It's been almost a year since I launched Akurai theme and now I'm very excited to announce Akurai version 2.0.
I've been providing support and talking to theme users about what they think is missing from the theme and what they'd like to be included during next updates and I've collected some valuable feedback during this time. Some of them I implemented for this second version of the theme and some are still in the roadmap and are coming soon.
AMP Support
The most requested feature was AMP support. So Akurai 2.0 has AMP support baked into the theme out of the box. It works perfectly well with official WordPress AMP plugin. All you need to do is install and activate the plugin. After activating it, visit AMP settings page and make sure "Transitional" option is selected for "Template Mode" and the checkbox for "Supported Templates" is checked.
That's all. Now you can navigate to AMP URLs and check your websites' AMP versions.
You can read more about Akurai AMP support in the docs
FAQ block
Another frequently mentioned feature was schema.org markup for FAQ blocks, and now FAQ blocks include the structured data markup by default, and for all your previously added blocks it will be automatically enabled.
Read more about FAQ blocks in the docs.
Lazy image block
You know images can be huge in size, and that can slow down your website. And that's kind of an issue as usually high quality images are heavy and when you try to optimize them and lower the size they may become pixelated or distorted, which is no good.
To overcome people decided to download and display images only when a user navigates to them, when they are in the viewport. This helps not only speed up pages with "large" images but also if you have a lot of traffic it may save you some bandwidth as some of the images will never be requested.
Since Akurai 2.0 you have a new block: Lazy image - you upload the image you want (or select from library), specify an alt tag and add optional CSS classes. Save it and your image will be loaded lazily.
Read more about Lazy image block in the docs.
Image improvements
There's been a lot of other internal improvements to images. Now you can specify review logo image sizes to make sure when pages are loaded the document keeps its layout and the page doesn't look weird while downloading images.
Read more about this in the docs.
Recent posts block
Turns out people like (need) publishing blog posts. Akurai had a single view for Recent posts block (and you could also display posts in a blog page with a different layout). Now since version 2.0 there's a new layout for Recent posts block called No Excerpt. It's a nice compact layout that doesn't display any content or excerpt, just the thumbnail and the title.
Read more about recent posts block in the docs.
Other changes
There are other minor changes, improvements and bug fixes included in this new version as well.
How to get the updates
Have you previously purchased Akurai? Check your WP dashboard for the new version soon, it will be there for you free of any charge. If you don't have it yet, what are you waiting for? Head over to Akurai page and purchase it! ;-)
Let me know if you have any questions and as always any comments/feedback is welcome.