ThemeFlood.

Introduction

Consider Glide as an older, elderly, slightly more traditional RapidWeaver theme design. But don't dismiss it as a theme that's no longer relevant. The densely compact nature of this theme lends itself well to content-heavy websites and blogs. It would've easy to discontinue Glide or do a radical overhaul of it's styling; but this theme design is more-or-less perfect as it is, for what it's intended for.

You'll find that Glide is mobile compatible; with the navigation menu converted into a "toggle" on narrower screens. The choice of theme style and colour settings is largely unchanged from earlier releases. Its strong codebase ensures excellent all-round reliability on different web browsers and devices, including older web browsers like Internet Explorer.

Changes in Glide 4

Glide v4 was released in December 2020. The purpose of this update was to preserve as much of the original styling and settings as possible, while fixing some obvious bugs, adding some feature requests, and moving the theme over to ThemeFlood. Some of the work included the following.

• Major overhaul of smartphone compatibility features, to improve support for more smartphones.
• Added more layout width and font size choices.
• Optimised all images used by the theme, to reduce page file sizes.
• Support has been added for RapidWeaver dragged and dropped banner images, which is now the primary method for adding custom banner images within Glide.
• jQuery is now called from within the theme, instead of remotely from Google. Better for reliability and privacy.
• Modified the viewport meta tag, to allow smartphone users to zoom further in or out of a webpage.
• Button labels are changeable using CSS code.
• Updated all the former Glide style presets to work with this newer version of the theme.
• Improvements to the formatting of heading tags.
• RapidWeaver contact form fields stretch wider and feature a black border.
• Added the required code so Glide can be used with the free ThemeFlood stacks.
• Fixed some HTML5 validation errors.

Customers eligible for this free update can download the latest version of Glide from their Paddle account.

Navigation

Glide can either be configured to with drop-down navigation links (this is the default configuration) or with a split navigation layout. A split navigation layout means that parent page links are displayed at the top and subpages are listed in the sidebar. Most commonly, users of the theme prefer the drop-down navigation layout - especially when building responsive websites.

All of the older code for Internet Explorer has been left within the theme. Although Internet Explorer is no longer officially supported, on some rare occasions, a few RapidWeaver users have been specifically looking for a theme that still works with "ancient" web browsers! Such instances could include an old computer being run in a school or building an "intranet" type website to be run on older computers in an office. Code still exists in Glide for browser support as far back as Internet Explorer 6, but obviously this has not been tested and isn't official supported anymore.

Translating Theme Labels

Customers of the Glide theme often asked how they could change some of the text labels used in the theme mobile layouts; like the words 'menu' and 'sidebar'. Either because users wanted to translate them into another language or they wanted them to display something else. As of Glide 4, a newer and easier method has been devised to accomplish this task. You can use custom CSS code like this:

#mobileMenuTab:before {
  content: 'Menu';
}

Custom CSS code can either be entered into your Settings > Code > CSS box (to apply the code on all pages of the website) or you can enter it into the Page Inspector > HTML > CSS box on every page. Simply change the words to the ones you want to display instead. This technique will work for newer web browsers, but not older web browsers. However it's worth remembering that users of older web browsers are far less likely to be viewing your website in "smartphone mode" where these buttons are normally displayed.

Easy Drag-and-Drop Banners

Gone are the days of using code to change the banner images in Glide or buying third-party theme modification apps! If using RapidWeaver 7 and above, you can make use of drag-and-drop banner support. As the name suggests, you simply have to place a suitable image within the Banner box, within the RapidWeaver General settings or the Page Inspector. Glide will take the image you provide and embed it as a banner background image. Ideal for quickly adding some distinction and uniqueness to your webpages.

Banner slideshows and video are feasible too. You can configure these using a suitable stack and then embed the stack within ExtraContent 1. Some further theme styles may require adjustment (like the height of the banner). However the banner area in Glide is very customisable and can accept various content types and stacks.

Breadcrumb Trails

A unique feature of Glide is that it supports multiple breadcrumb trails. The purpose of these links are to show a website user where they have currently navigated within the website. A user can click links to navigate up to higher pages. Breadcrumbs are useful in larger websites. The theme style settings provide some options relevant to breadcrumb links. To make sure breadcrumbs are displayed in your website, go to Settings > Advanced and make sure 'display breadcrumb trail' is enabled.

Includes Font Awesome

These little icons are perfect for applying onto subheadings or buttons. Because they are handled as actual fonts, they scale readily to any size and are easy to recolour. The free variant of Font Awesome is built into Glide. You do not have to buy extra stacks or plugins to use these icons. Just refer to the Font Awesome website and use their provided code snippets for the icons you want to use. More details are available in the ThemeFlood knowledgebase.

Widest Web Browser Compatibility

Glide works on older web browsers (like Internet Explorer) all the way up to the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, Chrome and more. All the tedious testing and bug fixing has already been done for you! This makes Glide good to use for websites, where the target audience might be using older or outdated web browsers. Especially in developing countries or regions of the world like China, India, Russia etc.

20 Preset Styles

Glide comes bundled with 20 style "presets", which are available for selection from within the styles dropdown. These instantly give you a choice of "child themes" to build with. Or modify these presets further for your own requirements. Few RapidWeaver themes come with this many style presets. There are styles listed here to suit almost every type of website you might want to build in RapidWeaver using Glide.

ExtraContent

Glide has a total of 7 ExtraContent containers. These are handy if you need to present some extra links, social media buttons or other basic content, in areas of the page which are not normally editable with RapidWeaver. To get content into these ExtraContent containers, you can either use the ExtraContent code snippet or an ExtraContent stack. There are more details about ExtraContent in the ThemeFlood knowledge base. Some of the ExtraContent containers require switching on in the theme style settings, using some checkboxes.

Newly Simplified Mobile Menu

The old mobile menu was very complicated. Glide v4 has a greatly simplified mobile menu which uses only a few lines of Javascript code. Once opened, the menu animates into view and stretches to fill the whole page. All page navigation links are presented tidily as a bulleted list. It makes browsing a long list of pages far more intuitive. In older versions of Glide, the mobile menu only worked on iPhone, but this new version supports all smartphones. Mobile adaptations are displayed on all screens less-than 768px wide.