Aggie UX 2.0 WordPress theme now available

It’s official — Aggie UX 2.0 is now available in our Aggie UX WordPress theme!

Thank you to everyone who has reported a bug, submitted a feature request and helped us test! Many have contributed, but I want to give a special shout-out to Lindsey Norman at DSA, Cindy Mahoney at Mays, Mark Bennett at Engineering, Jennie Lamb at VetMed, Justin Romack at Disability Resources and Ryan Chadek from Inventive. They have each contributed in significant ways in recent months!

What’s New in the Theme

We have put a lot of effort into big new features such as the mega menu, AUX 2.0 components, the directory and the 150th anniversary banner. We’ve also made a bunch of improvements in smaller, less noticeable areas, like accessibility, user experience for site editors, improving page load speed and bug fixes.

Mega Menu Functionality

This release adds mega menu functionality to our site header and navigation options. Dropdown menus are also still available.

While we were modifying the navigation code, we also simplified the way we talk about the different options to focus on the site identity type: lockup identity or text identity.

Options to edit your navigation, site header and more are available in the WordPress Customizer.

Learn how to customize your theme

Directory and Profiles

The 2.0 release officially brings in the functionality to have profiles in a filterable directory. A directory cannot exist without profiles.

Our WordPress implementation allows site owners to determine what sections are available on profiles, control the headings across sections, and set a default location for each profile.

Learn how to edit directory and profiles

Sitewide Alerts

This release adds the ability to set sitewide banner alerts that can display on every page of your site.

Learn how to set up a sitewide alert

Custom 404 Pages

You now have the ability to customize the messaging on your site’s 404 pages. You can either keep the default text and only update the site administrator’s title and email, or customize the entire message.

Learn how to customize your 404 page

150th Celebration Banner

The Texas A&M 150th celebration banner is integrated directly into this theme.

Learn how to turn on the 150th Celebration banner

Improved Editor User Experience

A banner displays when you are previewing a private or unpublished page/post to help add clarity to what site visitors can see and what they cannot.

We have spent significant time updating labels and help text across components and templates to bring the Aggie UX WordPress theme into better alignment with our other Aggie UX products.

Advanced Enhancements to Post Types

This release also includes several enhancements to post types, archives and search.

Enhanced post type archive, post type search settings and functionality:
- Archive pages are now more forgiving of missing/incomplete search and archive settings.
- Less search configuration is now required. Default choices for search filter fields are provided and sorted by the selected input field type.
Granular control of more AUX features for post-types:
- Selectively turn on or off archive featured posts for each post type.
- Selectively turn on or off posts in the recent posts selector fields for each post type.
- Selectively turn on or off the archive search option for each post type.
- Selectively turn on or off taxonomy/term/category tags on the page for each post type.

Optimized Code + Accessibility Improvements

This theme uses Aggie UX 2.0, which includes major changes and optimizations to our codebase (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) from Aggie UX 1.0. These optimizations:

Speed up load times for sites using Aggie UX by making our CSS file 6x smaller and reducing the number of JavaScript files — even after adding functionality
Eliminate reliance on external JavaScript libraries (jQuery)
Improve accessibility through structural HTML updates across the system
Increase consistency across class names, especially for component containers

Bug Fixes

This release also addresses several bugs found in earlier versions. Some notable fixes include:

Removed the AUX Search Block and AUX Curated Collection blocks. These blocks were designed for the Stories site theme and were not functioning correctly in the parent theme.
Fixed most of the bugs that have been reported since the last release. (THANK YOU to everyone who has helped us find and fix bugs!) We have also conducted user testing, extensive manual and automated testing which allowed us to identify and fix a number of additional potential issues.

How to Update Your Site

Always test new themes in a test environment before applying to your live site.

You don’t need to install the Aggie UX v2 WordPress theme immediately when it is released. Choose the time that works best for your team to test the theme on a development or staging copy of your website. Update the theme to your production website after you have confirmed the new theme doesn’t introduce issues to your site.

Please take extra care to review:

Any pages with custom development or code copied from aggieux.tamu.edu. You’ll need to update any code to the 2.0 version (for Aggie UX components) or make sure your custom development displays and functions as desired.
Any content controlled by third-party plugins. Especially if any third-party plugins are used for directory functionality.

How to Install the Aggie UX WordPress theme