Changelog
Release Notes
Every feature, every improvement, every fix since v1.0.0.
Page 7 of 24 - 710 releases, newest first.
Header Studio: announcement bar, header button and social icons, transparent and smart-sticky header on every theme
Added
- Announcement bar above the header: text plus an optional link, four styles (brand, dark, soft, outlined), shown on all pages or the homepage only, dismissible with the visitor's browser remembering the choice.
- Header button (subscribe, contact, shop…) in solid, outline or pill style, optionally opening in a new tab, and a social icon cluster fed by Settings → Social links - both placed inside the theme's own header on every theme.
- Header behaviour: transparent over the homepage hero (returns to normal on scroll), sticky mode (theme default, always pinned, smart hide-on-scroll-down, or not sticky) and a shadow choice.
- All of it is off by default; nothing changes until you turn it on under Customize → Header.
One colour system and one typography panel on every theme, portable settings, and full export
Added
- Colours: every theme now exposes the same eight roles - primary, secondary, text, muted text, page background, card surface, border and link - each with a light and a dark value. Where a theme did not offer a role, an optional field appears: leave it off and the theme's own colour stays exactly as designed; tick Customize and your colour is written to every variable name the theme uses.
- Typography: heading and body font pickers on all themes (blank keeps the theme font), plus heading weight, letter case, letter spacing and an article text width preset. Everything is off until you choose it.
- Settings now travel between themes: fields that mean the same thing under different names (breadcrumb, share buttons, author box, colours, fonts) resolve to each other, so design packs and imported settings land correctly on every theme.
- Export includes homepage, post and sidebar layouts and the version history; import restores them.
Fixed
- The personal theme's custom CSS and HTML fields used a plain text box; they now use the code editor like every other theme.
Universal homepage cards: boxed surface, breathing room and a saner horizontal layout
Improved
- The universal card looks (grid, list, masonry, title-over-image, horizontal) now sit in a proper card: a surface background with a hairline border and soft shadow, the image seated flush into the card's corners, and a generous body padding so titles and meta no longer hug the image or the page background.
- The wide horizontal look uses at most two columns (one on narrow screens) instead of squeezing three thin cards side by side; list and showcase side cards got matching padding.
Edge HTML caching is now opt-in, so saves are visible at once on every host
Fixed
- Hostinger's CDN (and similar edge caches) treated the s-maxage hint on HTML pages as a five-minute store that none of jekcms's purges could reach, so a saved customizer change, a new post or a menu edit kept showing the old page for up to five minutes. HTML responses no longer advertise an edge lifetime by default - jekcms's own page cache still keeps pages fast - and hosts with a working purge integration can turn edge caching back on with a single constant (JEK_EDGE_HTML_TTL).
Changes show up immediately on LiteSpeed hosting
Fixed
- On LiteSpeed servers (most shared hosting, Hostinger included) the built-in server cache kept every HTML page for five minutes after any change, so a customizer save, a new post or a menu edit stayed invisible until the timer ran out - a switched card look on the homepage kept showing the old design. jekcms now tells LiteSpeed not to store its HTML (jekcms keeps its own page cache and clears it on every change), and admin saves also send a purge so anything already stored is dropped at once.
Cleaner section settings panel with a live card-look preview
Improved
- The gear panel under each homepage section was re-laid out: every label now sits above its control at full width (no more clipped 'Card lo…' labels), the card-look picker shows a live miniature of the chosen look - grid, list, masonry, title-over-image, wide horizontal or the theme's own design - that updates the moment you change the selection, and settings the theme design does not read stay hidden until a universal look is chosen.
- The layout editor no longer squeezes into a 300-pixel column on laptop screens: the mini page preview now appears only on very wide displays, and section rows wrap their controls onto a second line when space is tight.
Homepage section details: card look, title and count on every section, plus category picker with uploadable icons
Added
- Every post-list section on the homepage (latest, popular, recommended, opinion, videos) now offers a Card look setting on every theme: keep the theme design, or switch to grid, list, masonry, title-over-image or wide horizontal cards. The universal looks honour the Cards tab switches and add column count and a category filter; section title and post count are editable on every theme.
