We are very proud to announce that we are releasing some very substantial updates to ColorLabs Framework, fixing bugs, adding wanted features and cleaning up our codes to be in compliance with WordPress standards. All users (both premium and free) will be able to update to the newest framework. And, here are the highlights of the new ColorLabs Framework 1.7 release:

• New Image Uploader - We have replaced our image uploader with the core WordPress media uploader. Now you don’t have to worry about those pesky upload permission issues.

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Great news!! We recently updated Laboratory and added a new functionality: Facebook Comments. Now you can completely take the advantage of having social media interaction on your website. This is a great way for your visitor to easily engage in conversation about your posts.

You can easily implement this Facebook Comments feature and get rid of the hassle each and every time you are required to type in your name and email address. There’s no need to do any special magic to activate this on your site, just activate it through Laboratory, configure the plugin settings and you are done.

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Getting new visitors to come to your site is always a challenge. If you want to keep your site alive, then it is imperative that you keep visitors coming back. Same old stuff staying on your home page for too long will let them right down. Never a good thing. You should think about the fact that you have to provide fresh contents and the way they should be styled.

Featuring a unique, modern design, today we deliver to you a magazine-style theme, Rumour, that will give your blog the unique visual impact you have been longing for.

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The Backbone Framework has been carefully sprinkled with actions and filters that external code can hook into, injecting new functionality into the standard flow. In this article we list a complete list of hooks and filters that have been built into the Backbone Framework.

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Mobile technology is going big. Every other user is now viewing your website from their iPhone, Android or other smartphone. People are always on-the-go and they bring the world, through their phones, with them. It is essential that you create a mobile-friendly version of your WordPress site. The majority of top sites and blogs have already made their sites mobile-friendly, but there are tons of other sites and blogs that still lack this feature. If you fall under the latter, now is really the time to jump into the mobile world.

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Backbone implements a series of actions and filters to make it easy for you to plug in your own sets of code into the theme, whatever the purpose may be. For example, with an action hook, you could add a chunk of HTML code to show an image in the header of all pages without having to touch the header.php template. With a filter hook, you can change the format of the dates shown in posts. There are other examples and you could look into and to learn about hooks in detail, please refer to this hooks and filters documentation on WordPress.org. Just before we start, please understand the basic difference between action hook and filter hooks. Action hooks are executed when certain WordPress events occur while filter hooks are executed throughout the whole page loading process, from the beginning to the end. Filter hooks are particularly useful for text and/or content manipulation.

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The recommended way to customize Backbone Framework and keep track of all your changes is to create a child theme. It is not as hard as you might think. Even if you do not think of yourself as a developer, meaning you have limited HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP skills, you STILL ought to create a child theme. By using a child theme, you can make all of the same modifications as you would to the Backbone Framework, make changes to the markup (adding extra divs or wrapper for styling). This allows you to update the Backbone Framework whenever you want and you can still realize your own ideas.

What is a Child Theme?

From the WordPress Codex:

A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme, and allows you to modify, or add to, the functionality of that parent theme.

A basic child theme consists of only a style.css file.  If you plan on using the available Action Hooks and Filters in Backbone, you will also need to create a functions.php file.  You can also add a screenshot.png file too, which is your theme’s thumbnail that will show up on the Appearance -> Themes page.

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