Version 3.8.2 of Suffusion was approved today. As promised this is a minor release with just some minor new features. The following are the list of changes:
- New Features
- New Widgets
There are two new widgets and one revamped widget:- Child Pages
This might make some people happy. The Child Pages widget, if activated, can show you the child pages for the current page. Think of a use case where you are writing a book via WP. You could make a section of the book a parent page, then all the chapters in there child pages. If you have this widget activated, you will see the links to the chapters in the widget. Obviously, if you go to a different parent page you will see the child pages of that. What’s more – if your page has no child pages, or if you are viewing a post archive or a single post, the widget is automatically turned off. Of course, there is an option to turn it back on, but I don’t see a reason to use it. The title of this widget supports short-codes, so you can use one to dynamically control what is displayed. - Query Users
WordPress site owners with multiple users, rejoice! The Query Users widget can display all users of your blog by authentication level (Contributor, Editor etc). You can also choose to display the description for the user or simply display the Avatar. With certain tweaks you can make it behave like an “About Me” widget, wherein your Avatar is displayed along with your description and the number of posts you have written. The users displayed can be linked to either their regular WP Author pages or to the BP Profile pages (if you have BuddyPress installed). - Query Posts
This is really the old Category Posts widget. I have added capabilities such as filtering by tags, ordering by title, comments etc. With appropriate configurations you can make this behave like a “Recent Posts” widget or a “Popular Posts” widget. The advantage this offers is that it is capable of displaying thumbnails for your posts. I would have ideally liked to include a few more choices like displaying specific archives, or displaying the child posts for the current view, but those are for a later release.
- Child Pages
- I have added support for manual excerpts in pages. This was just a simple one line addition – I should have thought of it long back.
- Another feature added is more framework-like. In case you are building a child theme of Suffusion, you can add an “Announcements Feed” to your style.css file and that can show up on installations of your child theme with a “New Version available” message, like the one you see in Suffusion’s option panel currently.
- New Widgets
- Bug Fixes
- There was a small bug in the Featured Posts excerpt, which was not honouring the word limit defined in the options. Thanks to Justin Klein for the report and the fix.
- There has been a long-standing bug for IE8 that prevented native WP thumbnails from displaying. Hopefully this release fixes it.
- In a fix for IE7 while using the “No Sidebars” template I broke some functionality, wherein a page without comments would collapse in width. This has now been fixed.
- Code Housekeeping
- Again thanks to Justin Klein there has been an optimization in terms of database entry storing. Earlier, if posts were using the default template, an entry used to be saved in the database. I have modified the code so that “default” is not stored any longer.
- A ghost file called “mosaic.php” had been left in the theme in the last two releases. I have removed it.
- I have also switched to using WordPress’ native “contextual help” for the admin panels. What does this mean? When you view any options page in Suffusion, you will see a small link saying “Help” in the top right, near “Screen Options”. I have moved the help texts to that section instead of having the “?” icon near the options page headings. This has entailed removal of “jquery-dialog” from the back-end, hence one fewer JS file to load.
- I have cleaned up some miscellaneous comments and redundant code in the admin files.
- I have updated the translation file. Translators, please fire away.
The next few weeks I will focus on a plugin called Photonic. It is the photo-blogging plugin that I had promised.
Cheers.
Good to see that this already great theme continues to be developed and enhanced.
Thanks for all your efforts.
actively developing theme under GPL – it’s fantastic. thanks!
Thanks! I thought you didn’t like more features 😉
i have been following your site around a few days. really love your theme. by the way i am conducting a study regarding this theme, Carry on the outstanding work! Excellent work I must say.. Simple but yet functional.
Your Theme is simply next to nothing! 🙂 Love it! Have just startet working with it, after I have tried quite at few others! Superb work – thanks a bundle!! 😉
“Next to nothing” could mean “close to zero”! Hope that wasn’t the intent 🙂
I know that wasn’t the intent! 🙂
Thank you! Really nice work!
Great.
I was curious . . . is there a bug or something wrong with the featured images? When I use an image to feature a post, the image gets basically cut in half and it doesn’t show the whole picture.
Searched all over options and couldn’t find anything regarding to this issue.
Any thoughts anyone?
No, no bugs of this sort exist.
The only bug I know of is that there is an issue where the content container ‘slides’ down in Opera. Doesn’t happen all the time but it does happen. Happens on a standard/clean install so it’s not a settings issue. Been happening since v11.
Hi Sayontan,
Thank you for this wonderful new release of Suffusion! You theme has always been so feature-rich, yet easy to configure and use. There is no other WP theme out there that can compare with yours. Great job! And as an appreciation for building such a fantastic theme, I just sent you an amzn gift card to your gmail account.
Thank you again!
Sharon
Thanks, Sharon! Glad to see your site up and running nicely!
I earnestly subscribe to all the praise you’ve received so far! I’ve used dozens of themes over the last few years, but I will never again feel the need to try another. What you’ve already done with this project is amazing, and the fact that you keep working on it is simply outstanding!
By the way, is there an easy way to upgrade without having to adjust all settings manually? That would surely be useful!
Pedro,
You shouldn’t have to adjust any setting manually, assuming that your settings have been defined through the options panel. Bugs do creep in, but in general all settings should be preserved in an upgrade.