- Category band: pick exactly which categories to show and in what order, show a category icon or image in three sizes, and show post counts. Upload a square image per category under Admin → Categories (512×512 recommended); it is fitted into a fixed box whatever its source size, with the initial letter as fallback. On the travel theme, picking categories replaces the fixed continent map with category tiles.
- Section settings the theme's own design does not read (columns, category filter) stay hidden until a universal card look is chosen, so nothing looks like a dead switch.
Fixed
- Several homepage sections ignored their title or count setting even though the customizer showed it: recommended blocks on travel, health and minimalist, and latest posts on pets and recipes now read them.
Customizer saves now reach the CDN edge immediately
Fixed
- Saving, resetting, restoring or importing in the customizer cleared the local page cache but never told the CDN edge, so on sites behind Cloudflare the previous design kept being served for up to five minutes - a card template switched from Detailed to Clean still showed the author name and excerpt. Every customizer write now purges the edge as well (and sends a LiteSpeed purge header), so the new look is live on the very next visit.
Post and archive extras: previous/next navigation, universal breadcrumbs, pagination styles and designed 404 pages on every theme
Added
- Previous / next post navigation on every theme: cards with thumbnails, a minimal line, or covers with the title over the image. Choose whether it follows the date order or stays inside the same category, and whether images show. It prints after sharing and before comments; a theme's own navigation is hidden once a universal design is chosen, and a Hide option removes it entirely.
- Universal breadcrumbs (Home › category › post) in four styles: chevron, slash, pill badges and small caps. Choosing a style hides the theme's own breadcrumb; with a post header design the trail prints inside the header, otherwise just above the theme's title.
- Pagination style for category, tag, author and search lists: pill buttons, outlined, bold square, or previous / next only - applied on top of the theme's pagination markup.
- 404 page designs under Customize → Advanced: Minimal, With search box, and Explore (search, most-read posts and category chips), each with an editable heading and description. The theme header and footer are kept; only the page body changes, and the theme's own 404 stays the default.
Customizer Pro: version history with one-click restore, design packs, undo/redo and a seventy-font library
Added
- Version history: before every save the customizer captures the current state - all field settings plus the homepage, post and sidebar layouts - into a per-theme history of the last twenty-five saves. You can label a save, see who made it and when, and restore any earlier version in one click; the state you are leaving is captured first, so a restore can itself be undone.
- Design packs: Editorial, Magazine, Minimal and Bold apply a matching set in one click - heading and body fonts, card layout and hover, badge shape, section title style, sidebar design, button shape, post header style, share position, author box and reading extras - together with a fitting colour palette. Only fields your theme has are filled; nothing is stored until you save.
- Undo and redo inside the customizer: every change to a control is kept in an in-page history, reachable from the sidebar buttons or with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z (Cmd on Mac). Text fields keep the browser's own undo.
- The font pickers now offer seventy Google Fonts across sans, serif, display, handwriting and monospace families, loaded on the site only when chosen.
Fixed
- The dead-setting audit now skips fields that layout cards manage and seeds the fixture with every social link, which surfaced three real defects: the finance theme never printed the featured image on posts because it read the wrong array key; the lifestyle theme's header and footer social icons read an always-empty theme file instead of Settings → Social links; and the copyright suffix field on the recipes and travel themes was saved but never printed because the shared footer bar ignored it. All three are fixed.
Homepage Studio: twelve universal sections on every theme, a layout-engine fix that had silently dropped sections, and a dead-setting sweep
Added
- Customize → Homepage now offers the full section set on every theme: latest posts (grid, list or masonry, with columns, category filter and paging), most read, category band (chips or tiles), category blocks, showcase (one lead + three), dual spotlight, newsletter band, call-to-action band, custom HTML block, headline strip, gallery strip and video row. Each section has its own heading, counts, columns, band style and category filter; sections are reordered, toggled and previewed live. Themes that ship their own design for a section keep it.
