This is great news for everyone who has yearned for more control over exactly what pages, categories and links are shown on the Heatmap Drop Down menus.

So if you have a yearning for more control (muhaha!) and you are still rocking the free download HeatMap Version 2.5.4 then its time to head over to the HeatMap Theme Store and get yourself a membership.

Custom drop down menu power can now be yours!

Version 3.0.5a beta allows both the pages nav bar and the categories nav bar to be fully customised using the new WordPress 3.0 menu manager. You can still use the old menu system too if you prefer your drop down menus to be automatically generated.

So, WordPress 3.0 beta testers start your engines! Custom WordPress dropdown menus are here!

As ever, the beta is available from the Heatmap Insider Beta Downloads area.

Whats new?

There’s a new addition to the HeatMap Theme options page which allows you to switch on support for the new menu manager (thus ensuring that the new menus are backward compatible with the ones you already have). At this time the menu manager only works for the Pages Nav Bar.

The new beta is available in the HeatMap Insider Forum Beta Downloads area.

This release brings a couple of extra useful goodies which HeatMapsters have been asking for in the shape of two new page/post templates which allow you to…

• Switch off the ads and/or auto thumbnails images when using the WordPress Gallery feature in pages or posts

• Turn off the auto thumbnail images when you are manually inserting images into pages or posts

These nifty little templates help to keep your blog formatting stay just as lovely as it should whenever you are using images in your pages and posts.

HeatMap Theme has just celebrated its 250th member, so if you are using the free download version, loving your HeatMap Theme and would like to take advantage of the latest and greatest theme updates direct from HeatMapster HQ then we invite you to jump aboard and join our happy band!

Post Thumbnails

StuartWider.com gets the Thumbnail Feature makeover!

Its now super easy to add thumbnails and images to your posts and pages using the Post Thumbnails feature. Just set the thumbnail image in your WordPress Post Editor and the image will automatically be sized and included in your Recent Posts Plus sidebar Widget, pages or posts. You can also choose to automatically align these images left or right from the HeatMap Theme options page (this is feature only available in 3.0.2).

You can see this feature in full effect on stuartwider.com.

Hide either post details or the comments count (or both!)

Some Heatmapsters wanted more from the Hide Post Details Feature that was introduced in 3.0.1 and now you’ve got it. You now have the option to hide the post details (eg categories, tags, date, author etc) but still have the comment count showing!

Again you can see this in full effect on stuartwider.com. Note the neat looking comment count where normally the full post details would appear on the home page under each post.

Bugs Eradicated

Child Themes now correctly pull their favicon from the child theme itself.

Compatability

Please make sure you are running WordPress version 2.9 and upwards.

Support and Extra Goodies

The supported version of HeatMap Theme version 3.0.2 is available from the HeatMap Insider Forum.

Visit the HeatMap Theme Store

You can see the latest v3.0 update in action on  http://creativitypro.com – notice how some elements have been turned off to give a simpler cleaner look, with the sidebar switched from right to left.

Sidebar Switching

You can now switch the whole sidebar left or right for maximum heatmap experimentation. Pop your ads in the fabled top-left hot-zone with ease!

Hide the Page navigation and Categories navigation bars

You can now entirely switch off the Page Nav and Categories Nav bars!

Hide the RSS Icons and Links

Want your categories to go the full width of the cat nav bar? Then you can by switching off the RSS Icons and links.

New RSS Icons Widget

If you switch off the RSS Icons you can still have them in your sidebar using this new widget.

Hide the Search Box

You can eliminate the search box so your page nav can go to the full width of the theme. There is of course a Search widget should you still need that function to pop in your sidebar.

Hide Post Details

Going for a minimalist neat look? You can now turn off all the post details for every post on the home page, posts, pages, categories, search and archives.

Footer Bars

You can switch them off too!

Bugs and slight annoyances fixed

• The theme now comes rounded corners for the default inbuilt classic graphite style – you could only get those in child themes previously.
• I moved the search in the nav bar 1px downwards just to make it look a little better in Firefox.
• I noticed that the post details box for each post was out by about 5px. I’ve fixed that up in the CSS.
• The (EDIT) link for each post has now been moved out of the post details box and underneath the POST it relates to. This is of course required because you now have the option to switch off the post details and therefore would not be able to (EDIT) the post unless I changed this!
• Removed the pesky NO CATEGORIES message on the cat bar when you have no categories in your blog – some people dont have any categories in their blogs – go figure!
• Removed the pesky NO POSTS message when you have no posts in your blog – giving you the option to just have a site entirely made up of pages!
• Fixed various low-importance minor typo issues.

Members Release

As of this version, the latest release of Heatmap Theme will always be a members download.

Additionally I will also be making a ‘free to download’ earlier version available, for those who want to give Heatmap Theme a whirl before joining our growing community of fellow HeatMapsters on the HeatMap Insider Forum.

Want to join us?
I look forward to meeting you on the Heatmap Insider

This a highly recommended update folks!

Even if you don’t update to 2.5 you should definitely check out search.php and apply the changes documented in there to your old version.

In addition, all of the previous child themes have had a bit of spruce up, making a grand total of 17 child themes available.

The new and spruced up child themes all now include css for rounded corners to add a nice touch for browsers that support ’rounded-ness’.

Also in other news…

HeatMap Ads Theme 2.4 has now been released along with HeatMap Extras Plugin 1.3 (Drop down menus). These releases just fix up a couple of small bugs and typos, plus changes the way that the nav-bar and cat-bar text is centered vertically to make things look a bit more consistent in that area across a wider range of browsers.

This version tidies up a few issues and adds support for threaded comments (woohoo!)

Things to know…

• The logic of the ‘Display Title and Tags’ tick box has been ‘inverted’ – It defaults to ‘on’ instead of ‘off’.
• Time formatting of posts and comments are now set to show whatever defaults you set in your theme admin.
• Child Theme override of common.php and preset.php now works properly – no need to copy every php file that contains common.php to your child theme anymore if you have made changes to common.php

Minor things

• Fixed ‘no posts found’ error – when posts are not found there were some situations where the code that displayed the error threw a wobbly – the error should be nice and tidy now.
• Removed double semicolon error (;;) in style.css
• Made more room on the categories bar – you should now be able to fit more categories in there.
• Categories and Pages nav bar overflow – no more annoying artefacts if you try put more categories or pages on the nav and cat bar – excess words will not show.
• Eliminated the references to missing images in the css.
• Styling of ol and li lists now looks neater and wraps around ads better.
• Preset Mode – No longer contains any simulated ads.

For HeatMap Insider Members, this release is teamed with updates for the HeatMap Extras drop downs plugin which now sports 4 levels, and the HeatMap Child Themes which now have appropriately coloured threaded comments styling.

Child themes also now have threaded comments styling to suit their colours.

If you need the multi level drop downs or the child themes what are you doing hanging around out there?  Come on inside! (the HeatMap Insider Forum that is!)