Views 1.6 with WordPress 3.9 Support and Lots More

   Amir

April 16, 2014

WordPress 3.9 was just released and we’re happy to release a beta update for Views. Besides WordPress 3.9 support, Views 1.6 comes with tons of new features!

WordPress 3.9 includes a number of ‘under the hood’ changes and Views 1.6 is updated to support them. Since Easter (and Passover) is upon us, we are holding back this update for after the holiday. We rather not make major releases and go on holiday. When our entire team is back next week, we’ll complete QA, update the documentation and have a proper Views 1.6 release.

In the meanwhile, if you must update your, or client sites, you should update to Views 1.6 (which is in beta). This update will prevent your WordPress 3.9 site from outputting notices about deprecated function calls.

Download Views 1.6

Since it’s in beta, Views 1.6 is not yet available for automatic updates. You can get it from your wp-types.com account. Log in, go to Downloads, scroll all the way to the bottom and get Views 1.6.0b1.

New Features in Views 1.6

Besides WordPress 3.9 support, which is pretty important, Views 1.6 comes with a few features that we’ve been eager to deliver for a long time.

  • Responsive Bootstrap grid layouts – in addition to the existing layout styles of table, table grid and lists, you will now find a Bootstrap Grid layout. This layout helps build modern sites with clean semantic HTML. It’s also responsive.
  • Dependent values for custom searches – Views custom search now officially went into the ‘big league’. If you want to build powerful listing and classifieds sites, you’ll be able to do just this with Views. I’ll write a separate blog post, bragging about the new features of the custom searches in Views 1.6.

This blog post hardly describes all the goodies in Views 1.6. We’re in the process of updating documentation and we’ll have a proper announcement early next week. In the meanwhile, if you need to update your sites to WordPress 3.9, you can use Views 1.6.

 

Comments 26 Responses

  1. Thanks for the update, Amir. I can’t wait to try out the dependent values thingy!

    On a side note, what I was really, really hoping to hear news about is CRED. It’s been WAY too long since you guys said you’ll release a new “Zebra Forms-less” version among other goodies. Whatever happened to that plan?

  2. That is brilliant – just tested the dependant values – Just what I have been working on for the last two weeks! Works Really Well!!!!

    Well Done!

    • Thanks a lot for the feedback. When you have a nice production site running with the new parametric search, we’d love to add it to our showcase.

      • Amir – not wanting to be negative, but the dependancy does not work when you use the Filter in the “WP Views Filter” widget…. I’m hoping this a bug as ideally we would want this to work in a right bar…

  3. When will you update everything to Bootstrap 3? There’s no point in adding new features for an old release which is not officially supported anymore, I need features for the current release.

    • The new grid output in Views 1.6 works with both Bootstrap 2 and 3. You can choose the Bootstrap version in Views->Settings. Layouts plugin also works with Bootstrap 3 and there’s a minimalistic Bootstrap 3 theme. What other updates are you looking for?

  4. Hi Guys!
    Really good news for holiday time. Appreciate your work – helps build better websites.

    I will wait for this “separate blog post” about the new features of the parametric searches in Views 1.6 – as we are planing to want to build into our site powerful listing and classifieds features just this with Views.

    We are also considering to extend this craziness and go with Views to build Event Calendar? Until now we were using All-In-One Events Calendar by Time.ly, but there were heavy problems on the admin and server side of the sites, creating long-lasting list of bad behavior.

    Then -one of my admins asked if it is possible to use Toolset to create such a system ourselves:
    * Types for custom post types (event post, event tags, event categories, event venues, event addresses, etc.)
    * CRED – for creating front-end form for adding events by users
    * Views for matching all those above into different displays – with some widgets also, and especially with parametric search
    With a parametric search you are bragging about this could be done, I hope.
    What I am not sure about is iCal/Google options, import export options for the data, and map integration for this
    What do you think of this idea? Is it possible?

    Regards, Lukas

    • I’m not familiar enough with the details of ical data format. We haven’t looked at it in this release, so I can’t really say what it takes to make that import into WordPress.

      The nice thing about Toolset plugins is that they use the WordPress standard storage (posts, fields). So, if you find a dedicated plugin that imports / exports ical data to posts and fields, you will be able to display that calendar with Views easily.

  5. Amir,

    From my initial tests of the beta I’m very happy with the new (and long-waited) parametric filters. This opens a whole new world of possibilities for Toolset sites. Now I wait for the many-to-many relationship functionality…

    • Thanks for letting us know. For many-to-many relationships, we’ll need to first implement in Types. The next major development cycle for Toolset is on Types and we’ll try to fit this in. I’ll write more about Types updates when we get started.

  6. Hi,

    I am just a beginner in Toolset world. Just a quick question with parametic filters can i achieve filters provided on the site http://www.housing.com using TYPES.

    I am planning to create this website feature using Toolset if anybody can comment on that.

    Thanks,
    Bhavin

    • The homepage on that site includes a number of elements. Can you tell me which ones you’re referring to? If you can describe the functionality you’re trying to implement, in words, it will make it a lot easier to answer and help you.

      • Hi Amir,

        Thanks for the prompt reply. So now that you have asked for the details here you go. I hope you dont get bugged up.

        In the Site first page just select… Mumbai > Go to next page in location type “Dadar”… You will be redirected to Google Map page which will show you markers for all the location. ON this page on right top in menu if you see you will get FILTER symbol in that you see how search is filtered and how filter parameter updated in it. One good feature is “In my search result I do not have any location having swimming pool then in my filter that parameter will not appear all together. What I am planning is my custom post type will have these many custom fields and all those custom fields will come in search parameters.

        This is the what exactly I am looking for. Please let me know from this what is achievable via ToolSet? Just for a note this website is build on RoR. I am tring to build this using wordpress PHP.

        For this website I am doing POC using theme MetroDir + Toolset.

        Let me know if this is the correct direction.

        Thanks,
        Bhavin

        MetroDir – http://themeforest.net/item/metrodir-directory-listings-wordpress-theme/6897791?WT.ac=search_thumb&WT.seg_1=search_thumb&WT.z_author=uouapps

  7. I’ve tried the Beta and I do have an option called “Bootstrap Grid” in the Layout Wizard now.

    However it inserts exactly the same code as “Unformatted”. Am I missing something here?

    • Sorry fort he very late reply. I suspect that your theme doesn’t load the Bootstrap CSS. In this case, you will get all the HTML for a grid, but it will look like an unformatted list, because there is no CSS to style all these DIVs.

      To experiment with the grid layout, I suggest that you download our demo Bootstrap themes. They are available in the downloads page. If you like this, you can load the Bootstrap CSS in your own theme and you’ll get these grids too.

      Does this help?

  8. I had a quick look on the new parametric search but I couldn’t figure out how to make the dependent values option work.. Anyway, I guess that with the documentation to come, things will be a piece of cake.

    In between time, would this new dependent values functionality will allow us to build calculators ?
    Like for example the following plugin does :
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/calculated-fields-form/

    I hadn’t dealt with this question in depth yet, but a quick search on the forum shows that this topic has already been talked about a few times. It seems that using Cred and/or some extra javascript & php code would allow this but I’m just wondering if the dependent values within Views would do the trick more easily (?)