Fixed
- The layout engine ran every section template in its own loop scope, so a template that assigned a variable named theme overwrote the engine's own - every section after it was dropped without an error. Sections now run in an isolated scope and one faulty section can no longer take the rest down. On the lifestyle theme this had disabled the homepage layout entirely.
- A new dead-setting audit changed every customizer field on every theme and compared the rendered pages: four travel options that no template read were removed, a date format switch on recipe cards that show no date is hidden, the excerpt-below-title switch is hidden on five themes whose header never printed it, and reading time now reaches all news cards when you turn it on.
Sticky widgets that actually stick, one sidebar engine for every theme, and a sticky mode selector
Improved
- Customize → Sidebar gains a sticky mode: theme default plus sticky group, sticky group only, whole sidebar sticky, or nothing sticky. The per-widget default is now sticky only for the table of contents, so enabling widgets no longer turns the entire sidebar into a pinned block by surprise.
Fixed
- Marking a widget (for example the table of contents) as sticky had no visible effect on most themes, and when it did, several sticky widgets overlapped each other while scrolling. every theme now share one sidebar renderer: from the first sticky widget on, the remaining widgets stay on screen together while the ones above scroll away; a group taller than the screen scrolls inside itself.
- Themes whose sidebar was designed as a screen-high box with inner scrolling clipped the studio widgets; that rule now steps aside whenever a sticky group is present.
- The customer sites running forked themes ignored the studio's widget rows and kept showing only their built-in table of contents; their sidebars now render the rows you enable.
Sidebar Studio: sixteen widgets on every theme, page-by-page visibility, and six sidebar designs
Added
- Customize → Sidebar now offers the full widget set on every theme: search, about, author card, table of contents, recent posts, most read, trending, categories, tags, newsletter, social links, share, info box, image banner, call-to-action box and custom HTML. Each widget carries its own settings (headings, counts, thumbnails, look-back window, button label and link, sponsored banner, and more) and can be reordered, switched on or off and previewed live.
- Sidebar visibility per page family - homepage, post pages, category/tag/author/search pages and static pages - plus a per-widget rule that can also say 'everywhere except home'. Themes that never had a sidebar (starter, tech, entertainment post pages, travel's rail, recipes) gain one the moment you switch it on.
- Six sidebar designs - theme default, clean, boxed, cards, dark panel and centered rules - with width (narrow/normal/wide), left or right position, widget spacing and a whole-sidebar sticky mode. Everything is pure CSS applied only when chosen, so the theme default stays untouched.
Improved
- A new release gate switches every theme to the studio's widgets, checks that they reach the post page and the homepage, that visibility rules hide them, that design rules land in the stylesheet, and that a reset restores the theme default.
Reading experience controls, card layout variants, badge shapes, archive columns, a reading progress bar and a back-to-top button
Added
- Customize → Post gains reading controls on every theme: a drop cap on the first paragraph, left or justified text, three in-content link styles (underlined, brand color, highlight) and compact or relaxed paragraph spacing.
- A reading progress bar at the top of article pages and a back-to-top button (left or right corner), both in the brand color and both off by default.
- Customize → Cards gains a layout variant - title over the image, or horizontal with the image on the left - and a category badge shape (pill, rounded, square or text-only). Hero and featured cards keep the theme design.
- Customize → Layout gains the number of columns on category, tag, author and search lists (1–4), narrowing automatically on small screens, and Customize → Appearance gains a global button corner style (pill, rounded, square).
Fixed
- The health and travel themes did not run the shared footer script hook, so custom footer scripts from Settings never reached those sites; the hook is now in place.
Sidebar widget and title styles, and section heading styles across the homepage
Added
- Customize → Sidebar gains a widget box style (boxed, outlined or flat with dividers) and a widget title style (brand underline, uppercase rule, filled pill or centered rule) on the ten themes with a sidebar. One choice restyles every widget consistently.
- Customize → Homepage gains a section heading style - bold underline, centered with a short rule, spaced uppercase, or a filled label - applied to every section heading on the homepage and related-posts blocks of the twelve themes that print them.
Improved
- These styles are pure CSS emitted only when chosen, so the theme default stays pixel-identical; a new release gate confirms the rule reaches the page and disappears when the choice is cleared, on every theme.
