To reiterate, here are the highlights:

1. Mega-Menus:
   To see what the fuss is, go to Appearance → Menus. Then create a menu. For the root level items in your menu you can pick a Mega Menu Widget Area. Pick one, assign it a number of columns and do the other settings as required. Make sure you assign this menu to a menu location.
   Then go to Appearance → Widgets and add widgets to the Mega Menu area that you have selected. Now check it out on the front page.
   Typical things to test would be:
   1. The menu shouldn’t overflow the wrapper’s borders if the menu width is less than the wrapper width.
   2. Check with the different widget height settings, such as “Auto-arrange” or “Equal height for the same row” etc.
   3. Vary the number of columns and see the effect.
   4. If you have picked an empty widget area, you shouldn’t see the tab in the navigation bar.
2. Custom Layouts:
   Go to Templates → Custom Layout Template. Save the settings as you wish. Then create a page and assign the “Custom Layout” template to it. Upon “Save Draft” or “Publish”, in the “Additional Options for Suffusion” box you will see a new tab for “Custom Layout”. You should be able to save the settings. Add the widgets to the widget areas and then visit the page in the front end. Your new page should conform to your selections.
   Typical things to test would be:
   1. You should be able to create different pages with this template.
   2. For each page you should be able to control the number of columns in each Custom Layout widget area.
   3. Each page should respect the corresponding selections.
   4. Try the different widget height settings.
   5. Use this capability in conjunction with Widget Logic and see the effects.
3. Page Layouts:
   Instead of picking a “Single Left Sidebar” page template, you can now pick a “1 Left Sidebar” layout for a page / post. This gives you the advantage of combining third-party templates with Suffusion layouts. With this, the regular page templates with sidebar options are deprecated. You can still continue using them, but using a layout is going to be much easier.
   Things to test would be:
   1. If you have a page template such as “1 Left Sidebar” assigned, then you assign “2 Left Sidebars” layout, your page template will get the preference.
   2. Pick any other page template and assign a layout to it – you will be able to get the combination of both.
4. Featured Content:
   I added a lot of new options to the static Featured Content and widget. You will now have options to display icons, position the slider index and the controls differently etc.
5. Magazine Template / Tiles Layout:
   I have changed the markup here to use div instead of tables. This will now prevent the unbalanced column widths that you currently see. Do give this a thorough test with all your layout combinations.
6. General Checks:
   Try the following general checks (not a complete list, but it should give you some idea):
   1. There were issues with the latest version of the NGG plugin – that should be gone.
   2. Activate another theme, then come back and activate Suffusion – you shouldn’t see any errors of any sort in this process.
   3. Check if the menus are working correctly in terms of custom colours, rightly showing a downward or sideward arrow etc.
   4. Try sharing posts with this release – you shouldn’t see any fatal errors reported when you do this.
   5. You should see some “pointers” with tips in the back-end if you are using WP 3.3.x.

Note that this is a beta release. So please don’t use it on a live site! Feel free to post your comments and bugs here.

1. Mega-menus:
   I know that I have been dangling this carrot for a while, so hopefully the delivered functionality will be worth the wait. Suffusion will be the first free theme with this functionality, so no pressure.
2. Page layouts:
   I did mention this earlier – you will be able to associate a page template separate from a layout for your pages. This will let you utilize templates offered by plugins and bundle them together with a specific layout.
3. Custom Template Layouts: This is another biggie. You will be able to assign a “Custom Template” to a page. That will let you do some awesome layouts by utilizing widgets. E.g. if you want to create a product page, you will be able to define a specific layout that has one row with just one big featured slider, then two rows with 3 boxes each, with specific product features, then one row with 2 boxes, with testimonials and pricing options.
   If this feature isn’t good enough, you can create multiple pages with the custom template and either keep the same defaults across all of them, or create specific layouts for individual pages.
4. Since a very very long time I have had one particular feature request on my plate. Although this request is 2 years old, I have always had it in plan for different releases, but then pulled it when the releases became big. Even during the release of the Photonique skin I wanted to improve the look and feel for the Featured Content and I did make some changes for the same. Yet I chickened out at the last moment when it came to specific aspects of improving the look and feel. This time I bit the bullet and finally put it in place. The Featured Content now has options to do a whole lot of cool things in terms of look and feel.

In addition, the regular improvements to speed, performance and usability are included. I have finished coding all the major items and am hoping to wrap up development in a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, I will be pushing this release out for beta testing.

Current users of the theme see an option, Templates → Magazine to change → Sidebar layout to adopt, where you can pick a particular layout. If that is set to “Default” for you, you have nothing to worry about. But if you are using a specific layout, this will temporarily stop working. The fix though, is very quick. You have to open the Magazine page for editing, and go down to “Additional Options for Suffusion”. There you can pick the appropriate page template and save the post. Things will work as usual after that.

