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v1.5.42 - Header and Signup card images

By: Neutrino
In: Change log
1 min read
Background images on Header and Signup cards now keep the shape you uploaded them in, instead of being cropped to a wide rectangle.

Background images on Header and Signup cards keep their own shape. Until now every one of them was cropped to a wide 16:9 rectangle, whatever you uploaded — so a portrait photograph lost most of its top and bottom, and a square one lost nearly half of itself.

Upload a tall picture and the block is tall. Upload a wide one and it stays wide. You no longer need to crop to a particular shape before uploading.

The one limit is at the extremes: nothing renders wider than 16:9 or taller than 9:16, so a panorama or a very tall image is trimmed back rather than turning one block into several screens of scrolling.

New features

  • Header and Signup card backgrounds follow the image you uploaded. Applies to the Regular and Wide layouts, and to the Split layout on phones — where images had been squeezed into a square, which was particularly unkind to screenshots. Full-width cards are unchanged and still use a 16:9 background. See Ghost editor cards.
  • More of the picture stays clear of the text. Roughly the top three-fifths of the image is kept free, and long text pushes the block taller rather than creeping further up the photograph.

Bug fixes

  • The fade behind the text is now the same on every image. It was sized as a proportion of the picture, so a tall photo got a fade more than twice as long as a wide one, starting in a different place relative to your words.
  • Wide Signup cards showed a strip of the picture below the text, along the bottom edge of the card.
  • Wide Signup cards faded only the middle of the picture, leaving a visible vertical edge down each side.
  • Signup cards with a background image were drawing their fade twice, which made it darker than intended.

Under-the-hood improvements

  • The block now runs on less JavaScript than before, not more: a measurement that re-ran on every window resize has been removed, and the small amount that replaced it reads one fact from the image file and never runs again.

Worth a look after updating. Any Header or Signup card whose image is not already 16:9 will change shape, and the block will usually get taller. If a picture was chosen to work as a wide crop, it may want revisiting now that the whole of it shows.