Microthemer 3.0 – What did we get right? What should we improve?

Hi Abland,

I’m glad you like the new design, which is thanks to my colleague Monika Koziol – an extremely accomplished UI designer. She will also be designing some free and premium theme/plugin skins so the design packs marketplace will be a much bigger part of Themeover’s offering soon after the new website is launched. We will be accepting 3rd party contributors to the marketplace but interested parties will need to apply to join before submitting to ensure that all design packs are in keeping with our style and quality standards.

Thanks for pointing out the multi-site issue. That was indeed an oversight. I’ve corrected this on my development version and it will be released in the next 3.x (beta) release very soon. If you notice any other issues please let me know and I will get them fixed asap.

Many thanks for your support as always Abland.

Sebastian

Yes no problem Darron. See here: https://themeover.com/forum/topic/microthemer-3-0-general-support-questions/

Cheers,

Sebastian

For anyone that downloaded version 3.0 beta, I have just updated the beta to 3.0.8 with the following fixes:

* On multi-site, the “back to WordPress dashboard” icon in the left toolbar took the user back to the root admin dashboard instead of the intended blog dashboard.
* With WordPress 4.1 there were a few display issues relating to jQuery UI widgets like sliders and pseudo select comboboxes.
– The preview screen width slider handle was not correctly styled (it was too big).
– The dropdown menus looked a bit ugly and it wasn’t possible to specify an empty value to clear the field.
* With jquery versions older than 1.9, a javascript error could prevent the selector wizard from loading when double-clicking an element. Now Microthemer warns you to update jQuery.
* Microthemer was sometimes creating a debug-save.txt file in the root /micro-themes/ folder. This caused a blank design pack to be displayed on the manage design packs page that could not be deleted via the delete button. If you installed version 3.0 and you see a nameless design pack on the manage packs page, please delete the following file via FTP: /wp-content/micro-themes/debug-save.txt (or ask Themeover for help with this).
* Microthemer will not run with versions earlier than 3.6 (it will warn you to upgrade WordPress)
* The reported CSS could sometimes be too big for the input field and looked messy. If there is not enough room the value is truncated with a … suffix. The full computed CSS value can still be viewed by hovering your mouse over the input field.
* The icons for text-shadow X and Y offset were wrong. “Spread” will be added to these shadow options soon.
* An innocuous javascript error was generated if exporting the first design pack when no others exist.

As before, get it from “My Downloads”: https://themeover.com/my-downloads/
Or Download the free trial: https://themeover.com/microthemer-free-trial/

Hi Jamie,

Thanks for the feedback! I could be misunderstanding, but have you noticed that the main folder/selector menu now doubles up as a folder/selector management panel? You can reorder folders by hovering your mouse over the folder icon and dragging and dropping. You can do the same with selectors by hovering over the target icon and dragging. And you can also drag selectors into different folders now too.

You can’t currently select MULTIPLE selectors and drag them between folders but I can look into how doable this is…

Cheers,

Sebastian

Hi Jamie,

Feedback of any kind is always welcome. And slight positioning problems are definitely among the things we’d like to hear about. I’d like to fix this for you, but I may need your help. Would you mind sending me login details for the WordPress install you’re working on or let me know what theme you are using so that I can troubleshoot the issue?

You can send login details via this secure form: https://themeover.com/support/pre-sales-enquiries/

Many thanks,

Sebastian

Hi Antonio,

Many thanks for offering your thoughts – just the kind of feedback we’re interested in hearing. In answer to your points:

Not seeing all the CSS at once
I hear what you’re saying about the extra clicks on the CSS groups to get to the CSS properties. It’s something I discussed with our designer at length when we were initially trying to work out the best solution for all of the design challenges. I let our designer convince me that more space to see the page you’re editing outweighed the disadvantages.

I was coming at the problem from a programmers point of view, where I’m used to writing code to an abstracted stylesheet completely hidden from the frontend. And so options obscuring the page was less of a biggy for me. Designers are much more visual. And now that I’ve got used to the new interface I think it was the right call.

“more difficult to find what is where”
If you’re concerned about losing track of where you have applied style edits, please notice that when you apply style edits to a particular CSS group (e.g. border) that the icon has a blue background. The CSS group that you are currently editing will have a fully green background behind the icon. But when you move onto another group it will have a blue background (if you applied any styles) or it will keep the default transparent background if you didn’t apply any styles.

