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The Gutenberg blocks

• a-staff Loop block: does the same thing as the [a-staff] shortcode, but uses Gutenberg’s user interface. This way instead of typing shortcode parameters you can set them up using visual tools like drop-downs, text input fields, etc.
• a-staff Team Member block: shows only one team member’s box. It’s useful when you want to show a short bio of one of your team members as an addition to your post or page.

You can add the a-staff blocks to your Gutenberg pages just like any other block. Currently they reside in the Widgets tab of the block selector tool.

Pro version

• Free version: the traditional version of the plugin that you can download from the wordpress.org plugin directory or from our site
• Pro version: it contains some additional features for the plugin and enables its users to get priority support from us. Currently its only extra feature is the Departments part, but we are planning several new goodies for the upcoming versions.

1. Install the Free version after Downloading it from here or from the wordpress.org plugin repository.
2. Activate it.
3. After activation find the a-staff » Upgrade menu item in your WP-Admin
4. Follow the instructions there (make the payment, download the Pro version and install it). Learn more on the plugin’s documentation pages.

Departments (Pro version only)

Filter by departments in the a-staff Loop block

Design revamp

The new banner with the new icon

Sorting options

• Member name
• Date added
• Menu order (custom number you can set up individually for each member)

Download a-staff

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The post News: site update and plugin updates appeared first on a-idea studio.

Bye, bye, Adriatica!

After a long idle period we decided to dump our non-released theme, Adriatica. It was a simple business decision. It would have needed too much efforts to make it good enough while the competition on the market is tough and our time is very limited.

At least, we’ll have more time to focus on our plugins from now.

Site update

We have rebuilt the a-idea site from the basics. While the changes are small in the front end, there had been lot of changes in the back end. The change was necessary as the old version was running on Adriatica, so we had no choice but to move away from our discontinued theme.

However, we made the new site’s look very similar to the old one – with some fine-tuning. So the branding and the look&feel is the same here as before…

Plugin updates

All our plugins got a new update today. For a-folio and a-staff plugins this was a backend update only: we have updated the only TPL Framework that works behind these plugins.

WP Slide-up box goes a-boxes

For our oldest plugin, WP Slide-up box it was a big change. First of all, the plugin’s name was changed to a-boxes to better fit into our plugin branding line. However, we will use the old and the new names beside each other for a while to make the transition easier.

The Shortcode Generator has got a preview mode. So now you can see the changes right inside the Shortcode Generator screen, without leaving wp-admin.

The new Shortcode Generator with the visual Preview

Another bigger improvement is that now you can use default values for the shortcodes, making it easier to create similar sliding boxes using a-boxes 1.0. For the full list of new features and bugfixes, please have a look at the plugin’s changelog.

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The post New portfolio plugin for WordPress: a-folio appeared first on a-idea studio.

The plugin can be really useful for development teams, event organizers, travel agencies, creative professionals, etc. Using it, they can show to the public what they can offer or what projects they had worked on in the past

As an example, you can have a look at this site’s Products page, where we already use the a-folio plugin.

Download & Documentation

For more information and the download links (yes, the plugin is completely free) visit our sub-site dedicated to a-folio here:

Visit a-folio page

Available on wordpress.org, too

The a-folio plugin is already accepted and available in the official WordPress plugin repository, too:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/a-folio/

An example screenshot

An example of a-folio’s output

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The post New minor version of WP Slide-up box (0.4.1) appeared first on a-idea studio.

Together with it we changed all the links to use https://a-idea.studio (instead of the old, http:// links) in the plugin’s documentation.

Also removed the light blue line from the touchscreen link icon. This was a small visual glitch when using the plugin with the Twenty Sixteen theme on Android version of the Chrome browser.

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The post WP Slide-up box 0.4 released appeared first on a-idea studio.

What’s new in the 0.4 version?

Better support for mobiles and touchscreens

As these devices don’t have real hover effects, we had to completely rewrite the animations engine. Now it detects if we are using a touch device and switches to click events if yes. To make sure that linked boxes and animations work fine together, we added the links to the corners of the boxes on touchscreen devices. This way you can both play the animation and use the link.

