Microthemer – What Do You Like? What Could Be Better?

Author Posts

graffig

Notice: this information was written when Microthemer version 2 was current. On Dec 26th, 2014 version 3 was released with a completely new interface. Some of the information may be redundant, but as much of the functionality remains the same in version 3 we haven't deleted this post.

Sebastian

Hope all is well.

Just drawing your attention to CSS Hero: http://www.csshero.org/

Would be nice to see an update to the customisation UI panel and options and possible real time css change updates. Like the clean/flat UI of CSS Hero.

Forgot to say, also a way to see what the css is of the element selector when you select it. So say you select text, you can actually see the original line height in order to make change – hope that makes sense.

Let me know your thoughts

Darron


Sebastian

Hi Darron,

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. Your request about being able to view the current settings of an element has come up before. It’s a good one. And although it will take some coding, I think I may have some time to work on it soon.

The UI could certainly do with improvements too.

CSS hero appears to be the closest thing to Microthemer now. It was only a matter of time I guess. It should keep me on my toes!

Cheers,

Sebastian


graffig

Hey Sebastian

Been playing around with CSS Hero, I would say Themeover still ahead with the ability to target selectors etc, you still need to identify and add them in CSS Hero as far as I can see.

More than happy to pay more for your planned upgrades as I still finding lack of time to site down and deal with my lack of CSS knowledge as still dealing more with print on a daily basis – hence big thumbs up for Themeover.

Hope you are well, and keep up the great work!!

Darron


Sebastian

Hi Darron,

Good to know you’re still favouring Microthemer. No need to pay for upgrades. I plan to keep offering free upgrades for life. And if I do ever switch to annual upgrade licensces, I can guarantee that this won’t affect customers who purchased Microthemer when the free upgrades for life offer was running.

I’ll draw up a plan for the feature you’ve requested in the next few days and write back here once I’ve implemented it. Probably mid February.

Cheers,

Seb


graffig

Perfect! Thanks so much Sebastian – keeps us posted


yazo

Sounds like a good request graffig, i too have notice the similarities between Csshero and Microthemer, I also like the “being able to view the current settings of an element” from csshero and would love some of the best features of Csshero integrated into Microthemer, I also like the “UI” in csshero, its just very easy to use and cleaner i think. Yes Sebastian I can’t wait to see what you have in store for us!

Thanks Sebastian!

yazo


Sebastian

Thanks for your input Yazo. I’ll write back here soon with an update…

Sebastian


graffig

Seb – this might be of interest for you too:

http://codecanyon.net/item/live-composer-frontend-content-creator-for-wp/6594028?ref=DanyDuchaine

Nice little footer UI – though the horizontal scroll can become painful

Hope you are well

Darron


Sebastian

Hey Darron,

Thanks for the additional pointer. I’ll be sure to review that plugin too when I’m planning UI improvements.

Cheers,

Seb


Galen

I am loving what Microthemer can do, so this is just something I came across recently which has helped me get even more out of Microthemer.

I’ve been using the Rule/Value tool in Child Theme Configurator http://wordpress.org/plugins/child-theme-configurator/faq/ (see video) to help find some of the drop-down menu selectors to use in a microtheme I am currently working on. As a child theme creator it lacks the level of customisation and speed of control that Microthemer gives me, but has certainly helped speed up the development of the microthemes I’ve been working on.

It would be great to have something like the Rule/Value tool in Microthemer. At the moment, I copy the selectors over to Microthemer manually, but if I could click on a button and ‘Add to Microtheme” that would be great.

I’ve been using it as a kind of ‘search tool’ for selectors. Type in ‘background’, for example and it brings up a list of selectors containing the word ‘background’ in their property. I can then choose ‘background-color’ to help identify the element I am looking for by the colour of its background.

Could also be useful for reverse-engineering a bunch of selectors to target in one go. For example removing text-shadows from menu links.


graffig

Hey Galen – thanks for sharing this – certainly a nifty wee tool/plugin.

Going to give it a shot!


Sebastian

Hi Galen,

Thanks a lot for sharing your tips on the forum here. I’m going away for the weekend shortly but will check it out when I get back. I’ve got a few plugins on the “to review” list for functionality ideas!

Cheers,

Sebastian


yazo

The Rule/Value tool would be a good addition for Microthemer.
Thanks Galen for bringing this up.

Love Microthemer, it just gets better and better!


Galen

Is it possible to add 100, 200, 300 or lighter to the font weight dropdown? For Google fonts at least that would be really helpful.


Sebastian

Hi Galen,

Yes I’m happy to numberical values to the font-weight dropdown. It’ll be a quick addition so I’ll add it to the net release.

Cheers,

Seb


CannonBeach

@Galen Thanks too for link.
+1 to y’all for the conversation. Great it is..


