I have had bugs in software before, but by any standards version 3.7.7 was awful. Just awful. As the saying goes, The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In Beta 2 I tried to put in a tweak related to Suhosin, so I split the options into multiple forms and thought I got it working. The Beta came and went by without alarms, so I submitted the code for approval, and then it proverbially hit the fan. Truth be told I was expecting issues with the TimThumb replacement, and there were a few. But I seriously blew it with regards to the option management, costing people hours of work. Not all people faced issues, mind you – particularly several people who simply upgraded their sites and left it at that. People who are subscribed to my feed knew how to downgrade the release, so that alleviated some concerns. People who had little image jiggery-pokery on their sites (like me) faced literally no issues, because they didn’t have to tweak anything.

But for all the rest, all I can offer you is an apology, and what I hope is a clean version – 3.7.8. If you have bought me a coffee and then realized it was not worth it due to this release, please send me an email through the support forum with a transaction id – I will issue an unconditional refund.

Here is what I have covered in 3.7.8:

1. Thumbnail issues
   1. If images were not in the template path but in the local directory they were not being picked up and a warning message was being displayed. Thanks a lot to Bob Schecter for an impressive array of websites with a wide range of configurations, which he let me use so that I could track this down.
   2. If the image source was a secure HTTP location (HTTPS, like PicasaWeb), the image was not getting resized. This should be fine now. Thanks to Jürgen for the tip.
2. Color issues
   1. The first issue was with the color picker. Thanks to various quirks in the use of Farbtastic, I rolled back to something that has been a part of Suffusion since release 2.0 – JSColor. If you now pick a color and save, the change will go through without you having to go through an elaborate charade.
   2. Colors were inconsistently getting prefixed with a “#”. I have made sure that this is no longer the case. Thanks to Kattsby for the tip regarding this.
3. Option issues
   1. The biggest issue in the previous release was that the buttons to save/reset options had gone rogue and a lot of people have pointed this out. I have made sure of the following:
      1. Clicking “Save” in one screen will not blank out options in another screen.
      2. Clicking “Reset” will not empty the entire theme’s options.
      3. Exporting / Importing will now work.
   2. Another rather intermittent issue was the interference caused by a cookie used by the options panel while attempting to save things. I am only aware of 2 people facing this issue, mind you, and one of them (Mason) has confirmed that this has now been fixed.
   3. A minor issue was that if your options were saved, they needed to be saved twice for the auto-linked CSS to be updated.
   4. Quote characters around font names were being escaped, preventing the font from being loaded.
   5. Some people complained about a slowdown on IE. To counter this, I got rid of the JQuery Uniform script that I was using to make the admin panel look good. I will reconsider this once the changes introduced in this version stabilize.
4. Miscellaneous issues
   1. There was a bug that was breaking the layout of the Widget Area Above Footer.
   2. There were some issues with the navigation menu’s appearance in the standard skins, particularly with respect to visited items and hover-over items.

Things that are not issues

When something goes wrong, the natural inclination is to assign to it all faults, real and perceived. Something similar happened with the last releases, and because the core faults with Suffusion were so severe, a lot of issues from other places were ascribed to the theme. Not that I blame any of you for it. The following are NOT issues with Suffusion:

1. If your admin panel stops loading after printing the top bar, the culprit is, in all likelihood a plugin. There is a lot of literature around this on the web, but it bears repeating, particularly because Suffusion’s options panel is more complex and detailed than most other themes’ panels, and having an incorrect script interfering can really mess things up.

   A lot of people upgraded to WP 3.1 and Suffusion 3.7.7 at the same time. Now, WP 3.1 uses a new version of JQuery libraries. Some plugins and themes don’t include JQuery the right way. The somewhat correct way to include JS in WordPress is by using the wp_enqueue_script function. The truly correct way to include JS is to use wp_enqueue_script with the right hooks. Here is what I mean:

   1. The absolutely wrong way:

      function print_my_script() {
      	echo "<link media='all' href='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js' type='text/css' rel='stylesheet' />"; 
      } 
      print_my_script(); 
      

      The problem is that the above will load JQuery potentially twice. Plus you might be loading JQuery after something needs it, thereby resulting in errors. The only situation when this might be required is if you need conditional JavaScript (like something for IE), which is not the case in the above.

