rtMedia 3.8 beta with major UI changes

In second week of May, we plan to release rtMedia 3.8, which will have some major UI changes. As these are major changes, there can be some issues that you might face, even after some rigorous testing that we have been doing.

Hence, we are releasing a beta version. We will be sending newsletter as well as emails to theme developers who have built themes based on rtMedia.

New in rtMedia 3.8

Below is list of changes

• Removed Foundation framework
• Revamped rtMedia admin Settings and sidebar sections
• Updated BuddyPress activity post box structure – added thumbnail preview during media upload
• Updated Lightbox structure and styles
• Changed sidebar gallery widget
• Masonry styles changed
• Changed gallery styles and tab structure
• Removed font-awesome in favor of WordPress dashicon
• Added Grunt Environment for both backend and frontend
• Added minified version for CSS and JS

Bugs fixes

• Video player size in buddypress activity
• Documents file name is not properly displayed in activity
• Width size of single music player
• Lightbox issue when uploading first media in album
• Conditional support tab added for rtMedia ->Support in premium add-on installed
• Double tap issue for the attach files button in mobiles (iPhone) to upload photos.

Developer Notes

We haven’t changed any existing CSS classes or IDs in this new version, so if your theme has some rtMedia specific styling it shouldn’t break. However, we have added few new CSS classes and IDs which you may like to use.

List of CSS classes/IDs added

• rtm-load-more  it used in pagination on media gallery.
• rtm-media-options-list used in rtMedia options under media gallery section.
• rtm-tabs for all the tabs provided by rtMedia plugin.
• rtm-media-type-XXX class added on media-single.php

Dependencies

If you are using the foundation classes to customize themes along with rtMedia template, then make sure to remove this handler rtp-foundation-js and implement your own foundation files.

Also, if you are relying on font-awesome library added by rtMedia, please add it separately in your code.

Why no foundation and no font-awesome?

We love foundation and font-awesome. We were happy to use them when we started rtMedia 3. But over the time, we felt that they were interfering with themes. So we decided to relinquish control on front-end and made it minimal.

With this new approach, we hope that theme developers will find it easy to add rtMedia styling in their theme.

Screenshots for rtMedia 3.8

Below are some screenshots to show what to expect from upcoming release.

How to upgrade/test beta?

First, we do not recommend using beta release in production. For this reason we are not adding beta version to wordpress.org plugin repo.

rtMedia 3.8 beta can be downloaded from github (direct link to zip file).

You can upload this zip like a normal WordPress plugin and it will overwrite previous version of rtMedia you are running. Please perform this upgrade on a staging site and check if your theme and local customization (if any) are working nicely or not.

If you run into issues, please let us know via github issue tracker or premium support channel.

Rolling back

If you need to revert to previous release, you can download one from wordpress.org repo. We haven’t made any database changes in 3.8 so there is nothing to rollback in database.

Just uploading old zip should be enough. If you face any issues after rolling back, please clean server and browser cache. It that doesn’t work, feel free to use our support forum.

For Premium Users

We have already made required changes to all our premium add-on and premium themes. So we hope to not break anything on your site.

But if any issue arises, may be out of local customization or a theme/plugin conflict, feel free to create a premium support tickets.

Links: Download rtMedia 3.8 beta (zip file) | Upgrade Documention for 3.8 | Community support forum