 1.0.4.9)

WordPress has just released version 4.5 – and with it some nice changes but also some things that break old version of many many plugins. In order to make sure that all of your plugins keep working, make sure to update them as well.

We have just released MP Stacks 1.0.4.9 to go along with the WordPress 4.5 release and it fixes all of the bugs that were introduced by the changes in WordPress 4.5. For those interested, mostly the bugs were related to an update they did to ‘jQuery’.

Regardless, you can update everything all together and you shouldn’t run into any issues at all 🙂

Happy updating!

All plugins/themes compatible with PHP7

We just released version 1.0.3.0 of our MP Core plugin which powers all of our other plugins and themes. It contains some simple updates which bring it to full compatibility with PHP7. Most web hosts aren’t running PHP7 yet – but it is dramatically faster than older versions of PHP and many webhosts are likely to begin updating to it. This is a great thing for WordPress websites as PHP7 will DOUBLE the speed of WordPress and WordPress websites.

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So when the time comes for your web host to upgrade to PHP7, you can rest assured that all of your plugins/themes from us here at Mint Plugins are also fully ready for PHP7 and a lightning fast WordPress!

We hope to make the transition to PHP7 for MintPlugins.com and look forward to the speed increase it will give to our customers!

Join our Website Showcase!

Have you built your website with MP Stacks? If so, we want to show it off! This is a great chance to have your website get listed on ours – and help increase traffic for you! Send us your website with a quick testimonial about why you enjoyed using MP Stacks to build your website – and we’ll list it on our new website-showcase page! Email a link to us at support@mintplugins.com.

We love our customers and appreciate you using our plugins to build and design your WordPress pages and websites. This is our chance to say “Thanks” and also show off your work to thousands of visitors every day!

Question: What is the hardest part about picking a new WordPress Theme?

I was speaking with someone today about WordPress themes and how they struggle to know what to pick when looking for a new theme. They said that every time they’ve purchased a WordPress Theme it is hard to know exactly how to set it up as they are all a little bit different.

WordPress Themes are everywhere and it can be very difficult to know whether the theme is good or not prior to purchasing – whether it’s something that will be easy to customize, easy to update, manage, and use. Especially if you’ve ever purchased from Theme Forest, you’ll know that reviews aren’t always accurate and you can’t always trust what people are saying there because of potentially falsified reviews. I’ve also spoken to people who have purchased a theme from Theme Forest, had a bad experience, and never had time to give it a bad rating – thus not preventing others from falling into the same problem.

So my question is, what do you find to be the hardest part about looking for a new WordPress Theme for your website? Is it just finding the right design? Are you fearful about how it will work? Are you just overwhelmed by the sheer number of themes available? Have you had a bad experience with a theme in the past? Let me know in the comments below and let’s have a discussion that will hopefully lead us all to a better way of shopping for WordPress themes in the future!

P.S. Before I go, I just want to describe one thing that we do here at Mint Plugins to try and alleviate some of those worries. Before you purchase, you are able to watch an in-depth installation video so you can see all of the things required for setup. You’ll also get an idea of how easy it is to customize our themes. Also, our Themes are mostly powered by free plugins we’ve created. You can download those plugins for free from our website and try them out for yourself before you purchase one of our designs built on those plugins. This way you can get a feel for how it works and decide if it’s right for you or not.

Our newest Church Theme for WordPress

Our newest Church Theme for WordPress has been released. It is called the “Restore Church Theme (Bundle)” and we are very excited to see how churches use it to power their websites. It has already been described by a few customers as the “best website experience” they’ve ever had. This is great to see as many months were put into development of the church-centered features packed into this Theme to make sure we were delivering the best product possible. These are the same functions in our other church theme called the “Growing Church Theme (Bundle)”. The main difference here is aesthetics with a completely new “hipsterish” look and feel with rustic, reclaimed wood as the backgrounds.

