Cornerstone 2.0 is Here!

It’s been about six months since I released the original Cornerstone, and while I’ve been very happy with the success of the theme, I’ve also learned quite a bit since then. I figured it was time for some improvements.

Starting with the layout, I stripped away some of the visuals that I felt were unnecessary to give it a more streamlined appearance. Individual components are now more precisely aligned, and whitespace was added to alleviate the “crowded” feeling I sometimes got when looking at the old version. A more unified color scheme helped as well. (Let’s face it, the yellow just didn’t jive. I don’t know what I was thinking!)

Significant improvements to the underlying functionality have also been made. For example, IF statements were added to check for the existence of certain plugins supported by the theme. This makes it virtually error proof upon install. If a supported plugin is not installed on a user’s blog, Cornerstone will simply ignore it, causing no display bugs or cryptic error messages. (Unfortunate that I did not know how to do that when the first version was released.)

One of the most notable upgrades is how the navigation functions. Cornerstone now supports child pages more effectively (there was basically none before). If you visit a page with child pages assigned to it, those links will display automatically in the secondary nav bar. When you click away, the links go away too.

Just a few other enhancements include:

• Tag listing support on single post pages (along with a tag cloud in the footer)
• Latest Entry on the home page now supports custom fields for a thumbnail display
• Hand-coding the corresponding Category link for each Featured post no long necessary
• Register/Site Admin link in the footer displays properly now (thanks Kevin!)
• A visual indicator for which Page you’re on included
• Asides function more closely to how they’re intended on most blogs
• “Continue Reading” link added to Latest Entry and Asides entries
• Improved Feature (or alternate layout) Page
• Much of the back-end code has been cleaned up, revamped and/or better commented

That about covers it! You can see the new demo here, or visit the storefront to see what else is in the works. If you’ve previously purchased a copy of Cornerstone, this update is available to you at no extra charge. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested.

Tags: cornerstone | themes