A lot of change is happening on the web. One of the advantages of working with so many great nonprofit news organizations is we get to see how they are using the web for journalism and storytelling, and how people are using their websites. This drives us to continually improve the user experience, for those consuming news and for those producing it.

Today we’re happy to announce the next evolutionary step in INN’s WordPress framework for news websites, Largo version 0.5.4.  This release brings a number of major improvements to the mobile experience, social media sharing tools, and general clarity and aesthetics.

Enhancements include:

Complete navigation overhaul - Menus have a cleaner look and are much more usable on mobile devices. On small screens, menus should help when needed but otherwise get out of the way. With Largo 0.5.4, the sticky navigation bar is visible by default on all pages for mobile screen sizes. It disappears when a user scrolls down and reappears on an up scroll.  There’s also an option to enable the sticky navigation for all screen sizes on article pages, and to hide the main banner on article pages.

New social sharing buttons on single-column posts improve functionality and look - As the user scrolls down into a story page, the social sharing buttons fade in and float along with the viewport, so they’re always in the user’s easy reach.

Here's a short video showing the new sticky navigation and floating social media sharing buttons.

Archive pages for terms (including categories, tags, series and other custom taxonomies) can now have their own featured image - This image will display as a banner image on the top of the term’s archive page and we hope to extend this functionality in the future to support images of different sizes and aspect ratios. Additionally, with the addition of this functionality the Largo Taxonomy List Widget now includes an option to display thumbnail images for each series.

Other visual improvements include removal of the sticky footer, consistent styles for the search box across all headers, and many other style adjustments that add up to a better user experience.

Behind the scenes we also improved the performance of Largo by streamlining parts of the code people never see.  We believe this release will result in more useable, attractive, and better performing sites for the dozens of organizations now using Largo.

You can read all the details in the release notes on GitHub. Largo 0.5.4 is being rolled out over the next couple of days for sites that we host.

If you're not an INN member using our hosting, you can download the latest version from the project repository on GitHub.

We’re not done improving Largo and probably never will be. As long as the web continues to evolve, we’ll roll with it. And we’ll keep working for your success and greater impact!