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Full Feature List Test Drive It Buy it now - $79

 

All of the functions are plugin-powered and come as part of the theme bundle with auto set-up in minutes. You’ll love using the sermon manager to posts your sermons and organize them by sermon series, speakers, and topic. This allows your listeners to easily find sermons in seconds without even needing to refresh the page.

It’s all totally built to be optimized for Mobile devices so your website users can use all of the website just as easily on their cell phones as they do on their laptop/computer at home.

All of this comes couples with our support to guarantee you get the site set up the way you need to. We’ll be there every step of the way! Updates are also included for a full year to make sure you are always secure.

If you have any questions about this theme, feel free to email us and we’ll be more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Our email is support@mintplugins.com and we usually respond in a couple minutes!

Check it out here and see how you can transform your church’s website to something amazing today!

Mint Plugins Affiliate Program

Are you interested in helping to sell our Plugins and Themes on your website/blog? We just publicly launched our affiliate program which will allow you to do just that! You can earn 25% of each sale you refer through your own website.

Right now, this program is only open to people who are using their websites to promote Mint Plugins. In order to be credited for any sales you generate through blogging, make sure that all links to Mint Plugins contain your affiliate URL. There are a few other terms and conditions you must agree to – for example, we aren’t into spam and don’t want anyone spamming on our behalf either – stuff like that.

Basically, we just want REAL people promoting our products to sell to REAL people. If that sounds like it’s up your alley, head over to our Affiliate Program.

Free Church Logo Template for Photoshop

If you’ve been looking at our WordPress Church Theme bundles, you may have noticed the logo placeholder at the top left. This week, we are giving away the Photoshop file that is used to generate that logo.

Here are some screenshots and links to our Church Theme that use this logo for their “demo” version:

restore-church-thumbgrowing-church-thumb

If your church needs a logo to go with your website, you can modify this file (using Adobe Photoshop if you have access to it) and have a great, simple church logo ready to go in minutes!

Download the logo here:

free-church-logo

Looking for a Church Theme for WordPress to bring new life to your Church’s website? Check out our Church Themes for WordPress – our customers love them!

 

Merry Christmas from Mint Plugins!

We hope everyone is having a great holiday Christmas season! Here at Mint Plugins, we are going to be available to do support all through the holidays to help make sure that your questions continue to be answered quickly and your websites are functioning perfectly.

On Christmas Day (December 25th, 2015) you may notice a small delay if you email us for support – but we will get back to you within the same day for sure – as always! Let us know if you have any questions at all and we’ll be here to help!

Why the new WP API feels like the past repeating – and like the future.

I don’t often write about my personal feelings with WordPress and usually focus on technical developments, updates, and improvements. While this blog post falls into that technical category, it also has an interesting, almost nostalgic feel to it.

I started using WordPress in 2004. Back then, I was a Flash Developer. Remember Flash? It used to be all the rage. I was building websites for people in Flash left right and center. People loved them. They were fun, edgy, “outside the box”, and all that good stuff.

With Flash your website could look like almost anything – even if it was very obscure or seemingly random. Want your website to be a picture of a room where people can explore by clicking on random things in the room? Flash could do that – and it did that type of thing really well. It ran similarly to how Apps work today – with a “single page” it would change based on what you click without refreshing and it would change its state with ease and beauty. To the end user, it felt like the mobile apps of today.

However, it wasn’t great for website owners who wanted to update their information. When I built someone a website in Flash, I would compile the entire website into a single SWF file. In order to make a change I would need to recompile the whole website. Websites need updates – and I ended up spending a lot of time doing updates for my clients – updates they could have – and would have been happy to do themselves.

Thus, I looked for a way to allow users to save custom information which could be “pulled in” to the Flash app without me needing to re-compile. This is when I found WordPress. It was my de-coupled user interface where my users could save their information without needing to touch the Flash file at all! It saved me time, them time, and everything was great.

The way I pulled the information into WordPress was using RSS feeds. WordPress would spit out all of the text content using RSS, I would pull that RSS feed into the Flash app, parse it, and place the text where it needed to go on the website. With this system, my users could blog directly onto their Flash websites.