Four post header designs on every theme: title over the image, centered, two-column, or minimal
Added
- Customize → Post opens with a header design selector on every theme. Pick the theme's own header, a full-width cover with the title over the image, a centered title with the image below, a two-column layout with the image beside the title, or a minimal header with no image. The category, excerpt, author and date switches from v2.82 apply to every design.
Fixed
- On the tech theme, turning off the category badge also hid the ad slot at the top of the article; the two are now independent. The theme's own share box also steps aside when a shared share style or position is chosen.
Post page freedom: share buttons where you want them, four comment designs, and three more author boxes
Added
- Customize → Post now controls where share buttons appear on every theme: above the content, below it, both, or as a floating side bar that becomes a bottom bar on phones. Themes that had no share buttons at all gain them with one selection.
- A comments design selector with four looks - classic avatar list, cards, chat bubbles and minimal rows - plus switches for avatars, newest-or-oldest order, form above or below the list, and the count in the heading. The shared block posts to the same moderation pipeline as before.
- Three more author box designs: a cover-strip card with social icons, a boxless byline row, and a dark spotlight panel.
Improved
- A new release gate loads a real post on every theme and verifies that the chosen share position, comment design and author box actually reach the page, then confirms the theme default returns when the choice is cleared.
A rotating homepage slider on every theme, card hover effects, and more editable section headings
Added
- Customize → Homepage → Hero now offers a rotating slider on every theme: choose the theme's own hero or the slider, then set the slide count (2–8), autoplay, slide duration in seconds, arrow buttons and dot indicators. Themes that already ship their own slider expose the same duration/autoplay/arrow switches on their native design.
- Customize → Cards gains a hover effect selector: lift with shadow, image zoom, both, or no motion - applied to every standard card across lists.
- Section headings on the health theme's Latest, Most Popular and Recommended blocks are now editable from the customizer, matching the other themes.
Fixed
- The hero section's variant choice was locked on 13 themes, so the slider settings the layout engine already carried never reached the customizer. The lock is lifted and a new release gate drives the slider on every theme and measures slide count, arrows, dots and duration in the rendered page.
Post header controls on every theme, card excerpts that always work, and complete social icons
Added
- The post page header is now yours to shape, on every theme: Customize → Post gains switches for the category badge, featured image, excerpt below the title, author row and date/reading-time line. Each theme only shows the switches its design actually has - and every one is verified on screen by the release-gate test.
Fixed
- Turning card excerpts on now always shows them. Two silent failure modes were closed across themes: posts without a hand-written summary now derive one from the content (WordPress parity), and designs that restricted excerpts to only the large card now apply your explicit choice to every card.
- Pinterest, TikTok, X, Telegram and e-mail icons in the footer social row rendered as a question-mark glyph on some sites; the icon set now covers every supported platform.
Header and footer styling restored on article pages, and a new Showcase author box with the author's latest posts
Improved
- The author box design lineup was reworked: the horizontal style is replaced by Showcase - a two-column box with the author's avatar, bio and a "View All Articles" button on the left, and their three latest posts with thumbnails on the right. Existing selections switch over automatically.
Fixed
- On two themes, a performance optimization from late August loaded part of the stylesheet only on the homepage - but that file also carried the header and footer design, leaving article and archive pages with an unstyled header. The shared header/footer styles now live in their own always-loaded file, keeping the homepage speed gain without the breakage. A release-gate test now verifies the header is styled on every page type.
Author box designs you can pick visually, and full sidebar control: position and per-widget page visibility
Added
- The author box under posts is now a design choice, on every theme. Customize → Post shows visual templates - Compass (horizontal card with socials), Card (centered), Banner (paneled with post count), Minimal (slim row) - as miniature mockups, the same picker language as the footer and menu designers. "Theme default" keeps each theme's own box untouched; picking a style previews instantly and applies on save. Verified on screen across every theme by a new release-gate test.
- Each sidebar widget can now say where it appears: all pages, home/archive only, or the post page only - set from the widget card's gear in Customize → Sidebar. Turn the trending list into a homepage-only widget and keep the table of contents just for articles.