Desktops still work in the good old way with hover effects.

Image URLs as the id parameter

Now you can use the image URL instead of the image ID, which have 2 main benefits:

• You don’t have to search for the image ID any more if you don’t want to (which is a bit tricky task and the exact method can change with every new version of WordPress)
• You can now use external images as the background. Before 0.4 only images on the same WordPress installation were enabled.

Of course the boxes will still work with image IDs, too. You can choose which one to use.

The plugin’s page on wordpress.org now looks better

The documentation on wordpress.org became more comprehensive and finally we have a nice banner and an icon for this plugin, too. Hope you like them!

WP Slide-up box plugin banner

Other stuff

For the full list of improvements in v0.4 take a look at the plugin’s changelog.

Another good news about the plugin is that its overall download number has recently exceeded the magic number of 5000 downloads!

The next version will most probably be available in May 2017. If you have any recommendations, feature requests or found a bug, please report it to us. These feedbacks can really help improving the plugin.

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The post New plugin version: a-staff v1.1 appeared first on a-idea studio.

The new version generally has 3 major feature updates:

• You can add now phone numbers to team member boxes.
• Now you can choose to have formatted member descriptions. This formatting is however, limited to a few HTML tags, namely: ‘b’ ,’strong’, ‘i’, ’em’, ‘br’, ‘span’, ‘a’
  • These formatted descriptions now will include line breaks / paragraph breaks inside the text
• The previous version (v1.0) had a bug when there were no social icons in the boxes. It was caused by the too big bottom margin of the bio text and the absolute positioning of the social icons. Now we fixed it with flexboxes and margin-top: auto settings.

Learn more and download the plugin from its dedicated sub-site.

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Read more about this plugin on the official a-staff pages!

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The post WP Slide-up Box v0.3.1 released appeared first on a-idea studio.

The root of the issue was that the plugin used JavaScript to set the width of the cover boxes (based on the width of the background image). Sometimes it happened before the background image element was actually loaded, so the cover layer’s width became 0px. This new version fixes that issue.

There is another bugfix in this version. However the previous version was generally responsive, the text on the cover layers could become a bit unaligned if you changed the size of the window (or changed between portrait and landscape orientations on mobiles). This is also fixed now, the plugin now reacts on the window resize event.

Download the new version on the link below:

Download WP Slide-up Box

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The post New version of WP Slide-up box after 3.5 years appeared first on a-idea studio.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to add any improvements to it in the past 3 years because my daytime job and my private life had taken all my free time, so there was no real space for side-projects like this. But now, as I’ve became an entrepreneur again, I can schedule publishing small plugins like this into the strategy of our team.

Code quality

It was really interesting to see how I was coding 3.5 years ago… I’ve learnt so many things about WordPress theme and plugin development in the meantime that I felt like I wouldn’t give my best if I didn’t rewrite the whole codebase of the WP Slide-up box plugin. Now it’s a lot closer to the best-practice standards (well, maybe I’ll read these sentences in 2019 with a smile on my face :)).

One important change for the plugin was that it no longer needs a separate database table to operate. Instead, everything is done using the shortcode. It gives users more flexibility, and makes administration easier. However, for backwards compatibility, I’ve left in there the database reader functions, so if you’ve been using the database table, it won’t break with the update.

Also, the previous, v0.21 version was quite buggy with some animation modes with some image sizes / aspect ratios. v0.3 has great improvements in this field, too.

New features

One of the important new features is the Shortcode generator. This is added instead of the add entry form in the admin.

The other new feature is the size parameter for the shortcode: now you can specify which registered image size you’d like the sliding boxes to apply on.

For full list of changes, please check out the changelog page of the plugin.

Roadmap to next versions

However, this plugin is still not a priority at our team, we’ll aim to produce a new version every six months, so v0.4 is expected to be ready by November 2016. Smaller, bugfix versions may appear in the meantime.

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