Headway 1.5 Now Available

Nov 14, 2009
11 Comments

People have been asking us for weeks now when the new version of Headway is ready for download. I’m happy to announce that it’s ready, and you can now get it.

I’ve been showing you some of its capabilities over the past few weeks, and the comments and tweets have been really encouraging. Briefly, though, let me outline the main improvements from 1.0 to 1.5:

  • True WYSYWIG Layout in the Blog Theme: The Layout Editor is now the Visual Layout Editor, and it is truly visual: you work directly on the blog page as though you were viewing it on the web, and you can simply click on something and edit it in a floating properties dialog box.
  • Faster, Cleaner Code: The underlying code base has been rewritten to be even faster and more responsive.
  • More Header Tweaks: We’ve added new capabilities to make it even easier to get what you want in Headway without writing custom code. Now you can rearrange and realign your header navigation more easily.
  • Photo Gallery Leaf: We’ve added a leaf that lets you drop an image gallery for which you can command a host of settings. It does what you want it to do, without any custom HTML, CSS, or PHP.

To see a complete list of the changes, improvements, and bug fixes, check out the announcement on the Headway blog.

  • It's my first time to heard about it, is it just like any kind of blogging platform such as wordpress and blogspot? But then I guess with that platform it needs a payment right?
  • Matthew, it is technically a theme for WordPress. But it is much more than that, since most themes do not let you design every page of your blog.
  • Oh!! I see I was thinking that it's a newer form of blogging platform. Anyway, can I apply that theme to a CMS such Drupal and Joomla?
  • Cool, wish I had the money to buy it... I might when I have the money!
  • Michael, I've read on Headway's site that "CSS and JavaScript is now combined and compressed much more than before"...

    Yet this very own web page (I suppose you're running Headway 1.5) has 16 external javascript scripts, 13 external stylesheets and a total of 50 HTTP requests! GZIP is not used. Is there any way to make it more compact/efficient?
  • Yan, as you have already noticed, I haven't upgraded my own blog yet (you know the old saying: the cobbler's children have no shoes!). However, not all web hosts deal very well with GZIP and some WordPress plugins won't work if it's enabled. Other external JavaScript files may be due to other plugins, as well as various widgets embedded into the page, such as analytics or social media connectors. I felt this needed to be explained, so I published your comment anyway as a chance to address this. If you noticed it and had concerns, no doubt others did, too. Thanks for bringing this up and giving me a chance to address it. :)
  • Oh, I see that you're using Headway 1.0. That means my comment is pointless. No need to post it on the site!
  • The new headway is awesome.
  • That is rockin. I'm a fan of Headway for sure, and I'm excited to dig into the new features :) Thanks for your work on this theme Michael...it's truly a game changer.
  • Sweet. Make sure you pay careful attention to the instructions if you're upgrading from 1.0.
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