- Sidebar position (left or right) is now available on more themes - crypto, entertainment, lifestyle and pets join the ones that already had it.
Fixed
- A thin empty bar could appear under the settings search box in the customizer navigation; it no longer does.
The active card template is now marked, and the preview jumps to what you are editing
Improved
- The Card Templates row now shows which template is active - derived from your current settings on page load, kept in sync as you tweak, and still marked after you save and return. Previously nothing was highlighted, which made a successful save look like it hadn't stuck.
- The live preview now follows your attention: change a card setting and it scrolls to the post cards; toggle the author box or another post-page block and it opens the article and scrolls to that block, briefly highlighting it.
See every change live before saving, pick a card template visually, and a guarantee that saves actually show up
Added
- The customizer preview now shows everything, not just colors: flip a switch, hide the excerpt, reorder sections, change the category selection - the preview pane re-renders your real site with the unsaved draft within a second or two. The draft lives only in your admin session; visitors never see it and nothing is stored until you hit Save.
- The Cards section opens with visual templates - Detailed, Balanced, Clean, Minimal - shown as miniature card mockups, the same picker language as the footer and menu designers. One click sets the switches, the preview updates instantly, and you can still fine-tune every field below.
Fixed
- Some card settings saved correctly but never showed on the site: certain homepage surfaces (featured cards, hero lists, magazine grids) drew their own markup and ignored the switches. Every card-rendering surface across every theme is now wired, and a new release-gate test drives a real browser flow on each theme - toggle off, save, and verify the element actually leaves the page - so this class of bug cannot ship again.
- The category picker on some themes saved your selection but kept showing the default categories; those sections now honor the selection, in the order you picked.
Customized themes get the full customizer too
Improved
- A theme that has been customized at the file level (a child or forked theme) no longer loses the customizer's newer sections. With one line in theme.json (customizer.extend_default), such a theme keeps the universal Colors, Typography and Layout controls and adds its own tabs on top - Cards, share styles, presets and search all included. Sites running heavily customized themes previously saw only a minimal set of options.
Search your settings, one-click color presets, per-field reset, and typography & width controls
Added
- The customizer now has a search box. Type "badge", "font" or "sidebar" and jump straight to the setting - including layout section cards - with the matching field highlighted when you land on it.
- Color presets: the Colors section offers ready-made palettes generated from your theme's own brand colors - Ocean, Forest, Violet, Ember - with the hue relationships between fields preserved, so every preset stays as coherent as the original design. One click fills the fields; nothing is saved until you hit Save.
- Typography controls on every theme: body font size and line height, with a content-width slider for the site's main column. These emit nothing until you actually change them, so existing sites keep their exact look.
- Every color, slider and switch now carries a small reset arrow that returns just that field to the theme default - no more resetting the whole theme to fix one value.
- Ctrl+S (Cmd+S) saves from anywhere in the customizer, and leaving the page with unsaved changes now asks first.
A fresh install now looks like the demo, share buttons get styles, and every section heading is yours to name
Added
- Share buttons on the post page now come in styles: keep the theme's own design, or switch to round chips, brand-colored circles, or minimal icons - one dropdown in Customize → Post. Available on six themes (news, minimalist, lifestyle, entertainment, trends, travel); the default stays exactly what the theme ships today.
- Renaming homepage section headings now works across every theme that prints one - "Latest Articles", "Editor's Picks", "Most Read" and friends can all carry your own wording, set from the section's gear menu.
Improved
- What you see on a theme's demo site is now what a fresh install gives you. We compared every live demo's saved settings against the theme's factory defaults and folded the differences in: the crypto theme ships with its demo's heading font, the personal theme with its demo's palette and calmer sidebar, and the pets and finance themes with the accent colors their demos actually wear. A release-gate test now keeps demo and defaults from drifting apart again.
Card controls on every theme, and a real category picker for the homepage
Added
- The Cards section introduced in the previous release now covers every theme. Each theme exposes exactly the options its card design supports - from the full set (badge, excerpt and its length, author, date, reading time, view count, date style, image ratio, corner radius) down to the focused set of image-led themes like travel - so every switch you see genuinely does something. Defaults still match each theme's current look.