Then one day, smart phones came along. It became clear that websites needed to be responsive and change shape to fit whatever size screen the user was using. It also became clear that Apple was not going to allow Flash to work on any iDevices. With that, Flash was dead almost overnight.

By this point, I had begun to get very familiar with WordPress and started playing around with creating Themes for it. Themes were definitely more “standardized” than the Flash apps/websites I had been building. Navigation was usually where you’d expect to find it (at the top) and, while this was definitely less exciting and less “Wild West” feeling than my Flash design days, it was also good for the end user – as they could use websites much quicker with (at least slightly) more standardized layouts.

Now, almost 10 years later, WordPress has announced that the WordPress API is here and is essentially the new RSS – with more features of course. Developers are encouraged to build Apps by pulling WordPress-saved data into them – the same way I had been doing all those years ago. Now, users can send data to WordPress with the app as well – which makes it so that WordPress itself doesn’t even need to be seen. It can run entirely unseen by both the user and the website owner. If this had been around 10 years ago, I’d have been in Flash heaven.

These days, Javascript has completely taken over Flash’s place when it comes to most functionality and frameworks like React, Node.js, and Angular are taking over – among many many others.

All this feels very full circle for me as a developer and I got hit with a wave of nostalgia when it was announced at WordCamp US 2015 that “Single Page Applications” written using javascript and data passed through the WP API would be the way of the future. It’s funny because it reminds me of nothing but the past – but with some new flavours. It’s interesting to see this type of cycle on something as “new” as the internet and I’m excited to see where it takes us next!

I plan on diving into this new App Style of development with Javascript to power up our plugins and themes even more in the coming months. Stay tuned! 🙂

WordPress 4.4 Update – Make sure to update your plugins too!

WordPress version 4.4 has just been released. It has a bunch of new bug fixes and features. When you go to do the new update, you may also notice some updates from us here at Mint Plugins as well under “Dashboard” > “Updates” in your WordPress dashboard. Make sure to do all of those updates as well as they make sure that everything keeps running like a well oiled machine.

We have done testing to make sure that these latest versions fix any bugs that may have arisen from WordPress 4.4. If you find a bug or something isn’t working quite right, feel free to let us know!

You can always reach us by emailing support@mintplugins.com – and we’re always quick to respond (just read the testimonials at the bottom of this page for proof ;).

Our newest free plugin allows navigation anywhere you need it.

We just released a new, totally free add-on for MP Stacks which allows you to put WordPress navigation menus anywhere you need them. This expands the ability of MP Stacks to be simply for page (or post) design to being used for Website Headers as well. Now, your theme doesn’t need to have a header at all – and you can design your navigation menus as you need them using MP Stacks.

Your menus can be multi-level with as many sub-menus as you need. They will also work on normal desktops and on mobile devices (as mouse-over events are tricky on mobile devices).

To go hand-in-hand with this, our free WordPress Theme called “Knapstack” (which is built for all purposes and also highly compatible with MP Stacks) can now be set up without a default header – and instead gives you the option to use a custom MP Stack as your header on every page. The stack you choose to use for your header will automatically be placed at the top of every page. As with all Stacks, this header stack can have as many Bricks as you need. This opens up quite a few new possibilities.

For example, say your website is running a sale and you want to make sure everyone visiting your site sees that sale, you could simply add a Brick to your header stack with information about the sale, it it will appear on every page across your whole website – right at the top. When your sale is over, delete the brick and it goes away. This is just one potential use for this.

This free add-on is something that many of our customers have requested so that they can build complete pages with MP Stacks – from top to bottom.

It’s totally free to use and you can download it here: https://mintplugins.com/plugins/mp-stacks-navigation/

 

Why purchasing a WordPress Child Theme might be a mistake.

What is a Child Theme in WordPress?

WordPress has something called “Child Themes” which are essentially mini themes that sit on top of a “parent” theme. The Child Themes give you a way to change the look and feel of the parent WordPress theme.

Why use a Child Theme at all?

