Warp 7 - Engage! – The latest generation of our theme framework

Sascha
June 24, 2013
Warp

First a big THANK YOU to the community! We received around 137 posts with suggestions for Warp 7. This helped us a lot and many of them were taken into account.

Two years after we released the first version of Warp 6 in May 2011, its successor is waiting in the wings. Like with all major releases, we did a complete framework overhaul, not only adding features but rather changing the way of building themes. So here is a short Warp 7 feature round-up...

Support for LESS

Finally, we have support for LESS! Warp does the whole job for you and compiles LESS files into CSS, so you can start using all the latest LESS features like variables and mixins. If you don't know LESS, learn more on the official LESS website.

Customizer

An awesome new feature is the Warp customizer. It lets you pick colors, select fonts and change sizes and spacings without CSS knowledge or the need to write a line of code. Of course, we have Google fonts support and a nice icon font on board. It gives you a real-time preview of your theme where you can see all the changes you have made.

New administration area

The Warp7 theme administration got a makeover, and we are quite proud of the result. Now you have all major settings in one place, presented in a slick and clean UI.

New front end framework

All the LESS stuff made us rethink the way we style themes, and we started developing a completely new front end framework. We will have more news on this project soon.

PHP framework overhaul

Warp 7 now requires PHP 5.3+, which enables us to use better class autoloading and other new features like namespaces and closure functions. We also have updated the Warp dependency injection container which is now configured using config files in order to set paths or helper definitions.

Responsive modules/widgets

All Joomla modules and WordPress widgets are now neatly arranged in one overview, where you can set the style, icon, badge and even define, whether or not to show a module or widget on different devices.

We completely overhauled the mobile menu and transformed it into a modern and beautiful off-canvas navigation.

Bootstrap support

And of course for all the Joomla 3 users we have native Bootstrap support, which means Bootstrap markup will look awesome in our themes.

Release date and what's next?

We are very satisfied with the current development state of Warp 7. It's well-engineered and created from the developer's perspective - simplified, no magic, just a great tool set to develop cross-platform themes.

Our July theme will be the first Warp 7 based theme. In the next days we will provide you a blog post where we take a closer look on the new customizer and administration ares. We are very excited about Warp 7, and we hope you are too! Stay tuned!