Suffusion Version 3.5.3 and BuddyPress Support

 Theme Releases  19 Responses »
Jun 092010
 

Since it has been exactly 2 weeks after my submission of version 3.5.2 and I have heard nothing useful from the folks at WP despite my queries, I have decided to take some drastic measures resulting in some bad news and some good news.

The Bad News
I have pulled BuddyPress support from the theme. All the folders have been removed and a trimmed down version has been resubmitted as version 3.5.3 to WordPress for approval. I would have liked to be a complete theme with BP support, but 2 weeks for approval is simply not acceptable. I hope all of you agree.

The Good News
Of course, my conscience wouldn’t let me leave you in the lurch, so you will get the next best thing – a plugin that you can use on Suffusion and any child theme.

The Bad News – 2
Given the nature of changes in 3.5.3 I couldn’t do the theme AND the plugin. So the plugin is not yet developed.

The Good News – 2
While I haven’t got the plugin ready, you certainly can try out the BP functionality!!! Head over to the plugin page, or what will become the plugin page – right now it has instructions for you to make this work. Go ahead and give it a shot and let me know what you like / dislike.

And now for the details of version 3.5.3:

  1. Removed BuddyPress Support
    As described above. I haven’t removed the style information from the theme’s stylesheets, though. Just the files for BP have been removed.
  2. Bug Fixes
    There were some issues with BP styles, particularly for IE. Those have been addressed. Also the introduction of the body_class() call caused some unexpected styling issues – they have been addressed, too. Then there was an issue with the registration on the multi-site setup of WP, where the form was not rendering correctly. That has been taken care of.
  3. Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies
    This is the biggest feature of this release. Custom Post Types have been supported in version 2.9 of WP, but WP 3.0 takes it a lot further. I have provided a UI for you to add custom post types and custom taxonomies. This development took a good bit of time and testing. Here are the highlights:
    1. The Options menu has been subtly reorganized. You earlier had the options accessible through the “Appearance” menu:
      options-1 
      Now Suffusion has its own menu with an ability to set theme options or define custom types:
      options-2
    2. The major sub-feature here is the use of AJAX in the “Custom Types” section. People have complained regarding the fact that Suffusion does a “resubmit” of the options, reloading the page. What is not often understood is that the options UI for Suffusion is phenomenally complex and handling it all through AJAX is not feasible because you will lose the spiffiness that you currently have in the back-end. However I gave AJAX a shot in the Custom Types menu and tedious though it was, I might consider extending AJAX support to the main options page. The UI is still rough around the edges, but I will polish it in the coming weeks.
    3. You can set up custom post types for books, movies, music albums, support forums etc. You can associate your own taxonomies to these, like genre, rating, writer, support-type etc. You can include these in WP 3.0 menus and a bunch of other places, and in general you can make your site a true CMS site.
    4. In conjunction with child themes you can create your own custom layouts for each custom post type.
  4. Support for hAtom Microformats
    Your posts and pages now support the hAtom Microformat, which will  help microformat-capable browsers and browser-plugins detect post content much better.

I am sincerely hoping that 3.5.3 will get approved quickly. And I am hoping even more that you will like this triple release.

 Posted by Sayontan at 11:14 pm  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Suffusion Version 3.5.2 and Child Themes

 Recipes, Theme Releases  33 Responses »
Jun 012010
 

Minutes after making my submission of version 3.5.1 I realized that there were some errors that had inadvertently crept in because I used the body_class() method. So I had to fix the errors and resubmit the theme, but as version 3.5.2. Now, I had already laid out plans for 3.5.3 before making these changes, so another feature found its way in. So here are the changes for 3.5.2:

  1. Support for Child Themes
    This was another of those long-time to-do activities that I finally got around to delivering. This was surprisingly easy to incorporate and I just had to make a handful of changes. You can now define child themes for Suffusion. This is very easy for you as well. Let us assume that you will create a child theme called “Son of Suffusion”. Here is what you will do:
    1. Create a folder called son-of-suffusion under wp-content/themes.
    2. Create a file called style.css in this folder. Put in these lines: 
      /*
Theme Name: Son of Suffusion
Theme URI: http://your-theme-url
Description: Child Theme based on Suffusion
Version: 1.0.0
Author: Your Name
Author URI: http://your-url
Template: suffusion
*/

@import url("../suffusion/style.css");
    3. The last line in comments, “Template: suffusion” is critical. It tells WP that your theme is based on Suffusion. Make sure that what you put in there is the directory where Suffusion resides.
    4. The first line after the comments is important if you want to use the Suffusion stylesheet. If you don’t have it, Suffusion’s styles will not be loaded.
    5. That’s all, really. You can add additional styles if you wish. This would be one way to not use the “Custom Styles” option. You can also add a functions.php and define your own PHP functions there. That would be one way to avoid using the “Custom PHP” functionality. Note the following:
      1. What you define in functions.php adds on to the existing functions in Suffusion’s functions.php file.
      2. Any other template file that you add overrides Suffusion’s templates. So if you create your own author.php file, that will take precedence over Suffusion’s author template. One very important use of child themes is if you want custom templates for custom purposes. E.g. You can create a file called category-16.php and define a special layout for your category with id 16. You can also create author-specific templates for WP 3.0. See WP’s template hierarchy for more details regarding how to add custom templates.
    6. Suffusion’s huge array of options will all be available to you using this method. Ensure that you keep the theme up-to-date.
  2. Bug fixes for some errors introduced by the body_class() function, for static pages. Of course, after submitting 3.5.2 I caught another of these errors for author pages, but I am not going to bother with another release before WP approves my current release.

That’s it for now. I guess 3.5.2 will be a significant release for you users because it will come armed with both BuddyPress support and Child Theme support. So just keep waiting for WP to approve, while I figure out how to make some more WP 3.0 functionality available to you.

 Posted by Sayontan at 7:04 pm  Tagged with: , , ,
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