Infinite scroll added to two themes in WP.com

  • In the quest to make visitors engage with your content as effortlessly as possible we are rolling out a new feature to your blog home pages—infinite scrolling! Instead of having to scroll and click through older-pages links we are now pulling new content automatically whenever a visitor approaches the bottom of a blog.

    Best thing, it should be entirely transparent to you or your readers. The feature is enabled for blogs with the Twenty Ten or Twenty Eleven themes.

    We take care of the smaller details, such as removing the older/next links, integrating with your design as smoothly as possible. Having said that, please let us know what you think by posting any feedback you may have. Thanks.

    Update: see https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/to-infinity/page/5?replies=136#post-815129

    Update: For the latest news on Infinite Scroll, please see http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/to-infinity-and-beyond/ too.

  • And I thought it was my error! It is pretty cool – now that I know I didn’t mess something up!

  • Please see this thread re: bloggers feelings about this update: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/can-i-turn-off-the-infinite-scroll-update-twenty-eleven-theme?replies=9

    Is there any way to turn this off? I really dislike it. It should have been done as an optional feature, not an automatic, unilateral update to the theme designs. Now my footer widgets are buried, I’m showing more posts on my home page than I want, and there’s an intrusive floating name tag that serves no purpose other than telling people what theme I’m using. Please let us turn this off!

  • Please remove it! We are really unhappy with this change.

  • I too am unhappy with this change. I have to opt now for another theme if this option is not possible to be turned off.

  • Unfortunately, changing to another theme is not an option for those of us who put in a lot of work to modify their theme… Opt out option please.

  • What happens when I choose a no-sidebar layout and purposely have it set to only a couple posts and then have my widgets I need in the bottom widget area? There IS no bottom widget area on the main page now. It is gone.

    Seriously, provide an opt out on this. For many, due to customizations they have made in CSS, changing themes is a seriously labor intensive process.

  • Don’t like this ‘feature’. And certainly don’t like not having a choice about whether to use it. There has to be an option to turn it off.

  • Oh man, I spent forever trying to figure out what happened to my footer widgets. I don’t like this at all.

    My footer widgets are really important to my blog and I’d like the option to keep them.

  • Alas, footer widgets on the main posts page are history.

  • NOOOOO!!!! I set up a blog for an 81 year old friend; the widgets at bottom give her an easy way to keep up with news, not to mention four new vodpod videos every day. They are an integral part of this blog, a reason I chose twenty ten; I have four other blogs in this theme I haven’t looked at yet but know now they are ruined if this isn’t fixed!!!

    How dare you change a theme that has been around for so long and mess with it? Why not just have a new theme and make this a feature? I had deliberately set hers to show one post a day, which highlights her daily writing. I was even considering an upgrade for space and domain name, but if I can’t count on having things stable, forget it.

    VERY UPSET AND DISAPPOINTED and she as afraid she had “broken” the site by authoring on it.

  • Oh and please, please, please tell me they are NOT going to do this to the self-hosted versions of twenty ten and eleven. I have about 10 client sites using them and they are going to scream bloody murder if they have to pay me to change their sites over to a different theme and then re-customize them again.

  • I also just spent an hour trying to figure out where my footer widgets went. This is Not a universally helpful change. I chose this theme because of its layout. Without the links I had on my footer, my page is hardly useful at all. I paid extra to customize the CSS of this theme, and to register my own domain so that I could have a central site with those links on the home page. This is not just a blog for me, else I would not have put this much work and money into it. Considering the wide variety of uses of a WordPress page, it seems very irresponsible to assume a change like this would benefit everyone. Perhaps you could make a New theme that has this feature, or have an opt out, as others are suggesting. If WordPress wants to continue to appeal and cater to a large customer base, then I suggest consistency and reliability, of which this does not reflect.

  • With the effort put to limiting posts per page (to optimize page-loading time) and to the footer widgets, I must PROTEST the unilateral action by WordPress.com to put “infinite scrolling” without asking their users who adopted the theme for their blogs. Moreover, this change modifies the initial intent of the Twenty Eleven theme, which allowed for footer widgets to provide additional information and content in the footer.

  • I hate the change. Absolutely hate it!!! Can’t it be made as an option instead of mandatory? Why does it have to be mandatory to the theme?

  • I know already voiced my opinion, sorry for more, but I feel like my blog has just been destroyed. That may sound dramatic, but I chose my theme for what it offered and because I felt it was better than all others, and now suddenly it has been dramatically changed. This is really distressing!

    “In the quest to make visitors engage with your content as effortlessly as possible”

    Why would you assume your preference in that quest is suitable and acceptable for other people’s property? People that SPECIFICALLY chose their theme, layouts and options to NOT have the exact thing you now forced on us?

  • How about this: Two versions of twenty ten and twenty eleven. One with the “book printed on toilet paper” and one the old way. Call the originals “classic”.

  • Thanks for the “warning.” I just switched to this theme, made a new banner, spent a few hours last night configuring the footer widgets and then this happens.

    This is about the dumbest thing you guys have pulled. I’ve been very happy up to this point. Please change it back or give us the option to disable it.

  • It has been almost a day already and no one has responded. We are seriously thinking about moving our blog elsewhere.

  • @michaelmundy: “Almost a day”? Less than 12 hours actually. Maybe they are waiting for more people to post here before making a move or responding. Or do you expect them to acknowledge every single time someone posts here?

  • The topic ‘Infinite scroll added to two themes in WP.com’ is closed to new replies.