Preparation for update to 2.0 on sites using Thematic HTML5 plugin

I am currently testing Thematic 2.0 against upcoming WordPress 4.0. Thanks for reminding me of yet another configuration to test.

The HTML5 plugin will no longer be needed with 2.0 since the markup has been incorporated into the theme. The plugin can safely be deactivated and deleted.

Yes some modification will be needed if you want to use the new features.

The child theme needs to tell Thematic that it wants to use html5 markup and to use the new responsive stylesheet. There will be a clear transition guide up at the documentation site. But it is not hard. A couple of lines of code in your functions.php file:

add_theme_support( 'thematic_html5' );

function mychild_add_thematic_styles() {
    return array('thematic-main');
}
add_action( 'thematic_childtheme_style_dependencies', 'mychild_add_thematic_styles' );

You might need to adjust some css, specifically regarding the navigation. You might also want to adjust the styling of the mobile navigation since that is a new feature.

Your child theme functions will work as before. You don’t *have* to update them in any way, but it can be good to go through them and check that the markup matches the rest of the theme. The markup structure will also be outlined at the docs site, but you can use any standard tool like firebug to check the output.

Note that you don’t *have* to modify the child theme at all. Child themes will still continue to work as before using xhtml markup. It is only if you want to switch to html5 that you need to modify the child theme. This is for backwards compatibility reasons.

Thanks, middlesister. I’m very grateful for all of the great work that is going into the updating of Thematic.

For us, the responsive part was not really a concern; our child theme, based off Scott Nix’s responsive base and also making use of a responsive menu plugin, is already working fine, and I hope that the update will not in itself change too much for our child theme. As I understand, all of the elements that were there before, will still be available, especially if we were styling based on class names as much as possible. Our child theme doesn’t rely on @import of thematic css files, nor do we intend to use anything from the new main.css file in this case. (Although we are already designing some new sites with childthemes using it!) Thanks, though, for discussing that part of the equation, as it will probably be a question that comes into play with many child themes, especially those based on Thematic’s own samplechildtheme.

And because we were already using HTML5 markup thanks to the Thematic HTML5 plugin, I’m anticipating no major issues.

It sounds like we will just be able to do the Thematic theme update, disable the Thematic HTML5 plugin, check carefully for any issues, and make some (hopefully mostly minor) changes to our CSS if we find any changes. Very sweet!

Thanks again!