Galen

Just spent a several hours working on a large Microtheme on my local server – got a Memory Limit error which completely wiped the active stylesheet…. and reduced the sections and selectors to a mere handful.

Admittedly I had the Woocommerce and Ultimatum Microthemes loaded*, and fortunately I was able to reload the settings using “Restore settings from previous saves”, but it was pretty scary. I clicked on the SpeedUp button hoping it would fix things but it didn’t. I thought afterwards that maybe I clicked on the wrong button.

With that in mind, maybe in the UI the Reset and Clear buttons should be hidden behind a drop-down entitled “Clear or Reset” so it has to be opened before use and shows the warning messages once opened.

I already have define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’ ); in my wp-config.php for the benefit of Ultimatum, is there anything else I could do to prevent this happening again?

Is it related to this, server related, issue http://sevenspark.com/docs/ubermenu-menu-item-limit in Ubermenu? The server I am using is PHP Version 5.4.23

*The file size was 270kb in Microthemer but the active-styles.css only 19kb.


graffig

Hey Galen

Mega-menu continues to be a right pain in the *!£se for me. I just updated earlier today and still find it not playing nice with Ultimatum. I loose ULT menu options all the time


Galen

@graffig – I’ve had issues with large menus on WordPress even without using Ubermenu so I think it is probably the server limit they mention in the link in my post. It was again on a local server but I was able to edit the php.ini and that solved it. Problem is you can’t always do that on a hosting account.


CannonBeach

@Galen – Same here with Ult. memory issues and without using large menus at all. i.e. just horizontal w/ 6 items. This was with toolkit1…

we’ll see what happens when this inits. on my local box. ‘max_input_vars = 4000;’ [i’ll post back]


CannonBeach

So, max_input_vars = 4000 makes a huge difference – I can work now!

That being said I still can’t target bootstrap menu: navbar .nav > li > a:focus, .navbar .nav > li > a:hover {background:#xxx} either w/toolkit1 or w/out. But that’s ok – with the help of Gaagle’s Dom inspector for pseudo-styles the .css is easy enough to change…

Still fiddling….


Sebastian

Hi guys,

It looks like you’ve come up with the answer for this yourselves. I encountered the max_input_vars issue with PHP 5.3.9+ a while a go. It had me stumped for a while. Partly because max_input_vars relates to the number of inputs e.g. 1000, not the total size of the data sent in KB.

So with a max_input_vars server setting of 1000 you could have 900 input variables each sending a ton of data without encountering problems. But if you had 1001 input variables each sending just 1 character of data e.g. “1” or “0” the data posting (settings saving) would fail.

The best thing to do is to try to change the setting for max_input_vars in your php.ini or .htaccess file as per the instructions in the article you refererenced: http://sevenspark.com/docs/ubermenu-menu-item-limit. I also dicuss the issue in a tutorial here: https://themeover.com/avoiding-save-errors-after-editing-lots-of-selectors-by-using-the-speed-up-button/.

If Microthemer detects that your server has a limit for max_input_vars it will tell you what the limit is when you save your settings (if you expand the fixed right hand menu in the visual view). And Microthemer will warn you when you have reached 75% of your data sending limit. The speed up button should be used in this case. Although it won’t work if you have already exceeded 100% of your max_input_vars input, which may have been the case with you Galen.

I hope that’s of some use.

Cheers,

Sebastian


yazo

Hello Sebastian,

Any news on the upcoming features for Microthemer?
Looking forward to the new changes.

Thanks,
yazo


Sebastian

Hi Yazo,

I’ve been working with a UI specialist to help me make the Microthemer UI much slicker and more intuitive. I’ve been in two minds about whether or not to hold off adding “Show existing CSS values in theme” feature that was recently requested until I’ve updated the UI. I’m not sure if that’s what you were asking about explicitly?

In addition to the UI improvements and the aforementioned feature, I will be focusing on providing better support for custom fonts, making background images easier to include, and further developing tools to help with responsive web design. Part of the reason I’ve been a bit quiet these last few months is because I’ve been trying out dozens of responsive CSS frameworks and grid systems. They all seem to have good points and bad. I think I might be homing in on the optimum way forward though. If so, I will update Microthemer so that it can help make the optimum solution especially easy to implement.

Cheers,

Sebastian


yazo

Hello Sebastian,

That’s great news! Thank you very much for listening to us on the upcoming features.

I am glad that you are implementing a new UI that is better or very similar to the competition (CSS Hero, perhaps?). The look and feel would be most appreciated.

Also the ability to see the current settings of an element when you select it. – originally both suggested by graffig (Darron).

And perhaps adding something similar to the Rule/Value tool, to help find some drop down menu selectors and use it to help find selectors – originally suggested by Galen .

Glad that you might have found a “optimum” way of implementing these future upcoming features.

Thanks again.

yazo

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