Ad Hoc Widgets » Aquoid Themes

After a lot of delays and innumerable back-and-forth exchanges, a version of Suffusion has finally been approved – 3.6.3. This is essentially a combination of a large number of features and fixes, from release 3.5.8 through 3.6.3. If you look at the Change Log.txt file in the theme folder you will get an idea about how big the changes actually are:

Bug Fixes
There were quite a few bug fixes, actually:
1. Fixed a bug that was displaying the “Comment form closed” message even if the settings were done to hide them. The slow approvals mean that questions get asked hundreds of times on the forum – this happened to be the top question over the last month.
2. Fixed a minor problem with the style resets that I introduced in 3.5.6. This particular bug was causing Gallery items to spill over into a new line.
3. The “Page of Posts” template was showing a NOTICE message with WordPress debugging turned on. I have fixed this.
4. In my zeal to optimize code I had removed a bit too much in the “Now Reading” library page. The page was throwing up an error – that has now been fixed.
5. Fixed a bug in the suffusion-tag-cloud short code. This was assigning an incorrect value to the number parameter.
  Note: You can use this short code in a text widget to display a tag cloud. It gives you a lot more control in terms of the number of tags you want to show and the sizes you want to set for each.
6. Fixed a bug in the Custom Post Types section that was not saving post types with the correct index.
7. Fixed a bug that was causing single quote characters in the post title to cause invalid markup.
8. Fixed a bug in the “No Sidebars” template where the maximum width of the image was being set incorrectly.
9. An incorrect control switch was being used to determine if custom font settings were to be used. This has been fixed.
  Note: If your fonts suddenly seem to have changed, go to Visual Effects → Body Font Settings and select “Custom Styles” for the first option and save.
10. Fixed a couple of XHTML validation bugs. The first would occur if you have a gradient image selected for the header, and the second would occur if you had opted to use compression (GZip or minification) on the CSS files.
New Features
There were tons of new features added.
1. New Widget Areas
  There are nine new widget areas. Technically there are five, but the fifth is a special kind:
  1. Widgets Above Header – This is in response to requests to be able to display ads above the header.
  2. Header Widgets – This, again, is in response to requests to be able to use the blank space near the blog header.
  3. Wide Sidebar (Top) – This is widget area that sits above both your sidebars if your sidebars are on the same side. Otherwise this is not shown. It is as wide as both your sidebars combined.
  4. Wide Sidebar (Bottom) – This is widget area that sits below both your sidebars if your sidebars are on the same side. Otherwise this is not shown. It is as wide as both your sidebars combined.
  5. Ad Hoc Widgets 1 to 5 – This is something new and quite interesting. There are 5 new widget areas called Ad Hoc Widgets 1, … Ad Hoc Widgets 5. You can add any widgets you please there. You can then invoke these widget areas from within your posts or pages, if you want. You have short codes to do this:
```
[suffusion-widgets id='3']
```
    You can use any number from 1 to 5 for the id.
2. As stated above, the short code to display ad hoc widgets, suffusion-widgets is new.
3. There is a new page template for logging in, called “Log In”. You can use this template to create a login page for users. Mind you, this doesn’t tie up with the Meta Widget directly. You have to explicitly provide the link to users to log in.
4. You can now customize the labels on your Comment form. Head over to Blog Features → Comment Settings to do so.
5. There is a new Polish translation, thanks to Robert Maculewicz!
6. JavaScript files are now added to the bottom of the page by default. You can change this by going to Blog Features → Site Optimization.
7. Added capability to display text in multiple columns using short codes [suffusion-multic] and [suffusion-column]
8. Added translation support for child themes.
9. Added support for assigning menus to locations in the Appearance → Menus section of the admin panel. This comes with a change of behavior: if you assign a menu to the Top Navigation Bar and the Top Navigation Bar is hidden, it will still show up. Additionally if a menu is not assigned to a navigation bar in the Navigation Bar Setup options, but is assigned through the Menu administration page, the menu will show up.
Modifications
Some of the existing functionality has changed:
1. Code Optimization
  This is yet another release where I have reworked the back-end. The impact this time, though, is not severe. I had noticed, as had quite a few users that the options panel had become quite sluggish. Of course, when you are looking at 400+ options loaded from a 6000 line file into JavaScript memory you are bound to have performance impacts. So I did a subtle split of the options menu and prevented it all from adding to the JS footprint. Earlier you had this:
  Previous Look
  
  You now have this:
  New Look
  
  I have essentially moved all the horizontal tabs into the side menu. The back-end is now noticeably quicker than what it was in the previous releases.
2. I made minor CSS changes to the Minima skin. I will continue to tweak the style sheet in minor ways till I am convinced it looks good.
3. I have switched off the “Comment form closed” message by default. Users who wanted to see the message will need to revisit the settings in Blog Features → Comment Settings.
4. Code Housekeeping:
  1. Replaced occurrences of include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/searchform.php') with get_search_form(). This is as per the new approval process and it improves child theme support.
  2. Replaced occurrences of file includes with get_template_part(). This is as per the new approval process and it improves child theme support w.e.f. WP 3.0.
  3. Removed support for comments from WP versions older than 2.7. Suffusion anyway has been relying on at least 2.8 for widgets since a long time, so this code was redundant.
  4. Added call to new function comment_form() in comments.php. This is as per the new approval process, though it is quite counter-intuitive. I had to leave the old code in place, because there are still users who use WP 2.9 and for them the new function will not work.
  5. Moved licensing information to style.css file. This doesn’t impact you as an end-user.
  6. Enqueued all JavaScript file inclusions.
5. Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation, thanks to Alcides Soares!
6. Changed behavior to exclude posts from the static Featured Content section in the rest of the content on a page.

Hope you like this combined multi-release.