[1.0 BETA] Testers needed for WP Tiles 1.0 beta

I am testing. It is GREAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just what I needed…

Look at https://www.carlitoergosum.nl (dutch)

After a while using this plugin I get more and more exited. It takes some fiddling but it works nicely. Can I pass on a wishlist to you somehow? My main wish would be an easy way to play with the CSS, in order to remove or add borders to the tiles, change text colours, fonts etc.

A question: will I be notified by my WP-backend if the Beta version is promoted to production?

Still testing. It seems that loading the a page with tiles takes some time. Can you speed this up? Is it dependent on the amount of posts loaded? I have no animations active…

Another find: if the tiles-page is set as home/landingpage, the pagination doesn’t work. One is stuck to the first page.

Hi Carlo!

Thanks for testing the beta, and for your feedback! I’m very happy to see a ‘newspaper style’ layout with images on your site! That’s one of the things the new beta was intended for, but is hardly used.

The easiest way to play with the css now, is by passing a custom WP Tiles stylesheet using the wp_tiles_stylesheet filter. This mainly meant for themes that want to integrate with WP Tiles.

When the beta becomes 1.0 you may not get an update notice in the backend. If you subscribe to the newsletter (on the https://wp-tiles.com/ website) you will get notified! (Don’t worry about spam, I have yet to send the first newsletter!!)

The main thing with the speed are the animations. Then WP Tiles will load after the page has finished loading. But you have them off, so there shouldn’t be a huge performance hit. Next, I would mention lowering the image size – but you don’t use images. WP Tiles should then be as fast as querying the posts directly.. I don’t know any other performance problems with the plugin.

Finally, the pagination. Very strange! I have tiles on front pages, with pagination. Do you by any chance have a test site where I can see the problem happening?

Thanks again!

Mike

Ey Mike,

Yah, no sweat! I’m glad you like it… ??

The speed thingy is solved, it turned out to be another plugin that slowed my backend down (iThemes Security). I think that if you looked now, you’d find the response time very acceptable, like I do too…

Unfortunately I can’t help you with a test-site for the pagination issue. It might have been the same plugin as the one swamping my performance (which has been removed now). I am yet to test this, and if I find the same issue I’ll let you know. It might be gone now.

I subscribed to your newsletter. So I’ll wait for the final version, although the current one works fine.. ?? .

I will stay away from the css thing because that is too complicated for me as it is. For one, finding which topic to change in the main css is very difficult for an amateur like me. I did manage though, changing the hover-colour of the pagination, but I was looking for two other things: how to change the padding inside the tiles and how to give them a border. Don’t worry, no rush. You might want to make menu’s for the tile make-up, just like for the other options, but you might want to do that after Xmas, NewYear, your B-Day, cleaning out the garage and cooking a special meal for your mother in law. In short, I won’t be expecting such a thing any time soon…. ??

Cheers and take care. Great plugin….

Carlo

Subscribing to your newsletter does’t send the confirmation link. Nothing in any spamfolder either…

Did some more testing. Found the following:

– If the home(landing)page contains tiles and it is paginated at the bottom, you can’t go to the next page. Unfortunately I can’t offer you a testsite to show this.

– The amount of tiles (articles) on the page (naturally) has a lot of influence on loading speed. I brought that down from 50 to 17 and loading speed has increased significantly.

Later more…

I started using this plugin today. Firstly i installed stable version, and it was great. It was exactly what i was looking for. But because i just started to design my new site and test things on it i decided to use this beta version.

For now i have a problem using shortcode when selecting category. It doesnt show anything if i use “category=Somecategory” in shortcode. Tiles are displayed OK without that option.

Second, i really miss default option post per page

Third, had some difficulties with styling titles on tiles, but managed to do that with my own css. Maybe it would be better if there is some default css styling like in stable version.

I am trying to managed to make one of my tiles static. I wanted to use it as a banner place. Is that possible? Maybe if i define its number and set static picture in place of it?

Great plugin! We use it at https://www.pieterzandvliet.com/ and its great for websites that are more based on images than on text. Can’t wait for the new version to arrive ??

Mike – great plugin – does what it says on the tin.
I’m using beta 1.0, nice interface, quick to save changes.

A couple of questions/comments…
I’m using it primarily for galleries at this point (https://eddshots.com) and wanted to continue using the “lightbox” effect I’ve been using – or something similar (not a fan of “carousel”). However, after trying many lightbox style plugins, the only one that plays well with WP-Tiles is Ryan Hellyer’s Simple Colorbox (https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/simple-colorbox/) it’s one of two that have no settings.
They work well together and I thought were a perfect fit when I first tested…however, now (without any other additions), on mobile devices, WP-Tiles doesn’t respond at all – not even if specified to use a different tile grid. It seems to only create extremely small thumbnails (my default thumbnail size is set at 200×200) that are too small to really work with on even a large screen phone. I’ve tested with my Nexus 4 as well as Firefox extensions that show responsive sizing as low as 320×480 and spoofing the user agent – none work.
Anything I may be missing? It looks great now and I’d hate to have to change it!

Hi @captainswallow,

Thanks for testing the beta!

I had a look at your galleries, and the reason why WP Tiles becomes a small thumbnail grid, is because the small screen grid is set to:

. . . . . . . .

Which is 8 square tiles per line. To fix this, either set the small screen grid in the options panel, or set it in your shortcode like this:

[wp-tiles small_screen_grid='Grid Name']

Or, if you want to use the same grid on large and small screens, set breakpoint to 0, like this:

[wp-tiles breakpoint=0]

Cheers,
Mike

Ps. If you still have problems, please open a new support topic so the rest of the people in this thread don’t get e-mail notifications for every message!

I’m guessing the reason my Simple Color box plugin works here, is because it automatically loads the lightbox for all linked images, whereas most of those plugins rely on the link containing rel=”something” hardcoded in the HTML.

@mike thanks for the tip – what was confusing was that I did not have “use a different grid for mobile” switched on and it wasn’t working.
I switched it on, selected the same grid, set the break point to 0 – which works – but then switched it off again…and it still works! the shortcodes idea will be saved for future reference too…thanks.

@ryan Hellyer – thanks for the response; great plugin, always nice when it “just works”! FYI, a previous plugin I was using (Ulf Benjaminsson’s wp-jquery-lightbox https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-jquery-lightbox/), was a similar style of simple/automatic (though with the option to switch off and a couple of minor settings) and it doesn’t work. Of course it’s a couple of years old, but works flawlessly otherwise on any device.

Hi Mike, Thanks for the great plug-in.
I first installed wp-tiles 1.0 beta on 17 Jan and it was working fine except that it couldn’t limit by category or tag, as per @bhcrow’s comments.
So I downloaded the latest version wp-tiles on 22 Jan, but there was an error in the activation. The error message states:
The plugin wp-tiles/wp-tiles-loader.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.
But I could see the wp-tiles button appearing on the settings bar on the left. As soon as I click on some other button e.g. Post or Pages, the wp-tiles button disappeared!! And on the plugin admin page, the plugin is not activated.

I have not updated any of themes, plugins, wordpress at all.
It’s very strange but could someone please help?