After about 6 months of development, a new version of the Dev4Press website is now online. The website is built on the GeneratePress Pro theme and GenerateBlocks Pro plugin, it relies heavily on the block editor with many blocks created for this purpose only.
Before we go on, there are few other things that will be part of the different blog posts later today and tomorrow, so make sure to check back the blog for more information, or stay tuned for Twitter and Facebook posts when the blog posts are published.
So, it was a long time since Dev4Press look and feel was updated, and in the past 4-5 years, web design and themes have come a long way. WordPress also got the Block Editor and blocks, and because of all of that, I have decided to modernize the website, replace the theme, make many improvements to how the website works and look, and take advantage of blocks and through the learning process of developing blocks, make changes to Dev4Press. The development process for the new Dev4Press website started back in April, but along the way, I had to work on various plugins, with some of the major plugin changes directly driven by the changes I needed for the new Dev4Press website. The best example is GD Knowlege Base Pro 5.0 plugin, and GD Quantum Theme Pro for bbPress 3.0, both coming out soon (right now Beta versions are available).
The new Dev4Press website uses similar colors and before, it has a small refresh for the logo, simpler navigation menus, new footer area with more information included, it doesn’t use widgets (with the exception of the Support website), it doesn’t use shortcodes and it heavily relies on the block editor and blocks.
I am not going into a detailed technical analysis of how the whole redesign is done, how many modifications to the theme (via child themes) are done, blocks I developed, and more. But, if you want to learn more about the process, I would set aside some time and describe in more detail my work with GeneratePress theme, development of blocks, and other technical aspects.
The website once again uses the WP Rocket plugin for speed optimization, and it gives great results in combination with the GeneratePress theme. I expect to do some additional tweaks related to optimization, and smaller incremental changes will be deployed in the next few days.
Let me know what you think about the new website design, please report any issues with the new website (maybe some broken links, issues with some pages, anything really), and if you have any additional suggestions on how to improve this new design further, make it more usable or accessible.
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