The Time Has Come for Soliloquy v2!

It feels like it has been forever trying to get v2 out the door, but the day is finally here! Soliloquy v2 is ready to be launched out into the world.

The next major iteration of Soliloquy is a vast improvement over the first. It is insanely fast (even faster than before) and is built with a much more solid foundation that before. I’ve fixed many bugs and issues from v1, and with the flexibility of the engine in v2, bug fixes and features will be able to come at a much faster pace than before.

I mean, take themes for example. Previously, themes were really hard to build for Soliloquy. It took a lot of work to get one rolling. Now, building out a new theme takes just a couple lines of code:

$themes[] = array(
    'value' => 'karisma',
    'name' => __( 'Karisma', 'soliloquy-themes' ),
    'file' => __FILE__
);

How easy is that?? Defaults can easily be set across all your sliders and any new ones you create, and that goes for the slider and all of the addons too. There is a robust import/export feature that allows you to take your sliders and settings anywhere, and the filter and hook enhancements allow you to do so much more than ever before.

I had originally mentioned that this would not be backwards compatible. Well, as I got into it, I realized that is not very cool, and I definitely would not have wanted that done to me. In light of that, I made an importer and converter to make the transition from 1 to 2 seamless! You will not need to rebuild your sliders – all of your sliders, including addon data, will be converted to the new system and structure.

There will be an easy process to follow, and I will have a dedicated support doc and video walkthrough showing you the process. It is easy and only takes a few seconds after upgrading to v2 automatically from v1.

I have done my best to remove any inconsistencies in the upgrade process, but there are a few things that have changed that should be noted. For the vast majority of users, you shouldn’t notice any changes. We have extra support staff that has come along side to help with the transition to ensure everything is as smooth as possible. With that being said, here are a few things to take note of when upgrading:

1. The HTML structure is the same, but captions have been adjusted slightly in order to allow infinite flexibility as far as styling is concerned. This needed to be done to allow things like layered animations. Again, most of you should not notice anything different, but advanced customizations may need to be tweaked slightly after the upgrade.
2. The Dynamic Addon works much differently now, and as such, global settings will not be converted to the new system. You will need to do this manually. This is the only instance where a manual transition is still needed. It should be routine and very easy. Dynamic sliders now have one dedicated slider to hold all the defaults. It gains the benefit of connecting to all the addons so that now any addon now and in the future can be used in conjunction with dynamic sliders. This is a small sacrifice to pay for such a vast area of opportunity in the future.
3. The lightbox addon and lightbox engine is completely different than before. Because prettyPhoto has all but stopped development, I have moved to a customized version of FancyBox that is mobile responsive, retina ready and more mobile friendly in general. I will also be working with the FooPlugins team to get FooBox integrated into Soliloquy as well. While your settings will carry over where appropriate, the design of the lightbox will be altered some.
4. Video slides now require a thumbnail. If you have any video slides, all of the data will be carried over, but you will need to add thumbnails to them in order for them to function properly. With the meteoric rise of mobile and the fact that videos on mobile require user interaction, thumbnails are needed to initiate click/touch actions to use video. This allows for speed improvements on my end and better API management, but it does require a thumbnail to be added.
5. The Filters, Preview and Crop addons have been deprecated. Cropping is built into the plugin now (yay!) as well as native previewing in v2. The Filters addon settings will be carried over in the conversion process, but the addon itself will not be receiving further updates.

Other than this, everything should work smoothly in the upgrade process. Again, we have extra support staff helping us out through this transition. We want to make sure everything goes smoothly when upgrading to v2. v2 is so much better and has so much more potential that v1, so I am excited to get it rolling for everyone.

While I had planned to do it yesterday, I was sick and wasn’t able to get it launched. I am putting out this notice to let everyone know that this will be happening tomorrow morning. v2 will be available as an automatic update, and I will be linking to the necessary documentation everywhere so that you can easily upgrade following the guide.

I am excited to embark on this new adventure, and I can’t wait to see all the incredible things you will do in v2!

Published by Thomas Griffin