Got some great news, everyone.

Today I started playing with a beta version of the new Wordpress-compliant Montezuma. My devs have been working hard to get it to a place where the old settings are portable to the new version, and as of today we think we're finally there. Just gotta debug it thoroughly and I'll be making an update in this thread.

Anyone wanna be a beta tester? If so, the most up-to-date version of the beta can be downloaded by clicking here

Wow, you mean it uses the hard-to-use Customizer? I'd be interested in beta testing it. I'm curious as to how fast the Customizer preview is going to dynamically respond to changes in templates, and how big the input fields will be.

Originally Posted by CrouchingBruin

Wow, you mean it uses the hard-to-use Customizer?

It does. I'm not happy about Wordpress' decision to force a bad implementation choice on all developers, but if we were to have new versions of the plugin, it had to be done.

Sending you a download for the beta in a PM right now. Thanks for testing it (I installed it yesterday in my localhost test site, but then I had to leave. So today I'll be putting the theme through its paces for real)

When I first installed on a test site which already had Montezuma installed, the site looked very strange. Not sure if it was because of the customizations that I had already done (which, I don't think were many).
This is what the site looks like with regular Montezuma
This is what it looks like with Montezuma 2

So I did an install on a site that's never had Montezuma installed, and it seems to look fine. The only thing I noticed off the bat was the dual-colored titles are not there. And one other thing I've noticed: sometimes when I go to a post, nothing seems to have drawn on the screen, i.e., the page is totally white, even though when I inspect the page, I see all of the page elements there. If I do a page refresh, sometimes it shows up. Same when navigating back to the home page, sometimes it's just blank. Very strange. It happens in both Chrome and Firefox.

Here's my other test install:
http://twentythirteen.geefamily.net/

I went into the Customizer for a little bit, and I see that all of the Montezuma options got ported over there very well (but I hate having to work with the narrow field width in that sidebar). Pleased to see that the regular Montezuma Options was still under the Appearance menu, though. Will Wordpress let that slide through? I didn't try this yet, but the intent is for any changes made through the Customizer to flow through to the Montezuma Options section, and vice versa?

By the way, thank you very much for your efforts on getting this done. It would be a shame for Montezuma to not be maintained on the Wordpress theme repository.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll make sure the dev is aware of that. In fact, he's still debugging by himself too, so some of those issues may have gotten resolved.

Yeah, I'd love to retain access to both interfaces, but we'll see how guys at Wordpress.org react to that

Hmm, weird, now my test install is working right, i.e., I get the split colored titles and the pages/posts draw correctly. I wonder if it's because I switched DNS providers.

I just installed the Fruitful theme, and one interesting thing it has is a wider Customizer sidebar than usual, looks like it sets the width to 400px. Plus, the sidebar is fixed so it floats over the preview pane, and it becomes transparent when not hovered over so you can see the entire preview page. I'd like to at least see a wider width on Montezuma's Customizer sidebar so the template & CSS fields are easier to read. Maybe the width can be set to 80% or 90% in admin.css? If not, I can add my own CSS using Chrome's User CSS extension.

hi! you have done one of a hell job there. I.m intristed how did you do it

@CrouchingBruin - Thanks for the feedback.

I'd like to see more layout options myself. So far I have been creating my own responsive CSS and simply pasting them into clearfix.css section of the Montezuma's interface (that way it would overwrite and ignore anything set in the responsive grid section). But I don't like hack solutions - I have been thinking that one of the later iterations of the theme should address that as well - as in allow users to choose between a 100px & 110px-based columns, as well as add their own custom responsive layouts, should they choose to do so.

But that's a thing to work on after the theme is out of beta.

@beatrixwilliams - I myself didn't. We have a dev that did it on our behalf. He knows about this thread, so if you have any feedback regarding the current version, feel free to post it here (include as many details as you can - WP version, screenshots, etc)

Actually I was referring to the Customizer bar and getting it wider so the input fields are also wide. I think you can stretch the Customizer bar using CSS (although I don't think Montezuma's virtual CSS will be loaded), although I don't know if there's a certain amount of space that needs to be left for the preview pane. The way that Fruitful does it is that the Customizer bar overlays the preview, and moving the mouse away from the Customizer bar makes the Customizer bar transparent so you can see the entire preview pane underneath.

I totally misread that one. That's actually not a bad feature idea. Too early to promise anything, but I like the idea for sure

I have a fresh version of the beta. I played with it today and tested it for cross-theme compatibility, and everything has worked as expected so far.

I posted the link at the top of this thread, right in the first post.

Any update on this? I'd love a new version of Montezuma.

I recently sent a copy to JD, but he said he feels that it would get rejected by guys at WordPress due to slow load times of the customizer.

I myself am no longer heading the project that oversaw the development of that fork of Montezuma, and the company is not interested in pursuing it either, so unless someone else takes the work we did and fix the load times, I'm guessing that's the end of the theme.

For anyone who wishes to grab the version my guys worked on and try to speed up the customizer, I'll leave it posted on my Dorpbox for a month:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4hcd17x3qj...zuma2.zip?dl=1