Supernova 6.0.8

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A new release has landed, and this time we have a long list of fixes and updates.

First, your Google PageSpeed Insights score for Best Practices and Accessibility will be a guaranteed 100%. We made some small tweaks behind the scenes:

• Added ARIA label to all the menus for accessibility
• Added ARIA label to the side panel for accessibility
• Added ARIA label to the mobile menus for accessibility
• Removed the “Read more” link from blog articles for a better “best practices” score

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) is a set of roles and attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications (especially those developed with JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities.

It supplements HTML so that interactions and widgets commonly used in applications can be passed to assistive technologies when there is not otherwise a mechanism. For example, ARIA enables accessible JavaScript widgets, form hints and error messages, live content updates, and more.

The first rule of ARIA use is “If you can use a native HTML element or attribute with the semantics and behaviour you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state, or property to make it accessible, then do so”.

MDN Web Docs

Next, we fixed some small bugs that prevented our users from having a good admin experience:

• Removed transient caching from the latest articles block, so new articles are instantly visible
• Merged side panel JavaScript for better performance

As WordPress 6.3 is coming soon, we added some developer features and updated the theme framework to be compatible with the latest block editor:

• Added theme support for the latest block editor (WordPress 6.3) – buttons, links, and border radius
• Replace all instances of “Reusable Block” with “Pattern” for WordPress 6.3 compatibility

Note that your reusable blocks remain the same, they are just called differently now – patterns. Also note, that due to this drastic change on WordPress’ side, we decided to create our own reusable blocks, that will be shared among Supernova, WP Property Drive and Acquaint FAQ.

The front-end got some small improvements to the menu and the snack-bar:

• Tweaked the regular (not relaxed) navigation layout
• Improved the Snackbar module with layouts and themes

If you are still using Yoast’s SEO plugin, we made sure the Breadcrumbs module is enabled before displaying the links.

If you are using Gravity Forms, which we strongly suggest you do, we added native code integration for the correct Euro currency and format, a Gravity Forms licensing layout issue and also added a CC field for email notifications.

For developers, we updated our back-end UI library, Thin UI, and added all available shortcodes for a bird’s eye view of what’s possible.

• Update Thin UI to latest version (2.1.0)
• Add an available shortcode lister feature for developers

Finally, we removed some obsolete features:

• Removed AddThis integration