Backlight 5.4.0 is now available, bringing masonry-type grids to Kookaburra albums and essays, and improvements to grid metadata features! Also, we’ve gutted all things Twitter.
Masonry
To get started with masonry, edit your page template, dive into the Image Presentation: Masonry control group, and switch “Enable Masonry Presentation” to ON.
Once done, you will be able to use masonry layouts within Kookaburra Album templates, or when using the essay features to embed an album on any page.
To get going quickly, I recommend dropping a masonry grid onto a page using those essay features, then customize the presentation options to your liking in the page template.
If, for whatever reason, you should ever switch “Enable Masonry Presentation” to OFF in your template, any existing masonry grids will fall back to using the standard grid layout.
Twitter has been on a downward trajectory for more than a year already, since coming under its current ownership. The site’s relevance has tanked, and so it’s no longer as essential as it used to be. Meanwhile, the sharing experience has gotten worse.
Given the site’s various instabilities, degradations, and volatility, I just have no interest in awarding it even the smallest amount of my attention. And so, I’ve gutted all Twitter-related code from Backlight.
At some point in the future, I would like to devise a sort of API so that users can more easily offer whatever sharing options they prefer. I don’t know what that will look like, or when I will attempt it. It would be less convenient than checkboxes in the designer, but would hopefully be more flexible than my prescribing sharing options for some socials and not others. Hopefully, I will be able to find that balance.
Change log
v5.4.0
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– Kookaburra: Adds Masonry image grids for album and essay presentations
– Removes all things Twitter
– Adds background-color option for Carousel presentations
– Kookaburra Album Set: improves grid cell borders
– Kookaburra Album and Essay: improves grid metadata behavior, and new option to hide grid metadata at a chosen breakpoint
– Updates slideshow dependencies
– Kookaburra: Updates various descriptions in the designer UI