WordPress recently introduced a new review system at WordPress.org. Under this system you can write a review for any theme or plugin and it gets attached to the theme or plugin page. Earlier the only way to put in a review was to comment on the support forum at WordPress.org.

If you have liked my work (and even if you haven’t), I urge you to provide a review. The review sites for some of my projects are:

1. Suffusion: http://wordpress.org/support/view/theme-reviews/suffusion/
2. Photonic: http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/photonic/
3. FontMeister: http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/fontmeister/

I have been gradually wading through things on the professional front and will hopefully free up some much needed time to code. The responsive version of Suffusion should be out shortly, as will some enhancements to Photonic and FontMeister.

Version 4.3.2 of Suffusion has been approved, but it hasn’t gone live yet. While I wait for that to happen, I would like to post a few updates regarding what’s been cooking on Aquoid.

Along with the development of 4.3.2, I worked on a plugin called “Suffusion Shortcodes”. This plugin unshackles shortcodes from the theme, by bundling all of them and making them available separately. I did this to quell the debate of whether the shortcodes belong to a theme or to a plugin. With my current approach the shortcodes could coexist in both places. If you decide to stop using Suffusion in the future, you could use this plugin and keep all your shortcodes and content safe. If you use this plugin along with Suffusion you will get the added benefits of some customizability. The plugin is currently awaiting approval from the WP admins.

Another thing that I have been working on is FontMeister. You will be happy to learn that I have almost completed the support for Font Squirrel. I am in the process of ironing out some kinks, and once I am done I will release the update.

The third aspect I am working on is Photonic – apparently the last release broke some functionality in 500px.com. I am in the process of troubleshooting and I will soon have an update for you. In addition there is some other code in the works for OAuth2 authentication. This will let me add private photo support for Picasa, and will let me define new sources such as Facebook and Instagram.

And the last thing I have been working on is Responsive Design for Suffusion. As you can guess, on a personal front I am a lot more settled at this point of time. So while my professional work takes up a lot of time, I am able to dedicate some time to new code. So what is the status of Responsive Design so far?

What’s Done

1. I have finished and tested sidebar repositioning features. I have ensured that whatever the layout you will be able to see the sidebars below your content. In true Suffusion-style you will be able to pick what you want to do with the sidebars. E.g. On screen sizes between 650px and 980px you can opt to have your sidebars where they are. From 320px to 650px you can opt to have your sidebars below your content, but you can choose to have the sidebars side by side if you have 2 of them.
2. I have also put in code to switch the navigation menus to “Select” lists if the screen gets narrow. You get to pick which width the switch occurs.

What’s Being Worked On

1. I am testing out code for making the featured content responsive.
2. I am also trying to figure out how to handle the Custom Layout Template and the Magazine Template. Along similar lines what needs to be handled are the horizontal widget areas (“Widget Area Above Header”, “Widget Area Below Header” etc.), which can have multiple widgets in a row.
3. I have put in some preliminary code to tackle the “pullout” style bylines. On narrow screens the pullout will cease to appear as a pullout and will show up as the more traditional single-line byline display.
4. Lots of other code is in the works, to handle the multitudinous options of Suffusion.

What May Not be Included

1. Responsive images – Ideally if you are viewing a site on a low bandwidth connection (typically a mobile) you would want to reduce the size of images. Most themes fake this by setting the max-width for images to 100%. That works fine in appearance, but it defeats the purpose of responsive design because you are essentially downloading the full large image, but you are only scaling it down. Instead there should be a mechanism to control the image size from the server.
2. Hover effects – Touch devices have a drawback in the sense that you cannot hover over links. While most of them compensate for this by letting a single click function as a hover, the trouble happens when you have a menu item that is both, a link and has a drop-down under it. E.g. See the menu item for “Suffusion” in the menu on this site (Themes → Suffusion). That links to a page and it has child pages under it. On a touch device you would find it hard to click on the child pages, because the click on “Suffusion” will take you to the page for Suffusion. The click on “Themes” works fine, mind you, because that tab doesn’t go anywhere (its URL is “#”). I have to figure out how to handle this behaviour.

The Responsive features are very configurable. You can turn them on or off as you wish, and you can control what type of breakpoints you want to enable. E.g. If you don’t have people visiting your site from a 240px browser, you don’t have to handle that as a breakpoint.

Completion of all of these will take time, particularly since things are really hot on the professional front for me. But I will keep you posted.

