I’m making some final tests and going through the code, will launch it in a day or two. Till then you can check it in action here

Demo of Responsive Swift

I would like to thank and dedicate this responsive layout to EricMeyer and Lynda.Com for publishing CSS Web Site Design, without which Swift would have never been possible. I highly recommend this video tutorial to anyone stepping into web design and theme development.

• User friendly error pages.
• Added box shadow option for comments, and navigation after post.

Other changes to this version are listed below

• Further enhanced captioned images styling.
• Changed the shortcodes download icon.
• Increased the size of comments submit buttons.
• Some refinements to buttons.
• Fixed the bug causing flicker in magazine layout.
• Reduced three HTTP requests by using base64 images for RSS subscribe widget, breadcrumbs icon and comment icon.

New comments styling

Complete list of changes to this version are listed below

• Added RSS subscribe widget, and more social media options to compliment it.
• Added new page template ( check the screenshot below)
• Changed the comments icon on blog page, single page and magazine page
• Changed the nav search and captioned image styling a little.
• Few performance tweaks.
• Updated the help page.

There will be another update in the first week of February. If you have any suggestions or need any new feature, post theme in comments.

3 things happened during this time…

1. I found a js script to make HTML5 pages backward compatible.
2. I came across Golden Ratio and it very quickly became an obsession.
3. I got my hands on an awesome book named “Professional WordPress Plugin Development“.

JS script to make HTML5 pages backward compatible

With the improved semantics in HTML5, it will be easy for search engines to rank your pages for the right keyword

HTML5 brings a lot of new features and standards, one thing that stands out the most is the IMPROVED SEMANTICS. There are many black hat SEO techniques, but they are all dangerous, they can bite you back anytime and you will have nowhere to go. A better way to move up in search rankings is to help the robots understand your page better, help them rank you for the right keyword. Problem with the earlier versions of HTML was, there was no way to tell the robots which part of the page has valuable content. For example… Consider you write about dogs, and a user with alias “Bond007″ is a regular commentor on your blog and on one post he has written over 10 comments. Now the density of the word Bond007 is higher than any other word on that page. If you don’t tell the robots which part of the page has the most important content, they will rank the page higher for the keywords bond, bond007, james bond etc and thus lowering the importance of the actual keyword. The traffic you get for that particular post is uses less, as the user was looking for info on james bond and seeing the posts about dogs he will leave the site immediately. The new improved semantics will help us help the robots to understand the page better and rank for the right keyword. When you are ranked for the right keyword, you get quality traffic.

Golden ratio (1.618)

The golden rectangle or golden section is a visually pleasing geometric shape with specific proportions, when things are in this proportion it makes our brain feel comfortable. The number also appears in nature all the time!

If you take the ratio of males to females in a honeybee colony it will be 1.618!
Sunflower seeds grow in spirals. the ratio of each rotation’s diameter is… 1.618!
Measure the distance of the top of your head to the floor and divide the distance from your belly button to the floor.
Shoulder to you fingertips, then divide it by you elbow to your fingertips.
Hip to floor divided by knee to floor.
EVERYTHING IS EQUAL TO PHI, 1.618!!!

The golden ratio is used in swift 6.0

1. Line height is phi times font size.
2. Slider image width to height ratio is equal to phi
3. Content to sidebar width ratio is phi
4. Thumbnails are in this ratio

Professional WordPress plugin development

This is an awesome book by Justin Tadlock. After reading the first few chapters, I couldn’t continue the development until I read the entire book. This book showed me the mistakes I was doing, and taught me how to do things in a better and efficient way. The result being, a faster swift with cleaner code, lots of hooks and filters.

Major changes to the new version Include..

1. A complete proper HTML5 theme.
2. Developer friendly with hooks and filters.
3. Variable site width, you can now set the site width and even have fluid width layout.
4. Improved NEWS paper layout with easy setup.
5. Option to set post meta around post titles with easy drag and drop interface.
6. No more fiddling with file permissions. Swift takes care of them on its own using the WordPress file system API, a secure way of writing files inside WordPress.
7. Dynamic generation of thumbnails using WordPress core functions, you no longer have to worry about hacking attacks due to flaws in third-party scripts.
8. New comment styling.
9. Delayed loading of the Gravatar in comments to add to SPEED of the site and USER EXPERIENCE.
10. Improved font and color options.
11. Adjustable slider speed.
12. Support to the newly introduced author tag.
13. Option to disable WordPress tinymce smartness on pages, and custom CSS specific to pages. Both come in very handy when designing statics sites with WP as CMS.
14. Help page included with in the WP dashboard.
15. Easily import/export and share color schemes and font settings between your blogs and friends.

Demo of Swift-v6.0

Here are some of the beautiful sites built with Swift-v6.0

• http://careerology.co.nz
• http://TechBU.com
• http://www.facelinking.com/
• http://softwarebuzzer.com

Buy HTML5 Swift now

Note: Paid version of Swift will no longer be called SwiftPremium, it will be called Swift. Free version of Swift, SwiftLite will be released next week.

SwiftPremium by default gives you 80+ page speed score, with a few tweaks you can push it to 90+. Lets see what those tweaks are

1. Get a proper web hosting package from reputed sellers. When you have good hosting your pages are served fast. We recommend HostGator for shared hosting, and LiquidWeb for VPS / Dedicated servers.

2. Mercilessly remove all the unwanted plugins,  use only plugins be reputed developers.

3. Remove ad and tracking scripts from cheap ad networks and analytic sites.

4. Add plugins Wp-minfy and Smush.it. wp minfy will compress your css, javascript codes, and Smush.it plugin will compress and optimize your images.

