I submitted version 3.4.5 a few minutes back. Normally I post the release announcement after the theme gets approved, but given the fact that I will be extremely busy during the day, I might not be able to post this update in a timely manner if I don’t do it now.

Version 3.4.5 is a BIG release. Okay, so it might not appear big to you, but trust me, it is really big. I was hoping to get to 100,000 downloads of Suffusion in style.

But first things first. If you upgrade to 3.4.5 you may see the default settings activated on your blog and your actual settings might not be showing up. But, as the rule goes, “DON’T PANIC!!”

If you do not do this migration step after your upgrade, you might have a panic attack .

Now for the details of this release:

1. Code Housekeeping
   I did some major cleanup of the code. The fundamental shift I made was to move to a single options array in the back-end, instead of the multitudinous options each stored individually in the database. While PHP and MySQL are both pretty good in terms of database query handling, I didn’t want to burden the system given Suffusion’s large number of options. This is the main reason you should do the migration activity, because otherwise your old options will not be useful at all.
2. Rotating Headers
   I had quite a few queries come up regarding how to integrate rotating header image plugins with Suffusion. Rather tired with the queries I decided to provide this feature myself. If you go to “Header Customization” you will be able to set a rotating header image background.
3. Page of Posts
   I added a new “Page of Posts” template. Now you are free to create as many pages displaying all your posts as you want. This also helps you move away from WP’s approach of defining a front page and a page of posts, among other things.
4. New Action Hook
   I added an action hook “suffusion_query_posts” at the top of each page displaying multiple posts. How does this help you? Using the Custom PHP inclusion capability you can modify the posts you want to display for each screen, the way a good theme framework allows you. Mind  you, you should be brave enough to tackle PHP for this kind of an activity.
5. Theme Skinning
   I have been repeatedly asked, in spite of nice tutorials, how to change different aspects of the look and feel. To this end I took a baby step of providing options to set up your content wrapper more flexibly. Of course, behind the baby step there were the proverbial nine months of labour. Writing a neat and flexible module to help you set the wrapper background color, image, transparence etc. was a lot of effort. It was so much effort to set this up that I provided this just for the wrapper in this release. Subsequent releases should see this extended rather easily to other GUI elements. As an aside here, “Body Background Styles” is now called “Theme Skinning”.
6. Bug Fixes
   A couple of bugs have been fixed. The first deals with the translation text for “x responses to”, where “to” was not getting translated. The second tended to show “Tagged with” for the Now Reading plugin, even if there were no tags available.
7. Translations
   Suffusion’s impressive multi-lingual support continues to thrive thanks to its volunteers. I now have a new Belarusian translation, thanks to Marcis G. The Greek, Norwegian and Russian translations have been updated too.

That’s it for now. Counting down to 100,000 downloads!

After the rather non-core 3.4.1, the 3.4.2 release has quite a few new core additions.

1. Custom PHP
   I added a new capability to include custom PHP. Though this appears minor, it is actually a significant addition in a lot of ways. For one, you can make use of the hooks built into Suffusion, plus any of the standard hooks that WP provides. A look at the actions.php file and the filters.php file will tell you what the hooks from Suffusion are. I will be adding a few more hooks at different positions in the theme’s layout so that you can extend Suffusion with specific features. Mind you, doing this takes a good bit of skill at working with WP, so providing this is aimed more at advanced users who still want to be able to upgrade the theme and take advantage of new features.
   The feature has been added to what was formerly called “Custom CSS, JavaScript and RSS”. This is now called “Custom Includes”.
2. Enhancements
   I have added support for two additional TimThumb attributes, “Zoom Crop” and “Quality”. This will address some concerns people had about the thumbnails not really showing the part of the image that they wanted, and of the default quality being grainy in a few cases. The options were added to the former “Excerpts / Full Contents” option screen, which is now called “Layout: Excerpt / List / Tile / Full”. I have added option grouping to this screen
   I have also added support for the “sync” option of the JQuery Cycle plugin used in the Featured Content section.
3. Default JS Versions
   One more thing I did was to change the default versions of the included JavaScript files to 1.0. Otherwise your WordPress version is appended to the JavaScript file URL. Some people tend to think this increases security, though I believe it doesn’t help at all.
   Someone looking at your source code can easily figure out you are using WordPress because there are references to “wp” littered throughout folder names in the WordPress structure. After that you just need to know that the RSS feed can be accessed by appending “feed” to your blog’s URL. So if your site is hosted at http://mysite.com/blog, your feed will be http://mysite.com/blog/feed/. A person looking at your raw RSS feed can determine which version of WP you are using, and no amount of masking, by either the FeedSmith FeedBurner plugin or otherwise can prevent that. Try it out.
4. Bug Fixes
   There was a bug in the “Single Left, Single Right Sidebar” template that was failing to position the sidebars correctly. I have fixed this. I have also fixed an XHTML validation issue in the comment form, if you are using a plugin that helps subscribe to comments plugin.
5. Translations
   Wim and Didier provided updated versions of the Dutch and French translations. Thanks, folks!

Hope you like this release.