Thank you for this great work. It is a fantastic theme.
I Like the feature -Child Pages . Will be waiting for photo-blogging plugin 🙂
the german translations (both versions. du + Sie) are ready, take them from the forum, translation sections!
Cheers, Connie
Hi,
Apologies if this is a silly question, but loving Suffusion and don’t want to lose the work i’ve done so far. When i click on the Update Automatically option in my WP control panel on the themes dashboard, i get the warning ‘Updating this theme will lose any customization you have made.’ Does that mean my Suffusion will revert to all the default options, eg: losing widget locations and settings? Sorry if its obvious, jsut want to check. I really need the bug fix for the exerpt length on featured content. Thanks so much in advance.
If you have made edits to any files or have added / replaced any file within Suffusion’s folders, you will lose those changes. Everything else will stay intact.
Thanks, all worked fine, and update is complete! Hooray : ) One query, my Featured content exerpt length still doesn’t seem to be changing. I’ve set it to 30 characters in ‘Other Graphical elements – Layout: Exerpt/List/ etc’ yet it doesn’t seem to be changing on http://www.creativecardiff.org.uk. Is there somewhere else i need to change or is this not the bug fix? When i change the replacement text for (…) it updates immediately. Thanks so much in advance, Cheers Anna
Your site still seems to be at 3.8.1 instead of 3.8.2 (I can see that from the version prefix added to various stylesheets and script files). Are you sure your upgrade went through fine?
[…] Suffusion Recipes Add comments Aug 052011 This is an easy one, thanks to the recently updated “Query Posts” widget. The “Query Posts” widget offers you a lot more in terms of what you can use it for, so […]
I can’t get Suffusion Version 3.8.2 to work with WP 3.2.1. It installs fine, but nothing changes even when activated. Any ideas?
I’ve never used Suffusion before but reviews are great.
There are no such issues with the theme. If you are seeing no change it might be due to a malfunctioning caching plugin.
Anyway, please post support questions on the forum – I don’t handle support of this sort through comments.
How can i hide tags and categories only from homepage?
how can i get rid of the meta default side bar that contains login, rss, etc?
i don’t want that piece on my blog..
any help would be appreciated.
fay
I have detected what I think is a but. In a page with “Page of Post Template” each post is the
containing the previous post, resulting each post a bit thinner (less width) than the previous. Here’s an example in my site:http://www.ricardofoto.es/blog/
Thanks and congratulations for such a good and flexible theme.
Richard
There is no bug there. You probably have improper markup in one of your posts, like a missing </div>
Thank you, I’ll check it.
It was caused because of the plugin
“Facebook Like and Share , Twitter , Google +1 , Google buzz buttons”
I’ll contact the author.
Thanks
Sayontan, thanks for being on top of your already amazing theme. Your constant help to all of your users is very much appreciated. Hopefully you enjoyed the coffee I bought for you!
Shad
Thanks for the update, very scared to make changes so I do not loose my existing customization, think I need to create a child theme first before using this update. But just wanted to say thank you for giving us even more feature rich theme, will continue to sing your praise wherever I can.
Kudos!
Do you think you can release a buddypress enabled version of this theme, without the need for the extra plugin ?
You might have to lose some of the adjustable features of it, but often “less is more” .
That will not happen and it has nothing to do with features – I could retain the full suite of Suffusion’s capabilities plus any BP-related features. My core focus has never been BP, and I do the bare minimum to make sure that Suffusion works with it. I had done a release with BP capabilities built in quite some time back, but for various reasons pulled it. The primary among them was that theme approval times shot up exponentially. E.g. A regular theme might have got approved at WP in 2-3 days (or a week), but BP themes took over a month to get approved. I had no intention of holding up bug-fixes to the core because I wanted to support a plugin.
Another reason, obviously, was that I knew very little of BP – it isn’t something I use, so I don’t see any incentive to support it in a full-fledged manner. The Suffusion BuddyPress Pack plugin is how BP will be supported in the theme, not natively.
[…] in post body are a different challenge. One choice is to use Ad Hoc Widgets. The theme I use, Suffusion, has them. Short code inside posts can be used to add those widgets. This approach is the least […]
I just discovered this theme and love it. The more I work with it, the more in love I am with it.
You are a genius and that could not be lost on anyone who uses this theme.
Everything is so well thought out and executed.
Thank you for making this available and being accessible. You are appreciated!
Can’t wait for the Photonic plugin. My site has been dormant for a while and I just decided to give it a new look, tie it into my SmugMug site a bit neater and see if I can breath some new life into it. I’m sure a photo blogging plugin, written by you to work with Suffusion will be a wonderful addition.
Oppps; no need to release the previous post. I see that the plugin is designed to be used with flicker. I use SmugMug.
Actually that is quite fine. I will be happy to include SmugMug support in the next few releases. Release 1.00 has only Flickr and Picasa and went up today. If I am to do SmugMug, can you provide me with access to your photos? I can showcase them via demos on the site here.
Certainly; you can use this gallery: http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/13368662_Kb94Nj
Something wrong with the Query Users Widget. Stays empty (WP 3.5.1 fresh install, Suffusion 4.4.6). 🙁