   2. The sometimes correct way:

      add_action('init', 'my_enqueue_scripts');
      function my_enqueue_scripts() {
          wp_deregister_script( 'jquery' ); // Will remove WP's standard JQuery
          wp_register_script( 'jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js'); // Will register Google CDN's JQuery, version 1.5
          wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery' );// Will queue it up for printing.
      }
      

      The trouble with the above is that the script is going to get enqueued for all pages, admin or otherwise.

   3. The almost correct way:

      add_action('admin_menu', 'my_plugin_menu');
      function my_plugin_menu() {
      	add_options_page('My Plugin Options', 'My Plugin', 'manage_options', 'my-unique-identifier', 'my_plugin_options');
      	add_action("admin_print_scripts", 'my_admin_script_loader');
      }
      
      function my_admin_script_loader() {
          wp_deregister_script( 'jquery' ); // Will remove WP's standard JQuery
          wp_register_script( 'jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js'); // Will register Google CDN's JQuery, version 1.5
          wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery' );// Will queue it up for printing.
      }
      

      The only problem with the above is that it will queue up the CDN JQuery for all admin pages. What if another plugin is relying on a different version of JQuery? A lot of developers get this one wrong.

   4. The truly correct way:

      add_action('admin_menu', 'my_plugin_menu');
      function my_plugin_menu() {
      	$options_manager = add_options_page('My Plugin Options', 'My Plugin', 'manage_options', 'my-unique-identifier', 'my_plugin_options');
      	add_action("admin_print_scripts-$options_manager", 'my_admin_script_loader');
      }
      
      function my_admin_script_loader() {
          wp_deregister_script( 'jquery' ); // Will remove WP's standard JQuery
          wp_register_script( 'jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5/jquery.min.js'); // Will register Google CDN's JQuery, version 1.5
          wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery' );// Will queue it up for printing.
      }
      

      If you notice, the only difference with #c is the way the admin_print_scripts hook is used. By appending the options page to it, we are saying that the JQuery script should be used only for this particular plugin’s admin screens.

   What has been happening is that a few plugins have followed route b or c above, causing a proliferation of bad JavaScript across the admin pages. With the WP upgrade these plugins now have conflicting JS. This unfortunately causes the correctly coded themes/plugins to break because they rely on the native version of JQuery, which the bad plugin has overwritten on all pages. If you are facing this, you should try deactivating your plugins, then reactivate them one by one to see which one is wrong. If you isolate the broken one, feel free to point the above instructions to the author.

2. Header height and margin between top of content and top of page: If you had set your options to show a certain header height and margin, please note that the option has moved from Blog Features → Sizes and Margins to Theme Skinning → Header. What has happened as a part of this move is that the control switch has changed. So under Theme Skinning → Header you have to set the options to use “Custom Styles” for the setting to continue to be effective.

Thanks for all of you who had patience with me during the last one week. Thanks are also in order to all of you who provided detailed reports of the issues that you faced. I wish some of you had participated in the beta testing. Apologies if you don’t see your name above – it is just that there were so many people reporting the issues that I couldn’t fit everyone in here.

Version 3.7.5 was approved earlier today. I know that the beta releases were for 3.7.4, however 3.7.4 didn’t pass the approvals required by the Review Team, so I had to release 3.7.5. This is quite a big release with lots of changes. However, unlike other big releases this has more to do with code housekeeping rather than brand new functionality. Before you read further, here is a warning:

This release changes the whole look of the code behind the scenes. It has been beta-tested, but bugs always come up. In case this release critically breaks some functionality, please downgrade to the previous version and log a bug on the support forum. You can download the old version, then replace the contents of your wp-content/themes/suffusion folder with the unzipped suffusion folder that you get from the downloaded file.

Without much ado, here is the change list:

1. Code Housekeeping
   1. Switch to native WordPress APIs
      I have removed a lot of custom or third party code from a lot of areas and started using native WordPress areas. Here are the changes:

      1. Settings API
         One of the 2 biggest changes this release is a nice looking backend. For this I moved to the Settings API that WordPress provides. This was a huge and high impact change, because I had to decommission a tried and tested options engine in favour of something that has not been implemented by anyone on such a large scale. All uses of the Settings API on the web are for simple cases where you require only one options page. Anything more complex makes developers pick up a custom approach, or an approach that only superficially uses the Settings API.
         I can thump my chest here as the first theme with such a complex back-end to utilize the Settings API in all its glory. The only place where the API is not used is in the Custom Types section, which only partly uses the API. I will port it over in a subsequent release – for now it is not critical.

