DW Focus – New update version 1.2.0

DW Focus has been one of the most wanted Responsive News & Magazine WordPress theme. This theme was ranked 10th out of Mashable’s 20 Stunning Responsive WordPress Themes – http://bit.ly/dw-focus-mashable

DW Focus comes with the beauty of simplicity, from typography, grid-based layout and structure. The updated DW Focus 1.2.0 almost inherits what make this theme a stand-out:

• Trendy design for Online News website: Inspired by the design from popular online news sites like Mashable, The Verge, or The Next Web
• Responsive Web Design: Can be displayed on any tablet and mobile devices.
• HTML5, Grid Based design, LESS & Bootstrap, News Slider, Quick Tabs
• WordPress Plus Menu: This menu will automatically update and display up to 15 latest news/articles on daily basis.
• Display Category as Grid or List.
• A detailed Typography page
• Widget-full WordPress Sidebars
• Easy & Powerful Theme Customizer

And continue enhancement with performance optimization and new added features:

New DW Focus 1.2.0 Demo

What’s new in DW Focus 1.2.0?

1. Performance optimization

Apart from having the whole code base fine-tuned, below are some additional tweaks we have made to improve DW Focus average access times.

Post Queries in our widgets have been cached

As DW Focus homepage is widget-based, we apply WordPress Object Cache to optimize the database queries. When having new content update, it will flush widget’s cache for quick retrieval.

Revamped main menu

Due to the nature of high number of queries associated with menu items, we improve the “Must Read Article” feature to avoid repeated queries on all pages. The content is loaded only when user clicks on this ‘top left’ button. This way enables to improve the access time to content loaded from database.

Also slow queries in menu have been removed.

Note: Added menu features will be integrated via our (upcoming) DW Megamenu. The development of this plugin is in progress now.

You can try testing the theme yourself. Here is our before-and-after testing results:

Old GTMetrix Test

New GTMetrix Test

2. Widget Changes

All widgets in DW Focus 1.2.0 have been restructured to make it easier to use as well as to enhance performance.

Here is a quick overview about the new widget changes:

DW: Tabs – widget serves as a container, enabling to display different widgets into tab layout. Simply drag and drop any widget you desire to display.

DW: Accordion – Similar to DW Tabs, DW: Accordion container widget allows to load other widgets in an accordion style, a vertically stacked list of widgets.

DW: Column – This is a new container widget in DW Focus 1.2.0. Simply drag and drop any widget into DW: Column, then you will have those widgets being displayed in the column layout on front-page.

DW Focus: News Ticker – This widget is similar to the DW Focus: Headlines in old DW Focus 1.1.0. The News Ticker presents pieces of news in the form of scrolling, allowing for news headlines suggestion. You can also filter the news by tags and show/hide post date.

DW Focus: News List – being added with new options to show/hide post meta data which are not available in the old DW Focus: Category. Apart from responsive style improvement with Boostrap 3 support, this widget has also been optimised for better performance.

DW Focus: News Slider – We re-developed this widget to make it compatible with Boostrap 3 Carousel. Both UI and Responsive aspects have been improved as well.

DW Focus: News Grid – this is aimed to enhance UX aspect where gives flexibility in news presentation on the front-page. With other container widgets, News Grid extends up to 5 different layout variants

3. Change the Social Sharing add-on

As social media channel APIs see often changes, the statistic record update is not an easy task. We integrate new social counting by http://sharrre.com instead of the old custom script. Sharrre provides a handy statistic for all popular channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Pinterest. Beside it is possible to integrate Google Analytics with Sharrre.

4. Adapt new Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Article markup in DW Focus 1.2.0 has been optimised in accordance with Google Richsnippets Articles. Your content can be rendered in the Google search results in the following format:

Breadcumbs section is also enabled, with the help of WordPress SEO plugin. Just activate this plugin and enable breadcrumbs setting, then you will see your article in Google search result shown as follows:

5. Additional revamped features:

• Update to the latest Boostrap 3.3.4 and FontAwesome 4.3.0
• Remove front-end assets like jQuery Mouse Move, jQuery Swipe, jQuery Infinitescroll which are no longer needed.
• Update POT file for language localisation. You can check out the translation guideline here.
• Adapt Javascript to JShint standard; HTML, CSS, PHP to the WordPress Coding Standard
• Apply NodeJS, Grunt, Bower to compile LESS files to CSS, combine and compress files, update language file. We will walk you through this topic in more details in another blog post.

6. Removed features

• Post query by category in menu: This will be replaced by (upcoming) DW Megamenu plugin.
• “Related post” feature is replaced with default WordPress “Next / Previous post”
• “Infinite scroll” is removed. You can use Jetpack plugin for this feature.
• Inserting Header/Footer code snippet via Customizer is disabled due to security risks.

New DW Focus 1.2.0 Demo

Upcoming New Features:

Our team is still working behind screen to enrich features for DW Focus, in the next release you will see the following new addons:

Mega Menu: a new menu plugin we develop from scratch for DesignWall’s themes

As this update remains in beta release, if you detect any bug at your side, please help to report via Question & Answer. In case you have any feature request, I am glad to hear from your suggestion as well. We can expect to have stable version release within this week.

I would like to hear your opinion on this major update – DW Focus 1.2.0 in the comments.