WordPress 5.5 compatibility
The WordPress 5.5 update (scheduled release date: 11th August 2020) introduces some major changes, some of which affect our themes. Therefore, we have released updates of our themes to prepare them for the WordPress 5.5 update. In this article you can learn more about those changes and the new updates.
Sitemaps
WordPress 5.5 will now automatically generate sitemaps containing the site’s posts, pages and taxonomies. You can read more about this feature in the WordPress Sitemaps announcement.
The main way in which this affects our themes is that the custom elements post types and taxonomies URLs are added to the sitemaps. This includes elements like the sliders and services boxes – basically all elements that can be managed from their separate page under the theme options menu. These URLs do not have any meaningful content and therefore the latest updates of our themes change the way these custom elements post types and taxonomies are registered, so they are not added to the sitemaps.
Additionally, we have provided some options to control the portfolio items and categories being added to sitemaps. By default WordPress will detect all portfolio item pages and categories and add them to the sitemap. The portfolio item page is the page that you can access by clicking on the “View” link of each item in the Portfolio page in the admin dashboard. In the gallery however some portfolio items, such as lightbox items, do not open their corresponding Portfolio page and therefore if you wish you can prevent these types of items from being added to the sitemap. Similarly if you wish you can also exclude the portfolio category pages from the sitemap.
jQuery Migrate removed
WordPress 5.5 also removed the jQuery Migrate library, which causes issues with some of the theme JavaScript elements. Expression theme is the most affected theme by this change, where the gallery page and fullscreen sliders don’t load due to a JavaScript error. In the latest updates we have updated the JavaScript code of our themes so it does not rely on jQuery Migrate functions.
Latest updates
We highly recommend installing the latest update of the theme before updating WordPress to version 5.5+. The updates that fix the above-mentioned issues are the following:
- Story: 1.9.12
- Porcelain: 1.4.3
- Mineral: 1.6.3
- Expression: 1.4.7
- Photolux: 2.4.1
- Dandelion: 3.1.8
Some themes are more affected than others, so to find out how your theme is affected, you can check the Updates section of the documentation.