- Choosing which categories appear on the homepage no longer means typing slugs into a text box. The category blocks section now lists your real categories as tappable chips - tick the ones you want, in the customizer, and they are saved in the same format as before, so existing setups keep working.
The theme customizer, rebuilt: one clear layout, a new Cards section, and renamable section titles
Added
- A new Cards section controls the anatomy of your post cards: show or hide the category badge (and pick its position), turn the excerpt on or off and set its length, choose which meta appears - author, date, reading time, view count - switch between relative ("3 hours ago") and full dates, and set the image ratio and corner radius with live preview. It ships on four themes first (news, minimalist, tech, lifestyle); defaults match each theme's current look, so nothing changes until you change it.
- Homepage section headings are now yours to name. Open a section's gear menu in the layout card and type your own title - "Latest Stories" can become whatever fits your site; leave it empty to keep the theme's wording.
Improved
- The customizer now looks and works like General Settings: a vertical navigation on the left, your options in the middle, and the save/preview rail on the right. Every one of the every theme now presents the same order - Homepage, Post, Sidebar, Cards, Colors, Fonts, Layout, Advanced - with theme-specific extras at the end. Colors and fonts each have their own section instead of hiding inside "Branding", a dot marks sections with unsaved changes, and old deep links to the previous tabs still land in the right place.
Fixed
- Switches that rendered inside another tab (for example a theme's disclosure or trip-details options merged into the Post tab) could not actually be changed - flipping them did nothing after save, because the form marked them under the wrong tab name. They now save correctly.
A real author page, cleaner post cards, and a calmer "how this was made" box
Fixed
- The refund policy page laid its "term: explanation" points out as boxed rows, and the term column landed at a different width in every row - one wrapped over three lines, the next fitted on one. It now reads as a normal list with the term in bold, so every point lines up. The partner terms page shared those same class names but shipped no styling at all, and the styling that did exist was written for dark mode only, so on the site's default light theme the bullets and panels were invisible. All of it now lives in the site stylesheet and follows the light and dark palettes.
- The author page finally shows the author: their photo, name, bio, links and a real article count, in one card at the top of the page. Two themes (entertainment, tech) previously showed only a generic person icon, and on one of them the count was the whole site's post total rather than that author's. The header now comes from a single shared component, so every theme gets the same correct page.
- Category, tag, author and search listings no longer blow one card up to double size in the narrow column beside the sidebar - every card in a listing is the same size.
- Post cards on the entertainment theme were uneven and cluttered: cards in the same row ended at different heights, the author block sat at the bottom as a large square avatar, and the category badge could drift below the image. Cards now share one anatomy - image with the badge on its top-left corner, title, and a single meta line pinned to the bottom with a small round author avatar, the date and the counters.
- The featured card stretched its neighbour into a tall, mostly empty card. It now spans two rows as well, so two normal cards stack beside it and no card is left with a hole in it.
- The "How this content was made" box no longer draws a coloured bar down its left edge; it is now a single even outline in the theme's accent colour with the information icon carrying the emphasis.
- Posts could be unreadable in dark mode: text pasted from another page brings its own colour with it, so a paragraph saved as black stayed black on the dark background. Pasted black (and pasted white) text now follows the theme's own colour, while colours you chose on purpose are kept.
Theme switches no longer turn themselves off; reaction cards and headline badges fixed
Fixed
- Post-page switches (reaction cards, star rating, share bar) could silently turn themselves off after saving the customizer: a switch that wasn't part of the submitted form was treated as "off". Saving now only changes the switches that were actually on screen, so features can no longer disappear on their own. If your emoji reaction cards vanished, they come back with this update.
- Some sites rendered two reaction bars on a post - a leftover theme bar plus the built-in one. Themes now declare their own bar so the built-in one steps aside.
- Headline cards showed generic labels ("HOT NOW", "VIRAL", "EXCLUSIVE") instead of the post's category. They now show the real category name in its own colour and link to that category.
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