      2. No TimThumb
         This is the second big change, and potentially more high impact than the first. TimThumb, though popular has some security holes, particularly with its old versions. Recently the WP review team started cracking down on themes relying solely on TimThumb. I introduced TimThumb into the mix more than a year back, but I had also introduced support for the native post thumbnail functionality of WP almost as soon as it was introduced. This helped me avoid the axe. With this release Suffusion bids adieu to TimThumb.
         I have put together a resizing algorithm based on a method suggested by a contributor on WordPress Trac. I had to modify it a good bit to make it work the way I wanted and so that it did not break how your existing images looked.

      3. No “file open” operations
         Again, the WP review team has been cracking its whip to get file open operations removed. As a result I have had to think out of the box to make code behave to my liking. I have had to replace inbuilt CURL calls with the WP HTTP API, and where this really posed a challenge was regarding storing of the generated CSS and storing the resized file for the image resizing.

   2. Use of more modern functions
      A few functions have been deprecated by the WP development team. I have replaced all such functions with their new variants:
      1. get_bloginfo('wpurl') → site_url()
      2. get_bloginfo('template_url') → get_template_directory_uri()

      3. get_bloginfo('url'), bloginfo('url') → get_template_directory_uri() 

   3. Removal of backwards compatibility
      As stated in a previous post, WordPress 3.0 has been out for more than 8 months now and version 3.1 is almost upon us. So if you haven’t upgraded your WP installation now is the time to do it. This latest release of Suffusion will not work on anything older than 2.9. I have removed function/class existence checks for all these versions:

      1. 3.0.x – get_template_part, comment_form, wp_nav_menu, wp_login_form, get_nav_menu_locations, wp_get_nav_menus, register_post_type, register_taxonomy, post_type_exists and register_nav_menu
      2. 2.9.x – add_theme_support, get_the_post_thumbnail
      3. 2.8.x – class WP_Widget
   4. Function names are now more consistent. All functions within Suffusion are either prefixed with suffusion or suf.
2. Feature Changes
   1. Reorganized the Options Menu (again)
      Trust me – I did not want to do this. Suffusion started out with one link under the Appearance section of the admin page. I then pulled it out to give Suffusion its own menu when I introduced Custom Post Type support. I initially had horizontal tabs at the top and vertical tabs within each page, but I switched it out when the page got sluggish.
      This change consumed a lot of my development time in what was already an intensive exercise. But I believe I got it right this time:
      1. New Menu Position (aka Older Menu Position)
         