5. Install a caching plugin and configure it correctly, we recommend  w3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.

Wp-minfy, Smush.it and any of the above two caching plugins is a must.

6. Setup a CDN ( Content Delivery Network ), CDN will catch-all your statics files like, images, css, javascripts so that the number http requests to your server are reduced and thus redcuing the load on server. You can try SpeedyMirror a free CDN offering 50GB free bandwidth till you are ready to paid CDN.

Finally add the following code at the end of .htaccess file in your blog root. This code will compress your pages and set the expiration time for static files to a large value, so that they are cached on your reader’s browser. If you have regular visitors to your blog, they will notice a great improvement in your blog speed.

Caution, make these changes only after you have tweaked the site deign to your liking.

### BEGIN .htaccess

 # Protect the htaccess file
 <Files .htaccess>
 Order Allow,Deny
 Deny from all
 </Files>

 # Protect wpconfig.php
 <Files wp-config.php>
 Order Allow,Deny
 Deny from all
 </Files>

 # Disable directory browsing
 Options All -Indexes

 # BEGIN COMPRESSION AND CACHING
 <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
 # Enable compression
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript text/html text/plain text/xml image/x-icon
 <IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
 BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
 BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
 BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
 BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
 </IfModule>
 <IfModule mod_headers.c>
 # Make sure proxies deliver correct content
 Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
 # Ensure proxies deliver compressed content correctly
 Header append Vary Accept-Encoding
 </IfModule>
 </IfModule>
 <IfModule mod_headers.c>
 # No ETags, No Pragma
 Header unset Pragma
 Header unset ETag
 # Default cache time to 1 year (31536000 sec)
 Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public, must-revalidate"
 </IfModule>

 # No ETags
 FileETag none

 # CACHE SETTINGS (mod_expires)
 <IfModule mod_expires.c>
 # Turn on Expires
 ExpiresActive On
 # set default to "access plus 1 year"
 ExpiresDefault A31536000
 # html - "modification plus 1 hour"
 ExpiresByType text/html M3600
 # css and JavaScript - "modification plus 6 weeks"
 ExpiresByType text/css M3628800
 ExpiresByType text/javascript M3628800
 ExpiresByType application/x-javascript M3628800
 </IfModule>
 # No cache for php-files
 <FilesMatch "\.(php)$">
 <IfModule mod_expires.c>
 ExpiresActive Off
 </IfModule>
 <IfModule mod_headers.c>
 Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
 </IfModule>
 </FilesMatch>
 # END CACHING

 # W3 Total Cache are here (automatically included by the plugin):

 # WordPress Default Rules are here (at the end of the file):

 ### END .htaccess

Above .htaccess rules are taken from Zemalf.com, visit their site for more details

If you want the optimization to be done by experts, you can hire us for 49$

* If you don’t get 90+ Google page speed score, your payment will be refunded.

Big News! SwiftPremium version 0.5 is now translation ready. You no longer have to edit the files to translate the theme. Pot file is located in SwiftPremium/lang folder.

Whats new in SwiftPremium v 0.5

• SwiftPremium was reviewed by Mani Karthik, a SEO expert from India. I updated few sections of the code based on his feedback and suggestions. v 0.5 is more search engine friendly than the earlier versions. The major change is perfect distribution of header tags.
• Added sitemap template, so that you can easily create a sitemap for your blog without the need of an extra plugin.
• Changed the comment submit button styling a little.
• There were few problems with the font options, fixed those.
• Removed the comments closed text from the pages.
• Social media icons were out of place in v0.3, fixed it.
• Added nofollow tag to the link to SwiftThemes.Com in footer to, perhaps the only theme to do so.

For those who didn’t subscribe to the news letter and missed the news about SwiftPremium …

SwiftPremium was launched on April 6th to the forum users and news letter subscribers @ 40$. It was launched on the blog on 29th April and the price was then updated to 47$ for a personal license and 87$ for a developers license.You can find the pricing details here . Some of the awesome features of SwiftPremium are listed here, check it to find out why you should buy SwiftPremium.

Winners of the guess the price contest were announced in the first news letter.  If you haven’t claimed your copy yet,  contact me through this page for your free copy.

1. Azam (aff*@nowswe**.com)
2. Schofield (ste****o@***world.com)
3. Butch Bernstein (offers@imb*******.com)
4. Louis Bledsoe ( **les@***mpg.com )
5. moni******hnson@gmail.com
   
6. Eddie Gear (editor@******times.com)
7. Gordon Snyder (gs@water*****.com)
8. Tor Inge ( kro****@gmail.com)
9. Yoky Liadinata ( yoky*********@*****.com  )
10. Tony Cecala ( tony******@*****.com )

SwiftPremium Features  Plans & Pricing  Demo

Use this code for 20% discount on both personal and developer licenses of SwiftPremium, valid for the first 10 sales.

1DCAF

Thank you for your support.

[css]
#nav1-container,#nav2-container{background:#dbdbdb;border:0}
.navigation{margin-left:5px}
.navigation li a{background:none!important}
.navigation li a:hover{background:#EEE}

/* For rounded corners*/
#footer-ad-container{padding:8px 0}
#nav1-container {    -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 5px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 5px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 8px;padding: 4px 0}
#nav2-container {    -moz-border-radius-topleft: 5px;
-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 5px;padding:4px 0}
[/css]

Highly Optimized SwiftPremium beats Google in page speed score

*Page Speed is an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Its a measure of how well the site and the code is optimized.

PS: You can buy this highly optimized theme in a few hours, stay tuned.