We've just finished new updates for our WordPress themes, with a bunch of minor fixes and other improvements. We've also made some modifications required by the new version of WordPress and the Woocommerce plugin.
WordPress 4.3
The new version of WordPress was released last week, so we’ve had to update all of our quickstart packages and make some minor adjustments to our themes to take into account the main changes in this latest WordPress release, which are:
- Menu section moved to the Customizer
- formatting shortcuts (visual editor improved)
- security improvements (better password management)
- added option to add site icon to the dashboard
- mobile devices view improved (admin panel)
- comments on pages are now disabled by default
- quick access to Customizer (icon added to admin bar)
- new page template – singular.php
- for developers: PHP 4 style constructors are now deprecated.
For more information, see “Discover the new features in WordPress 4.3” article where I tested the beta version of the WordPress update to see what changes it offered.
GavickPro Themes and Plugins
Because of the last modification listed in the previous section (PHP 4 style constructors are deprecated) we have to make little changes to all the code responsible for generating our widgets. After the update to the new version of WordPress you may see the following message:
Notice: The called constructor method for WP_Widget is deprecated since version 4.3.0! Use __construct()
If you are using our external plugins, like News Show Pro, Tabs or Grid, please download the latest version from our Github repository to correct this issue.
If you are using our newer themes (those that do not use the Gavern Framework) then all you need to do is remove the plugin via the the dashboard and install it again via the Plugin installer, which will pull the latest version of the plugin.
In this latest update we’ve also moved towards parity with our more recent themes by removing some of the major widgets we’ve created such as News Show Pro from the core theme files; now, like our non-Gavern themes, these have some code added that will prompt for the widgets to be downloaded and installed automatically as external plugins. Because of this change in some cases you may find that you will have to reinstall the plugins and configure your widgets again (though if you are using the quickstart pacakge, don't worry because the quickstart packages uses the external version of the plugins by default).
If you've updated your plugins and the error is still visible, please update your theme; all updates with a list of changed files may be found in ourhere.
If even after reinstalling the plugins and updating the theme you are still seeing the error, then the likely issue is that there are other plugins installed in your WordPress backend that are not yet updated to remove the erroneous constructors (a list of these plugins may be found here). In this case, please wait for the update or contact with the plugin's author.
There are also many issues from our premium WordPress themes that have been addressed, including:
- WooCommerce 2.4 Update and changes in our WooCommerce themes
- Font Awesome 4.4 Update
- Update of language files
- WPML improvements
- Viewport meta tag improved
- Customizer options improved (Hotel)
- Menu options moved to Features section in Customizer (Hotel)
- Missing images added to theme files (quickstart packages were complete)
- Testimonials improvement (Steakhouse)
- Fixed front page excerpt length option (Writer)
- Top cart improved (StoreFront)
- Backend console error fixed. (Creativity)
- News Show Pro widget improved (StoreBox)
- Fix for the Shortcode API update. (John, Msocial, MusicState) This issue is described here
As always, we recommend that you create a full backup before performing any update, just in case.