I will be doing a beta release for 4.0.0 in a couple of weeks. Hopefully this beta will be fine, unlike the fiasco of 3.7.5!

If anyone is using that piece of functionality (and I doubt if the total count of such users is more than 10), I will be removing it in 3.9.3. Note that you can take all the functions defined in the Custom PHP file and put them in a child theme’s functions.php file.

Please feel free to post here in case you have any questions.

How will this help you? Well, I cannot think of any reason other than free publicity. You can check out the Flickr / Picasa / 500px.com demo pages of Photonic for sample usage.

How will this not harm you? That is a more pertinent question. Any watermarked photos that you have will remain with the watermarks shown. Plus I am never shy with giving credit where due, so your work will be proclaimed as your work, not mine.

How will this help me? Well, I will have something to demo for SmugMug. That can only be a good thing.

Version 1.07 should be out soon, and as you can guess, it will feature integration with SmugMug. This version will have basic unauthenticated access, which is good enough for viewing albums, photos etc. Subsequent versions might cover authentication as well for all service providers. Authentication will help you see/add comments for photos and will also unlock various APIs for signed in users.

In this post I wanted to give you a feel of what is coming and open it up for feedback. I am calling this skin Photonique (like Photonic, but different) because it is better suited for photo-blogs. Since it is meant more for photo-blogging, the ideal settings for this would be 0 sidebars and an 800px layout. I would like to call your attention to several new features, key among them being the comment display enhancements. The comment form also looks a lot more classy, but that is something you cannot see because I have blocked comments on that site. You can check it out here.

I have also been working on adding a Typography module to the theme and functionality to seamlessly use your own icons.

Stay tuned.

Contrary to my promise earlier, this release of Suffusion is not small in terms of a change log:

1. The bulk of the changes deal with performance. On the admin page side of things I have cut down memory usage a fair bit and now the back-end is a lot more responsive. On the front-end things were tougher to optimize because already a lot of things were quite heavily optimized.
2. I have also isolated several bits and pieces into separate files – breadcrumbs, menus, site footer, individual post header and footer etc. This will help you override things much easier in a child theme.
3. I have built in some rather nice breadcrumb functionality which is a lot broader than something that just applies to pages. Stay tuned.
4. There are some other small changes to facilitate ease of use/migration.
5. One of the key things mentioned to me in the previous release by a reviewer is that since I am offering the capability to use custom headers and custom backgrounds, I should use the native WP functionality. While custom backgrounds were rather easy to provide, the custom header piece is proving to be a major headache. WP requires you to define a header width upfront, which is not possible in Suffusion thanks to the fact that your page width is fully customizable. I believe this feature can be overridden with a hook, but I have, at this point, decided to give it a rest and revisit it when I have had a good rest. Once I am done with this feature I should be able to release this version.

A full change log will be published once I release the theme, and that will happen as soon as I am done with the native Custom Header Image functionality.

Once I am done with this release it will be back to focusing on Photonic and a new font management plugin that I have visualized. Also, the release after 3.8.3 of Suffusion should have a new skin. I do want to build one that is more conducive for photo-blogging, but I am in two minds whether I should release it as a part of Suffusion’s core or as a separate child theme. Right now the child theme route is looking very tempting, because that way I don’t have to burden Suffusion’s core.

A Big Thank You to all of you users!

The next release of Suffusion is going to be a “framework release”. I am going to be pulling out a lot of bits and pieces of the code into separate files which you can override in child themes very easily. Some classic examples of this are the site footer that is displayed, or how the pullouts show up for different post formats. Apart from other things this will also reduce the load on the site. Suffusion holds the distinction of being a GUI Framework with ease of code modification, but this move will make it even easier to modify the code in the theme.

Of course, Photonic should be out rather soon too. But till then, enjoy the theme!

In fact, Suffusion had TimThumb bundled with it for a long time, since version 3.2.2. However, owing to a crackdown by the WP Theme Review Team on themes not using WP’s native resizing capabilities, I took the decision to remove TimThumb from Suffusion’s core in version 3.7.5.