The biggest event in the WP universe last week was the release of version 3.4 of WP. While the event generated a fair amount of press, I honestly found the release very underwhelming. Broadly speaking, here are a few highlights of this release:

1. New Theme Customizer
   From your Appearance → Themes menu you will see an option to “Customize” themes or see a “Live Preview” of them, in addition to the already existing “Options” link. The key difference is that for the “Customize” or “Live Preview” feature to work, your theme doesn’t have to be active. You could try out basic customizations and then activate the theme. While this is a useful feature, from a developers’ point of view this is merely eye-candy with very little value addition. Themes that rely extensively on options will find it nearly impossible to embed all their options in the customizer, and I don’t believe the intent of the customizer was to have developers do this (Suffusion has more than 700 options – imagine all of them in the Customizer!!). The only benefit I can see is from a skinning perspective, if a developer offers previews of multiple skins via the customizer (which is something I have bundled with Suffusion)
2. Header and Body Background Customization
   Back in version 3.0 of WP, capabilities were introduced to natively support custom headers and backgrounds from WP itself. The functionality has been modified in version 3.4 and custom headers now support flexible widths. Apart from this, there is no impact to end-users.
3. Better Theme Searching
   The theme installer has been improved to have an “infinite scroll”. In other words, if you search for a theme from Appearance → Themes → Install Themes and there are several matches, WP displays a few, then loads the rest on the same page as you scroll down.
4. Templates in Sub-Directories
   One of the more painful aspects of developing a theme was in the way WP handled template files: all template files had to be in the theme’s root directory. In this release you can have template files in sub-directories. This is a feature I like, because it simplifies file organization significantly. For an end-user this has no impact.

What didn’t make it

There are several tickets that have been submitted with patches to the WP core, and they have been submitted several months back. Yet, release after release such tickets fail to get merged into the core, though the changes would be small to add and would provide immense benefit. Here is an example that I had submitted, which incidentally was a duplicate of an ages old ticket. This is an easy change to make and verify, and adding this ticket would let different plugins play nicely with each other while modifying the custom menu functionality. As things stand now, two different plugins cannot modify the menu items under Appearance → Menus.

This is one ticket I am aware of because I wrote a patch for it, and I am sure there are scores of others that got triaged in such a manner. Another that didn’t make the cut was the support for multiple screenshots in the theme back-end. Of course, the live preview functionality makes up for this somewhat.

In essence, the feeling I got from this release is that it was very light on good features. The developers might point to the Theme Customizer, but, the Live Preview feature apart, the only people who will benefit from it are those who have just a handful of options screens. Bear in mind that theme developers have been building options screens since a really long time, so a lot of users are used to seeing comprehensive options.

Having been in consulting for a while managing projects worth a few million on occasion, I do understand the process of triaging and prioritizing issues and fixes. It is perfectly normal for a few things to be prioritized over others, but maybe the good folks developing WP should stop once in a while and grab the low-hanging fruit. This is not meant as a criticism of this release of WP – I am sure what was done was done well enough. It is just that I was very happy when the last few releases came out: 3.0 had navigation menus, custom post types and native support for custom headers & backgrounds, 3.1 had custom post formats, 3.2 had TwentyEleven and had phased out PHP 4 support, and 3.3 had some neat APIs. But in 3.4 apart from the ability to define templates in sub-folders I didn’t find many appealing features.

Impact on Suffusion

In general I manage to stay on top of releases by silently yet actively tracking changing requirements and issues reported on other folks’ tickets. So most of the time users don’t have to wait for me to make Suffusion compatible with a new WP version.

However, this time I am compelled to make a change in theme behaviour. Recently there was a heated discussion on the Theme Reviewers’ mailing list about the way WP’s custom background works. The TL;DR version of the discussion was:

If a theme implements WP’s “custom background” feature, it should do it fully. In other words, if Appearance → Background doesn’t have an image, the site background mustn’t show an image.

So here is what I did for the next version of Suffusion:

1. If Appearance → Background has a background image, that image will be shown as your site’s background (no change in this behaviour).
2. If Appearance → Background has no background image, there will be no background image for your site. This is a big and disruptive change, because users might have set no image in this section. Sorry, but if I had my way, I wouldn’t have forced this on you.
3. If Appearance → Background has the default background image, only then will the settings from Appearance → Suffusion Options → Skinning → Body Background take effect. If you have left this section to have “Theme Styles”, then everything will be as default.

So, if you upgrade to the next version of Suffusion (4.2.3) and your background suddenly goes AWOL, please don’t be alarmed. You can go into Appearance → Background and simply restore the defaults there.

This is something that bears repeating, so I am going to post the instructions again when the new version is released.

This is hopefully the last beta for version 4.2.0. I am making beta release 4 available for you to try out. This release has some minor fixes:

1. The saved options in the Custom Layout section of the Edit Page screen were not showing up in the back-end.
2. There was a bit of a problem with the size settings for the Custom Layout template – the widget sizes were not showing up correctly. Now, apart from a small alignment issue with the “auto-arrange” option, everything should be working fine.

Do give this release a try! This is essentially the last opportunity to try out your corner cases before I make a formal release of this version.

I have made the second beta available for version 4.2.0. I did mention this in a comment last night, but for the benefit of the testers I thought it might be a good idea to make an official post for this.

You can get the beta from here. The beta fixes a couple of bugs reported by Mark:

1. There was an issue with incorrect sidebar counts coming up in the new Custom Post Type Archive.
2. There was another problem with the “auto-arrange” for the Custom Layout template not working correctly.

Give it a try and let me know if things are fine.