We’ve updated our LSX theme multiple times since its first release in 2014. On first release we received an official theme review from wordpress.org which really help to roadmap the future of the theme and helped us to identify many key areas for improvement. Since then we’ve consistently improved and enhance the theme to the point where we needed a major release to bring the overall design, functionality and core structure up to scratch. We are proud to announce that LSX 2.0 has been released!

With this latest release we really wanted to improve the site architecture, design and ultimately the user experience. We’ve also introduced four new extensions namely, Sharing, Geo Content, Search and Projects.

LightSpeed’s new LSX built site

We’ve just released our own new website which utilizes the LSX theme straight out the box! Through building our own site we uncovered some real world issues, and rather than fixing with custom code we refined and improved the theme to resolve this.

Design

We started with a thorough and comprehensive redesign process where we mapped out and identified design elements for improvement, or in some cases, complete overhaul. We needed to establish a series of design patterns that would ultimately guide the rest of the process. First we focused on the homepage as well as the blog single and archive pages.

This allowed us to highlight and resolve stylistic issue’s which we could then apply to other area’s of the theme as well as to the extensions. We carefully selected fonts, colours and layouts to give the theme a more modern, clean and sophisticated look.

LSX Team – The team extension received a total visual design overhaul, moving away from the list layout and opting instead for a grid layout with circular profile images. The Team single pages are now interconnected with all of the LSX post types allowing you to connect services, projects, blog posts and testimonials to a particular team member and have this related content display on their bio page.

LSX Testimonials – The testimonials extension also received a  re-design, which was carefully considered as this simple and uncluttered style would be inherited by our Tour Operators Plugin.

LSX Banners – The banners extension has new functionality allowing for customized banner text and tag lines, as well as being able to include a logo and primary call to action button in the banner.

LSX Projects -The LSX Projects extension was born out of LightSpeeds own requirements to showcase and package our portfolio with interconnected and related content. We wanted to link our portfolio entries to our Team and Services extension so we created a sidebar container which houses all the important information for the project.

We’ve updated and improved all of the other LSX extensions to be inline with the latest designs for LSX 2.0.

Code

With the style guide in place and a clear design direction established, we then started to look at improvements to the site architecture. We re-wrote all the SASS files and restructured these inline with WordPress best practice, with the primary objective of making the theme more efficient, developer friendly and enabling greater customization via the child theme.

As with our previous releases all the LSX post types are interconnected. We’ve built on this and made this a solid feature of the theme.

LSX 2.0 is now 100% compatible with WooCommerce. All WooCommerce page templates now work correctly, inheriting button styles, shopping cart, checkout and account pages from WooCommerce.

For LSX 2.0 we’ve cleared and addressed over 48 “issues” on github, many of these being pure enhancements initiated and logged by our own team, as well as working on fixes and clearing any bugs reported buy our users.

Found a bug?

If you find a bug please report it on github. If you have any other problems with LSX 2.0 please let us know.