The reset options
They do still exist! Towards the bottom of the left-hand menu look for the rubber icon. Both reset and clear options should popout.

Targeting and Inspector tabs
There was some logic behind splitting the targeting and inspector options into separate tabs, in addition to design considerations. I felt that there was quite a lot of scope for confusion when the two things are presented together because they actually concern different things.

The inspector tab lets you navigate single HTML elements in the dom. So it shows you the (simplified) HTML of the single element you double-clicked, and the directional arrows allow you to move your targeting onto other nearby single HTML elements. As new feature of version 3 is that is also shows you the computed CSS of the single HTML element in focus.

The targeting tab allows you to target the single HTML element that was double-clicked as well as multiple other elements that can be targeted along with the double-clicked element. In some cases, if an HTML element doesn’t have a unique id it must be targeted as a group rather than individually.

This is my reasoning for the advanced wizard options. I’m least confident about the decisions we’ve made regarding these options. That’s not to say that we are likely to restructure them. But I think they definitely need some additional features that will help non-web developers take full advantage of what they can do with them without getting too confused by what happens to the selector highlighting when they tweak things.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience. I hope that you ultimately find that the benefits of version 3 outweigh the potential disadvantages, but either way we’d always love to hear what you have to say.

Warm regards,

Sebastian

Ah I see what you’re referring with the option group reset now. No, you don’t need to clear the settings manually. It was a tad easier with the checkbox system. But you can still clear a full CSS group in one go by using the (-) icons in the media query tab management menu for the selector, which is just to left of the “All Devices” tab. The icon for accessing the media query tab management menu is a plus, (+) but now you’ve got me thinking, this should probably be changed to a (+/-) icon as you can remove tabs (including the All Devices tab) as well as add new tabs.

Note: you can remove all tabs (e.g. all devices as well as any media query tabs) in one one go by clicking the “Delete All” link at the bottom of the menu. This is equivalent to unchecking the checkbox you were referring to in version 2.

Thanks,

ps I’m glad it seems faster, we have quite a few optimisations planned that will make it even faster than it currently is.

Hi Antonio,

It seems that we are on a slightly different page here, but I think we’re on the same chapter. Thanks for posting the video. I think we’re talking about the same thing with regards to the version 2 checkboxes. But I think that may be some differing terminology that is confusing things a bit.

In your video you check/uncheck 3 checkboxes for color, background, and border. I would refer to these as “CSS groups” (even though color only has one property – which has been moved to the “Font” CSS group in version 3). I think what I call a CSS group, you are calling a property. And what I call a property, you are calling an attribute.

In version 3, instead of clicking a checkbox to add styling options, you just click an icon “e.g. for background”. When you want to remove the options, you need to use the following menu that I have created a screenshot for: https://docs.google.com/a/themeover.com/file/d/0B2vCpmXg7SjlcEhVNGFPM3Z0Rm8/edit?usp=drivesdk

If you click the bold subtract icon (-) next to “All devices” in the dropdown menu (see screenshot), all the fields disappear. If you then click the plus icon (+) next to “All devices” (the icon changes to a (+) if the tab doesn’t already exist), all the fields will be re-added with empty values (showing only the default existing CSS values). I probably should have mentioned that you can re-add the fields and that they will be empty in my previous post. Perhaps that was the cause of the confusion?

Or perhaps I’ve missed the mark again? Please let me know.

Cheers,

Sebastian

UPDATE – we’ve released an update to the beta which fixes the following issues:

* The appearance of the slider handle for the selector wizard element targeting tab also needed fixing in WP 4.1
* The notification about disabling highlighting when double-clicking something that is already highlighted was confusing.
* In rare cases Microthemer was not remembering the last frontend page viewed in the preview window.

Auto-updating via your WordPress dashboard won’t be possible until the new docs are ready, so for now:

Get it from “My Downloads”: https://themeover.com/my-downloads/
Or Download the free trial: https://themeover.com/microthemer-free-trial/

Thanks,

Sebastian

My apologies everyone, in my haste yesterday I forgot to actually upload the new build to the server (thanks for alerting me to this Jamie). 3.0.14 beta is now available for download.

Get it from “My Downloads”: https://themeover.com/my-downloads/
Or Download the free trial: https://themeover.com/microthemer-free-trial/