At this point, you might be asking: “Why would I want to use a Child Theme when I can just change the code of the “parent” (or “normal”) WordPress Theme”. You might know how to hack a bit of CSS and swap in your own code here and there – enough to make it work.

Well, here’s the important part of Child Themes: They allow you to modify the look/feel of the parent theme without changing any of the parent theme’s code.

Why does it matter if I change Parent Theme’s Code?

If there’s 1 thing I’ve learned in making WordPress Themes for the last decade, it’s that code projects are NEVER done. Many things are changing on the internet every day. Whether it’s hackers finding new ways of breaking security or even just browsers updating the way they do things, the internet – and the way it displays/does things – is always changing and evolving.

This means that your WordPress Theme is likely going to need updates. When a WordPress Theme gets updated, it deletes ALL of the previous theme code and overwrites it with the updated theme code.

If you made changes to the Theme’s code, it is going to be lost when you update! This is why it is so important NOT to change the Parent (or, again, “Normal”) Theme’s code. Here is where Child Themes come in:

Child Themes let you modify your Theme without changing any of the Parent Theme’s Code.

If you want to modify the header of your theme, just copy the header.php file in your Parent Theme’s folder and paste it into your Child Theme’s folder. This will let WordPress know to ignore the header.php file in the Parent Theme folder and to use your new one in the Child Theme folder. Now, you can modify any of the code you want in the header.php file and it wont be lost if/when you update the Parent Theme! Pretty genius right? The same thing will work for ANY file you place into your child theme. So to re-cap:

If you put a file called “header.php” in your Child Theme, WordPress will use THAT file instead of the one in the Parent Theme. Make sense? I hope so! (Let me know in the comments if this is still confusing and I’ll try to clarify it further).

Child Themes are great.

I love Child Themes and the way they allow me to tweak little things here and there in my websites. As my websites grow and change, I love the power that adding a couple of code lines to my child theme gives me over the look/feel/functionality of my websites. Even with MP Stacks, I can hide specific Bricks on specific pages by adding a simple “.BODY_CLASS_HERE #mp-brick-BRICK_ID_HERE{ display:none; }” to my child theme’s css file.

This all leads me to a strange trend in WordPress that I am confused by: Buying/Selling child themes.

If you buy a Child Theme and it needs an update, it defeats the purpose of Child Themes.

If someone sells you a Child Theme, it might as well be called a Parent Theme. Child Themes are intended to be custom to you – by you. This is their purpose: to give you a way of making your theme customized.

However, if you are buying a child theme, that means other people are buying that same child theme – and that means that it will eventually need to be updated by someone who isn’t you. When they release that update, it will overwrite your customized code – and it’s no different than if you installed the Theme without a Child Theme at all.

I find this way of doing things to be very strange. It defeats to original and stated purpose of Child Themes. It goes against WordPress standards and knowingly misleads users into thinking Child Themes are something other than what they were supposed to be – a way to customize your website. This type of product-creation-behaviour is frustrating because it leads to user confusion and fragmentation within WordPress – where official WordPress things lose their meaning.

There is no such thing as a Grandchild Theme – so be careful.

At this point in time, there isn’t a way to make a Child Theme for a Child Theme (or a Grandchild Theme if you will). There won’t be a simple way for you to customize a Child Theme or replace elements you wish to change. So be careful. I recommend only buying themes that are “Parent” themes – which will allow you to create a Child Theme and customize it as you need.

Here’s a Free Theme and Child Theme for WordPress to get you started in the right direction:

If you’re looking for a great “Blank Canvas” type WordPress Theme that will allow for a lot of easy customization, check out our free theme called “Knapstack Theme“. It utilizes the MP Stacks Page building plugin. We also have a free Child Theme that goes with it and can help you get your Child Theme off the ground the right way! Download the knapstack-child-theme.

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We stand behind our products and if you find you aren't able to use anything you purchase from Mint Plugins as advertised, and after contacting our support desk we can't get it fixed-up for you within 30 days of your purchase, we will gladly give your money back.