      2. New Tab Design
         
      3. Moved items
         There has been some upheaval in the options sections. Notably:
         1. Introduction – This is the same as the Introduction section of the old options
         2. Theme Skinning – Earlier you had a tab called Theme Skinning under Visual Effects. Theme Skinning is now a section of its own and deals almost explicitly with setting up the colors of various components (aka “skinning”). All former individual sub-sections under the old Theme Skinning are now tabs under the new Theme Skinning. For example you have Body Background, Main Wrapper etc.
            The main purpose of this split was to avoid Suhosin-related issues. You can click on the “Notes” button near the section title as shown above for more information.
         3. Visual Effects Other Graphical Elements – This has mostly the remainder of the items of the former Visual Effects section. In addition it has picked up items from the former Blog Features that dealt with graphical aspects, like Featured Content, Post and Page Bylines, layout options etc. You can click on the “Notes” button near the section title as shown above for more information.
         4. Sidebars and Widgets Sidebar Configuration – This is the same as the former Sidebars and Widgets section, except for the fact that the Static Tabbed Sidebar has been moved from the former Blog Features page to here.
         5. Blog Features Back-end Settings – This is a heavily stripped down version of the former Blog Features. Most of the older options have moved to Other Graphical Elements. You can click on the “Notes” button near the section title as shown above for more information.
         6. Templates – This is the same as the old versions.
         7. Custom Types – This is the same as the old versions.
   2. No Translations
      Translations are no longer a part of the core theme. They have all been moved to the translations page. Additionally, at no impact to you the translation text domain has changed from “suf_theme” to “suffusion”.
   3. Changes to Default Settings
      Some changes were required to the default settings to make it pass the review process, and some others were needed for ease of use.
   1. JQuery Masonry is switched off by default instead of being switched on.
   2. By default both navigation menus are switched off. This was one change I did not want to make, however I did so to avoid a lengthy back and forth exchange.
   4. Made the blog title use h1/h2 tags instead of div tags.
   5. I have renamed the classes category-info and tag-info to info-category and info-tag respectively. This is to avoid weird styling issues if you have a category or a tag named info. Please make note of this if you have used Custom Styles for these elements.
   6. Goodbye Marvin!
      For those familiar with lore, Marvin the Paranoid Android used to reassure you not to panic. Unfortunately, since the photo of Marvin was not GPL’ed, I had to remove him from the introductory screen (though I had provided the appropriate credits to Buena Vista).
3. New Features
   1. Sidebar Control
      There is a new capability to control the number of sidebars on different views like the blog, category, tag, date archive and search. For example you can now have 2 sidebars across your site, but only one sidebar on the blog page. Check the settings under Sidebar Configuration → Sidebar Layout. All in all the ability to manage sidebars for specific pages/views has improved from previous versions, and in the next release or two you should have something very flexible. I might write up an article on how to effectively tweak sidebars shortly – let’s see.
   2. You can now upload an image directly from the options pages instead of entering a URL. Of course, entering a URL works too.
   3. New Notifiers
      Added the following notifiers:
      1. New versions – Tells you when a new version is available and points you to the release notes. The reason for this is that some people complained about frequent updates (though old-timers will note that I have significantly slowed down) – this is for them to check out what the latest version has, so that they can make an informed decision about upgrading.
      2. Translations – If you are using WP in a language other than Americanized English, you are pointed to the right locations to pick up the correct translations.
      3. BuddyPress – If you are using BP, this provides you information about making Suffusion work with it.
   4. Added options to control the “Posted By” format. See Other Graphical Elements → Post and Page Bylines for more information.
   5. Added better WPML integration. There are texts that you set in the back-end, like the labels for your comment forms etc. I have added WPML support for them, so that you can translate those strings in the back-end.
   6. Added zoom-crop capability (aka proportional resizing) for images in featured content, magazine headlines and magazine excerpts. See the respective sections for setup options.
   7. There is dual JQuery UI support, for version 1.7.3 (WP 3.0.x) and 1.8.7 (WP 3.1.x).
   8. You can now control the number of headlines you want to display in the headlines section of the Magazine template.
   9. There are a couple of new filters: suffusion_author_information and suffusion_category_information. They can be used by you to tweak the information that appears at the top of the Author page and the Category pages.
   10. There is a new option to force compatibility mode in IE8. You will find the option in Back-end Settings → SEO / Meta Settings.
   11. There are a couple of options more dealing with the generated CSS. You can choose to cache the generated CSS, include it directly in the HTML, include it via a link etc.
4. Bug Fixes
   1. There was a bug earlier that was causing the title set through Suffusion’s SEO to clash with the title set by different SEO plugins. This should now be fine.
   2. In the Magazine template if you were displaying headlines, the first headline was not being selected by default. This has now been fixed.
   3. The $post variable was getting overwritten if the Ad Hoc Widgets were used to display things like featured posts or category blocks.
   4. I have fixed a bug where if you looked at a page in BP you would see an incorrect HTML title.
   5. I have included what is hopefully a patch for a WP problem (not a Suffusion problem) affecting a very small percentage of users. With the bug kicking in, users were unable to reliably see the child pages for a given page in the breadcrumb because WP fails to provide the ancestry relationships properly.
   6. I have also included a patch for a NEXTGen Gallery bug. I have often expressed my dislike for this plugin thanks to a variety of reasons. In this case including the fix at my end seems to be a much easier thing to do than wait for the NGG guys to put it in. The fix deals with viewing NGG, when used with themes employing max-width and min-width on IE8 without compatibility mode.
5. Removed Options
   I have decided that I will periodically do a review of redundant options in the theme and cull them. Options that have much better plugin-based alternatives and options that have significant maintenance overhead will be removed.
   
   1. Compression options for JS, CSS and the site as a whole have been removed. Sorry, but those serve very limited functionality and are incapable of generating compressed content for files from external plugins. If you are looking to do any of these, you can try using W3 Total Cache or some similar plugin. The only compression-specific option introduced is to minify the generated CSS into 1 line, so that you don’t add hundreds of lines into your source code – just one long line will be present.
   2. Removed the option to load JQuery via CDN. This was becoming extremely ungainly. If you want to use CDN versions, please use a plugin.

I do understand that this is a pretty big release. So if you have upgraded and something has broken badly, please do not hesitate to downgrade (and report the problem on the Support Forum). This isn’t meant to alarm you, for most code-related issues can be fixed and I have taken a lot of care to keep the code good. This is just to assuage your concerns that if something goes wrong, it makes best sense to follow the advice on the introductory page of the options: Don’t Panic.