The people have spoken! Core v1.17 marks the return of the slideshow banner. Some users of the previous iteration of the template will remember the homepage slideshow banners, but they’ve been unavailable for some time. While this feature is now available on all sites, we caution overuse. It’s worth reading Nielsen Norman Group’s "Carousel Usability: Designing an Effective UI for Websites with Content Overload."
In addition to the slideshow banner, we’ve also brought back the option for a "Home" link in the main navigation. While we’ve read the research that says Home links don’t add additional usability value when the site title or logo link to the homepage and there are breadcrumbs on the interior pages, we thought it was to at least have the option. If breadcrumbs can be disabled, we might as well be able to enable the Home link, right?
Finally, we’ve upgraded the icons used throughout the template to the latest version of Font Awesome! We’ve added backward compatibility so that none of your old icons will break, but there are a plethora of new icon options!
Features:
- New module alert 🚨: Users can now add slideshows to their page banners. They function very similarly to the Multimedia Background modules. Related reading: Nielsen Norman Group’s "Carousel Usability: Designing an Effective UI for Websites with Content Overload."
- A Home link can now be added to the main navigation on desktop. It was always there for mobile. This option can be enabled from your website’s Site Information block. Related reading: Nielsen Norman Group's "Best Practices for Home Page Links on Websites."
Improvements:
- Upgraded Font Awesome from v4 to v6
- Background videos now only load and play when you’ve gotten to the video. This performance enhancement allows users to use multiple video backgrounds throughout a page without the performance of that page suffering
- Added an alt text field to the images in the new Overlapping Media + Text module