Announcing the version 0.5 release of Largo, everyone's favorite responsive WordPress theme for news sites!

Where v0.4 was dedicated to a major overhaul of user-facing features and touching nearly all corners of the project, v0.5 brings a handful of new features for developers as well as some much-needed project cleanup, additional documentation and a few performance enhancements.

For this release, we audited the use of third-party PHP and javascript libraries throughout the project. Wherever possible, we updated third-party libraries to their most recent release or found suitable, well-maintained replacements.

We've also started an initiative — which will carry on through subsequent releases — to evaluate Largo's performance. No one wants a slow site, so we're doing what we can to cut down on wasteful resource usage. In this release, we've started using minified CSS and Javascript and refactored code to make less expensive database queries.

The shortlist of features added in this release:

• LESS source maps in all unminified CSS, to help in debugging styles while developing for Largo.
• Updated slideshows to use slick instead of slidejs since it is no longer maintained.
• Polished the styles for the Largo recent posts widget
• Added a LARGO_DEBUG constant, which is currently used to determine whether or not to include unminified, uncompressed Javascript and CSS. When developing your Largo site, use:

  define('LARGO_DEBUG', true);

  When pushing your site live, use:

  define('LARGO_DEBUG', false);

• Updated all "Investigative News Network" references to "Institute for Nonprofit News" after INN's recent rebranding
• Moved the "member of INN" badge to the footer and improved the styling of the social media icons in the footer
• Use the single column layout for single post pages by default

For more information and a complete list of new features and bugfixes in this release, see the release notes on Github.