Version 3.4.0 of Suffusion was released today with the following updates:

1. Added the capability to “unlink” pages in the navigation bar. I had received a request quite often to allow disabling the clicking of certain pages in the navigation bar, particularly if they had sub-pages. I have added some code to enable this.
2. Another oft-requested feature, though in a different form – I have now added some “control switches” for selecting pages, categories and links in the navigation bar. You can now say, “Display All” or “Display Selected”. Setting it to “Display All” will ensure that all your pages or categories or links will be displayed and you will not have to manually add a page to the navigation bar each time you create one. By default I have let the “Display Selected” option chosen, so that it doesn’t break any behavior for users.
3. One major bug fix is for the fact that the author page was not showing the author description. Somehow I had managed to break this in the recent past, and I have now fixed it.
4. Another somewhat big bug-fix is for IE6 and IE7 in the RTL layout, where the navigation drop-down menus were getting shunted to the right of the page. This has been addressed. Thanks, Owen Rose!
5. There were some minor fixes too. The wording for the description of “Sidebar 2” was incorrect. I have fixed it. Also the titles in the tabbed sidebar and the navigation bar tabs were displaying a “” (backslash) in case there were special characters. I have addressed this.
6. There is a new Italian translation, thanks to Francesco!

Sorry if I  have been off-color with support recently. I just have had too much work to do beyond Suffusion and the free support is proving to be quite a burden for me (and other volunteers too), with a lot of users seeming to think of it as their right rather than something to be used judiciously.

People are currently tagging every question they have as a support query without often doing a good search, and every issue they face as a bug. Some classic examples are the “Automatic Upgrade not being available”, which has of late been most frequently perceived wrongly as something I have changed, or of people putting in incorrect HTML code in their posts and saying that the theme is messing up their display. FYI, the automatic upgrade problem is a problem with one of WP’s servers and has nothing to do with Suffusion.

I have made an earnest appeal earlier to be more measured with the support requests, but it seems to have had very little impact. So I will monitor the requests in the coming few weeks and if things don’t change, then I will shut down the free forum and either introduce a charge for it or simply ignore most of the questions.

In the meanwhile, genuine thanks to volunteers who have helped out with queries (I know it is a thankless job) and to well-wishers who have made efforts to contribute back to the theme! I really appreciate your help.

Version 3.3.8 of Suffusion was released today with the following bug fixes and feature additions:

1. RTL Layout Fixes
   I have managed to fix almost all issues here except some quirks with the navigation bar in IE6 and IE7 (the other browsers are fine). If you are not using an RTL language this will not impact you.
2. Minor Bug Fixes
   There were some minor bug fixes done. First, the “target” setting for links in the drop-down menu in the navigation bars was being ignored. This has been taken care of. Mind you, the target setting is working fine if the links are not in a drop-down but are rather displayed as individual tabs in the navigation bar. Second, I put in a minor piece of code to order pages in ascending order for featured content. Apparently without this ordering the sequence was not being obeyed for some users.
3. Options Changes
   I extended the “grouping” feature to the most popular options page, “Custom CSS, JavaScript and RSS”. I also made a very subtle change in the list of categories displayed in the options page for selection. Earlier if a category had no posts associated with it it wasn’t available for selection in say, the navigation bar setup. Now it will be available.
4. The Norwegian and Hebrew translations have been updated. I received a new Hebrew translation, thanks to Tal Surasky.

I am gradually reaching saturation point with the 3.x releases. I have a list of around 15 more items that I would like to tackle before moving to the 4.x releases (with photo-blogging templates), but in the meanwhile here is a sample of what will be added to the 3.x releases:

1. A few more widget areas and widgets.
2. Full BuddyPress support, though I would like to wait for release 3.0 of WP before tackling this well. In the interim I will add inbuilt support for the BuddyPress template pack.
3. Full integration with WPML.
4. Better typography support, with ability to use custom fonts.
5. Support for a few more plugins. One plugin that I really like is the Now Reading plugin by Rob Miller. I will provide a skin for the theme for this plugin. I will also extend support for some other common plugins.
6. Some more tweaks to the options menus. The changes I have made so far have not received negative comments, so I will take that as positive feedback and continue doing those. I will also try to expand the use of JQuery and / or AJAX to the options pages.

As you can guess I have slowed down considerably with my development. However I do intend to fully deliver on the list above.

After a week long hiatus version 3.3.6 of Suffusion is out. The following are key aspects of this release:

1. New Option Grouping
   I tried experimenting with some option grouping and put in a proof of concept in the Visual Effects –> Sidebars and Widget Areas section. Let me know if that makes things easier or tougher for you. I managed to add this functionality without really butchering the code, so that was good. If this feature is liked by folks I can consider extending it to other screens and add fancy stuff like expanding / collapsing of a whole group of options.
2. New Widget Area Style – Sliding Panel
   I introduced a hopefully cool feature for the Top Bar Right Widgets – you can now make it a sliding panel!! I know that a lot of people like to have a login widget and some other content as a sliding panel, so hopefully this feature will benefit folks. You can set this through the Visual Effects –> Sidebars and Widget Areas section.
3. Fixed a bug that was hiding the top navigation bar if the header was not “open”
4. Fixed another bug in the Royal Blue theme where visited links upon hover were not getting the blue background.

As I indicated last week I am going to slow down with the release process. That might still mean around one release a week and higher if I go crazy. But for now, enjoy release 3.3.6.