We're pleased to announce the release of version 0.5.2 of our popular Largo WordPress framework for news sites.

With this update, Largo is now fully-compatible with https out of the box. Also included are some enhancements to managing featured media for your stories, some new footer layout options and a number of minor enhancements and bugfixes.

Full HTTPS Support

For many news sites, user privacy and security are significant concerns. With this release we wanted to ensure that sites using Largo would be able to use https out of the box. We're proud to say that this is now the case. Starting from a base installation of Largo you should not have any issues enabling https for your entire site.

WordPress has a guide explaining how to do that, but the details will vary depending on the hosting company you use.

A couple of caveats:

• If you are migrating to Largo from a different WordPress theme or even updating Largo from a previous version and enable https, you may find that you have http links hard-coded into the body of your stories or elsewhere in your site settings. To get rid of potential mixed content warnings you would need to perform a search and replace to change these URLs to https. We use and recommend this tool, but please be sure to backup your site before doing anything potentially destructive.
• If you have done any custom work in a child theme using Largo as your parent theme, you may also need to review the code in your child theme to make sure it also fully supports https.
• If you install third-party plugins or insert/embed content from other sites or services (ad networks, embedded media, etc.) you will need to ensure that those plugins/sites/services support delivery via https or you may also run into mixed content warnings, missing ads or other issues. This is sometimes a major tripping point for sites switching to https, so just be aware that a significant amount or work and testing may be required depending on the number and type of third-party services you're using on your site.

If you are an INN member using our hosted version of Largo and would like to enable https for your site, let us know and we'll explain how the process works, the cost involved, etc. and help you get switched over.

Enhancements to the "Featured Media" editor

In Largo 0.5 we introduced the ability to use a video, slideshow or other embedded media in the place of a featured image for each story. With Largo 0.5.2, we have added a number of enhancements to this functionality to make it work better in a number of additional contexts, including:

• The ability to set a thumbnail for embed and video featured media types to be used on the homepage, category pages, widgets or anywhere else a thumbnail/featured image might appear
• The video featured media editor will attempt to automatically pull a thumbnail from any available oEmbed provider (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) but still give authors the ability to upload their own thumbnail images if they would prefer
• For theme developers, we have also added "featured-media" and "featured-media-{type}" classes to story containers for use in customizing the appearance of different types of featured media via CSS (adding overlays, icons, etc. to call out posts containing video, slideshows or other rich media)

New footer layout options

In working on a few recent client projects (Nonprofit Quarterly, Midwest Energy News and the redesign of our own site) we've developed a couple of new layout options for the footer of Largo sites, specifically:

• A 4-column asymmetrical layout, with three narrow columns and one wide column, well suited for three menu areas and a donation, subscription or newsletter signup banner or widget.
• A minimal 1-column centered layout, well-suited for sites who want a simpler, more minimal footer limited to simple navigation instead of having more widget areas to populate and manage.
• For theme developers, an easier way to register and use a custom footer layout.

And of course a number of other bugfixes and enhancements.

We encourage you to download the new version and update your sites at your earliest convenience. If you host your site with us, we're making this update for you today. If you host your site elsewhere, you can download the new version from GitHub.

If you have questions or need assistance please check out the release notes and documentation first and if you're still stuck, open a ticket through the Largo help desk.

What's next?

Over the next couple of months we'll be working fast and furious on polishing a number of existing features gearing up for our next full point release, version 0.6 (currently slated for late October). Look for a new release almost every week in between now and then and if you're interested in following along or contributing to the project, you can check out the upcoming milestones on GitHub.

On July 16, we tagged Largo v0.5.1 with another slew of bug fixes and updates.

Amongst the bug fixes and enhancements:

Google Custom Search results are now displayed on the standard WordPress search results page and are compatible with the standard WordPress search results conventions including the /search/search%20term and /?s=search%20term url structures.

We've also added a menu to the WordPress Admin Bar with several useful Largo-related links.

Further, we fixed a nasty bug/oversight which resulted in the optional "donate" button not displaying on smaller screens. The donate link we're referring to shows up in the site's sticky navigation.

On the documentation front, we merged a ton of developer documentation that came about as a result of our participation in the OpenNews Code Convening in Portland The developer docs now include:

• Revised technical notes
• Instructions for setting up a development environment (based on the development rig we use at INN)
• Details for working with Largo to create Child Themes
• A first pass at Largo API documentation

A special note on a breaking change -- if you redefined largo_load_more_posts in your child theme, you will need to update it with code from this release, as the old logic will fail to load the correct posts.

That said, the "Load more posts" button can now be used multiple times per page and no longer relies on the global $wp_query. Further, you can customize the text of the button by using the largo_next_posts_link filter.

Read the complete release notes and download the version here.

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.