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:
       
      Now Suffusion has its own menu with an ability to set theme options or define custom types:
      
   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.