On March 4th 2010, we launched our first ever smart theme, Flavorite. It was nearly two months in the making, went through 7 beta versions and brought new, intelligent ideas and intuitive features to the RapidWeaver market.

It would seem that the RapidWeaver community is ready to embrace “smart themes” and move toward smarter, easier, more intelligent products. We’ve decided to keep going with the technology we developed earlier this year and make an even smarter theme — a forward thinking theme that embraces future forward ideas, features, and standards.

Meet Havnit, Smart Got Smarter

As you can see in the above RapidWeaver Classroom video walkthrough, Havnit is a very smart, very ambitious theme with a lot of intelligent logic programmed into it. We took what we learned in Flavorite, improved upon it greatly, and went far beyond what we had last time. This might sound like it’s a complicated theme, but I’m happy to say that it’s not. In fact, outwardly you shouldn’t notice any of the advanced logic at all. The theme should just tick happily along, doing things that you would expect any website to … but with some major advances incorporated into the mix.

HTML5 and CSS3

Following the trail blazed before us by a few other RapidWeaver theme developers (namely Josh and Nick), we are adopting future forward methods and employing the new HTML5 and CSS3 working drafts. Because of this, we are fast tracking on our upcoming modern browser support policy by a few months. Havnit officially supports IE8+, Safari 4+, Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10.5+, Chrome 5+. You are free to use Havnit with IE6 and IE7 (and it does work in those browsers) but your experience will be somewhat hindered by speed.

Smart navigation

A number of years ago when we pioneered and popularized the commercial use of the split navigation techniques now used in every major theme, we thought the method would just be a temporary stop gap until Realmac Software could make such a feature native to RapidWeaver.

That method had one major drawback — for as many ways as we had to split any given navigation, there would be as many duplicates of the underlying code. It’s definitely not ideal to load the source code with duplicate, unnecessary and often hidden elements.

With Havnit, we are pioneering new split/multiple navigation techniques. Our new method generates only one block of navigation code, but efficiently distributes the sub navigation components to their designated areas. Simply put, it’s one navigation in two or more different places. The end result is a multi-tiered navigation system that is produced with 50% to 66% less markup. This means much cleaner, more semantic code.

Slide show with greater control

With Flavorite, we introduced built in slide shows for those who didn’t have the knowhow or desire to mess with Bannerzest. Havnit takes that slide show and enhances it significantly with greater user control, double the images, many more sequences to choose from, selectable effects, slide show duration, and effect duration. Havnit’s slide show just has way more awesome!

Smart Layout

It used to be that we would fill our themes with options that controlled fairly trivial things. Things like turning breadcrumb containers on and off — if you weren’t using a breadcrumb trail, why should there be space left over for it? This makes for an overly complex set of options for what are essentially relatively minor layout changes.

In Havnit, you no longer need to use the option panel to turn bits of the layout on or off. Havnit has a smart layout, smart enough to detect which portions of the site you are using and enable that part of the layout for you.

This is even true of ExtraContent. Just add your ExtraContent and Havnit will render its portion of the layout for you. No more having to dig through the options to turn ExtraContent areas on.

Beautiful… and Beautifully Powerful

Havnit is not just about brains, it’s about beauty and power too. Havnit is one of Chris Cifonie’s finest designs yet and is packed with layout width, header heights, variable width sidebar, and fonts galore. In fact, the advanced features in Havnit are actually aware of each other and their standard feature counterparts. This means that Havnit watches some of your theme selections and acts accordingly where needed, providing better plugin and browser support.

And just like Flavorite, Havnit looks and acts the same as any other RapidWeaver theme we’ve made. It just works for you … intelligently.

As a seyDoggy Ultimate theme, Havnit comes fully loaded with powerful features, including a built in slideshow, 3 tier smart navigation, rounded corners, ExtraContent, and a variety of others:

• HTML5
• selectable, customizable slideshow
• 4 ExtraContent areas
• RWmultitool ready
• 20 customizable headers/ExtraContent backgrounds
• header height adjustment
• 3 tier, smart navigation
• sidebar width
• sidebar positioning
• comprehensive color control
• width control
• font size, style and line height control

30% Discount code (valid until May 28, 2010): NE9wAXrbsbyd

Learn more about Havnit (Ultimate)
See the live preview
Learn more about ExtraContent

More About RapidWeaver Classroom

RapidWeaver Classroom continues to expand its diversity of training material with a new series on Content Management Systems. The series is already underway with some tutorials available now, and once complete it will be a comprehensive resource demonstrating many different CMS options — utilizing RapidWeaver plugins, stacks and other 3rd-party solutions to allow for user-editable content directly through any web browser. In addition, RapidWeaver Classroom continues to grow its Stacks training library, releasing tutorials on many new custom stacks that make designing great websites even easier, and more fun.

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