So why am I writing this? There are a couple of reasons:

1. Some sites have been publishing false and half-researched information claiming that Suffusion has TimThumb. I did post back on their site pointing out that Suffusion hasn’t had a trace of TimThumb since six months, but I don’t see that things have changed. Just to assuage your concerns, here is how you can check for yourself:
   1. Go to Suffusion’s version control page on WP.
   2. Click on the link for the latest version, 3.8.2. You will not see anything that deals with TimThumb anywhere. Typically themes have a file called timthumb.php or thumb.php.
   3. In fact, check back to version 3.7.4, and you won’t see it anywhere.
2. Now, the real reason for writing. A user posted a question on the support forum asking why thumbnails were not displaying. I checked, and found that the site in question was using TimThumb. Digging just a bit further revealed that the user was on a version of the theme that is almost one year old, while TimThumb has been removed from the theme quite a while back. So, if you have a version of Suffusion at 3.7.3 or older, please UPGRADE now!!! Even if you have backups of WP with old versions of the theme or backups of old versions of the theme itself, do the upgrade. I cannot stress enough how important this is! It might be a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but it is better to secure your server now rather than later. Note that if your installation is already infected, you have to do major cleanup on your site and it is best to hire an expert for it. Also note that even if you have other themes on your site that are not active, and those themes have TimThumb, your site stands the risk of being infected, because TimThumb can be invoked without loading WordPress.

The current released version (3.8.2) is quite stable. It has very few bugs, and they are fairly minor and pertain entirely to new functionality. So you shouldn’t face any issues due to the upgrade. As you are probably aware, I make every effort possible to ensure you have a low change impact, so things should be generally fine if you are upgrading from a pre-3.7.5 version to the current one. However I have had some users lose some flexibility with respect to resizing. For example, TimThumb could resize upwards as well as downwards. The native resizer only resizes downwards.

I had promised a few things a year back:

1. Better Typography – I am writing a plugin for font management and I will have incorporate aspects of that into the theme.
2. Prettier Designs – Still working on those. You can expect one very soon.
3. Better Theme Skinning – I have delivered on most counts here. The only big thing not currently skinnable is the sidebar.
4. Some Stunning Widget Area Concepts – I have built out some (hopefully) good new widgets. The widget areas should also make their way into the theme soon. Who knows? Maybe I will do a release jump from 3.8.x to 4.0.0 to coincide with this. I honestly don’t know when I can deliver this, but it is something I dearly want to offer.

Due to reorganized priorities and a lot of changes on the personal front I had to rethink what I could offer over the last year. I did quite a few things I hadn’t thought of:

1. Fluid layouts
2. Rewriting of the options framework to be more inline with WP’s recommendations
3. Retiring TimThumb in favour of the native WP image resizer
4. Some pretty cool features like sidebar control for individual views, byline controls
5. Support for WP features introduced with every new version.
6. Lots of new widgets

All in all the second year has been good – Suffusion won quite a few popularity contests, it was made a featured theme on the official theme repository and its lifetime download count is close to 500,000. Not in my dreams had I expected something I wrote to be downloaded half a million times.

And now for the “one more thing” announcement: Photonic is here. Almost.

Photonic is a plugin that I have written to catch those Photo-blogging features that I had originally planned for 3.7.9/3.8.0. It is an extension of the regular gallery short-code that WP provides. Here is what it can do:

1. Native Gallery Extension
   1. You can now insert a gallery into a post and make it display as a slide-show, either in-place, or as a popup.
   2. You can also display the thumbnail strip at the bottom of your gallery and have full-sized images display there.
2. Flickr Support
   This is the heart of the plugin and I spent a lot of time building and testing this out. You can:
   1. Display all photos in a Photoset using photoset_id=’x’
   2. Display all Photosets for a user using user_id=’x’ and view=’photosets’
   3. Display all Photosets in a collection using user_id=’x’ and collection_id=’y’
   4. Display all Photosets grouped by Collection for a user using user_id=’x’ and view=’collections’
   5. Display photos based on search criteria
3. Picasa Support
   During the course of writing the code I realized how much easier it was to use the Flickr APIs than the Picasa ones. However you can do the following with Picasa:
   1. Display all photos for a user
   2. Display all photos for a user within an album
4. Support for Well-known JQuery libraries
   I have added support for the following popular JQuery libraries:
   1. Fancybox
   2. Colorbox
   3. Slimbox2
   4. Thickbox

Note that this plugin is different from other photoblogging plugins:

1. It doesn’t let you define new galleries on each post like NextGEN.
2. It doesn’t process photos on your disk to generate galleries. This might come on my radar later on.
3. It doesn’t pull images from other photo-blogging platforms such as Coppermine, ZenPhoto, PixelPost or Gallery2. This is something definitely on my radar – it might be as simple as supporting the Media RSS format.

The plugin offers you pretty good control over options. One scenario where it might not work is if you have conflicting plugins (or even themes) using Scriptaculous or Mootools – I haven’t tested this out.

Think of this plugin as a gallery extension to help display your photos from whichever platform you currently use. It is smart enough to pull up titles, descriptions and EXIF as required. By not bundling these features with the theme I am letting you pick the theme of your choice and run with the plugin.

I need about a week more (or 2 at the most) to close out any remaining issues in the plugin. My day job has been quite brutal the last few weeks, hindering my ability to deliver this quicker than I am doing right now. I have, for now, built a few test pages that you can play with. Feel free to click around and let me know what you think.