Suffusion Version 3.6.9

 Theme Releases  30 Responses »
Nov 112010
 
Design

Before I begin about this release, I would first like to apologize to all people whose layouts broke due to the last release. As it turns out I had not tested certain configurations involving the static Tabbed Sidebar, which resulted in all people using this feature having their sites become train-wrecks. Disabling the Tabbed Sidebar would have fixed the issue for all affected people, but there was no way you as a user could have known that.

Anyway, this release is a bug-fix release and there are no new features. Here are the fixes:

  1. Layout bugs
    1. The biggest issue – wonky layouts upon activation of the Tabbed Sidebar – has been fixed. There is one exception – if you are using IE6 (yes, that fossil) and you have the Tabbed Sidebar on and your Tabbed Sidebar is on the left side and you have at least one sidebar on the left site, then your left sidebar will render incorrectly on IE6 (only on IE6). I spent some time trying to figure this out, but gave up because I had to get this release out early and this particular combination has an extremely low probability of occurring. Otherwise I have hopefully resolved all issues on all browsers regarding this mishap.
    2. The Widget Area Below Header was not spanning the full width of the wrapper and was showing a blank space on the side.
    3. The Widget Area Above Footer was overlapping the right sidebar if the sidebar was longer than the content.
    4. The No Sidebars template was showing up with empty space on the side.
    5. In the “Tiles” layout excerpt images were becoming very tiny because the widths were computing incorrectly.
  2. If you had defined more than one WP 3.0 Menu, each menu item was getting repeated multiple times in the navigation bar. This has been fixed too.
  3. There was a bug that was preventing the post footer from appearing in the archive view (front page, category, date archive, tag etc). So if you had Tags or “Posted By” at the bottom of a post, that wasn’t being displayed. This now works.
  4. There was a very old bug where the excerpt title in the “Tiles” layout where the header of excerpts wasn’t reading the alignment setting correctly. Instead it was borrowing the alignment of Magazine excerpts.

One point I would like to highlight – often when you upgrade your theme it apparently breaks your layout, while in truth there is nothing wrong with it. In such cases try out a few very simple things. First and foremost, clean out your browser’s cache and reload your page. Second, if you have a caching plugin make sure that you rebuild its cache, otherwise it will serve content that is not current.

I also thought I should highlight what some known issues are. There are 2, actually, both of which are JavaScript-related:

  1. At some point in the last 3 releases the Google Translator widget stopped working. I have no idea why, since I haven’t changed anything there. If you were looking for this feature to work I encourage you to look for some free plugin to help you there.
  2. At some point in the last few months the Fade / delay effect on the navigation menu stopped working. Again, I have no idea why. Since this is a very low impact issue I didn’t spend an excruciating amount of time trying to resolve this.

Another aspect I wanted to highlight was regarding my comment in my previous post, about “Rolled up menus”. A few users had difficulty understanding the concept, so I thought I will explain it here. To create a new dummy node:

  1. Go to Appearance → Menus and open up your menu.
  2. Create a new menu item using a Custom Link.
    1. For the URL specify #. Make sure you delete the “http://” that sits there by default
    2. For the Label put in whatever you want to name your root node.
    3. Add to Menu
  3. Once added, move this item to the top of the list.
  4. Now, indent every other item under this top item. This way each other node is a child of your newly created root. Remember to indent – this is important.
  5. That’s it. Since you have set the URL to be “#” Suffusion knows that it shouldn’t open any page for it. All other items are listed as children of this new node.

That’s it for this release. I am hoping this will smooth over the rough edges of 3.6.8. I will keep subsequent releases smaller in scope, though, quite frankly I don’t foresee anything being so large in scope.

Over the next few weeks I will focus on building a proper plugin for Suffusion and BP compatibility, assuming that the support queue for 3.6.9 isn’t huge.

An Update on Suffusion – Part 3

 General  3 Responses »
Nov 072010
 
Opinion

After slogging very hard the last 3 weeks I managed to get all the changes I was hoping to include in place for version 3.6.7 last night. Making use of the illusion of an extra hour from daylight savings I went ahead and tried to submit the theme to WordPress.

But as I tried to submit it I hit a snag. I kept getting a message that said:

Error 413: Request Entity Too Large

No matter what I tried and from which browser and machine, the error did not change. It is highly likely that the WP servers had a configuration change in the back-end. I did post out a message to the theme reviewers asking them as to why this is happening. After all the file is just marginally larger than the previous versions and I have never had this problem earlier. Let’s see what they say.

As I mentioned earlier, the primary features of this release were a reworking of the navigation bar code, a fundamental change to the HTML markup and a set of options for fluid/flexible width. In addition there have been a number of BuddyPress-related style changes. I will release a new version of the Suffusion BuddyPress Pack when this version of Suffusion gets approved.

I will post a detailed change log once the theme is approved.

An Update on Suffusion

 General  24 Responses »
Oct 112010
 
Opinion

This is the longest I have gone between releases of Suffusion and unfortunately the current release is significantly more complex than the previous ones, hence version 3.6.7 is still a few weeks away from release.

A general fact of any software development cycle is that the more complex the software the longer the development cycle. As things stand today Suffusion is quite complex under the hood. As a result when I try to make a foundational change to the theme, it is a very very arduous exercise. Such changes were much easier to make when the theme was simpler. That is the difference between foundational changes and add-on changes: add-on changes are still easy to do given the theme’s modular structuring, which is why I can add new sidebars etc without breaking a sweat (actually adding sidebars is not that easy, but it still is much easier than what I am doing right now). There are two major changes I am working on at present:

  1. A revamped approach to navigation menus – I was never happy with the way WP handled its functions wp_list_pages etc. I felt that their concepts of “include” and “exclude” were slightly messy and I tried to build a fool-proof system for building menus myself. The net result:
    1. I was successful because I achieved what I had set out to do. Including and excluding items worked as advertised.
    2. I ended up introducing some rather undesirable inefficiencies in the code. The menu-bar code worked well, but to work the way I had envisioned it required to do a lot more queries in the back-end system. For users who had a large number of pages etc, the menus generated at least 100 extra database queries.
    3. Some plugins refused to cooperate with the menu code.
    4. Some features like highlighting the correct page etc were notoriously hard to implement.

    So in this release I decided to fall back on WP’s standard functions instead of my enhanced ones. The result is that menus will not work the way I think they should (which shouldn’t really concern you – I am but one individual), but they will work the way WP thinks they should.
    The change is complex because it required me to change all my menu code, test for pages, categories, links and WP 3.0 menus, fix all style-related problems and what not. Luckily though, this is a piece that I have finished implementing.

  2. An option for fluid width – This is a more cataclysmic change. It involves revamping the entire HTML markup and a humongous amount of implementation and testing. This piece is taking a lot of time to finish implementing, let alone get into full-blown testing.

Adding to the implementation complexity are some major changes on the personal front for me, like an upcoming move from the US to Canada and you can see why this release has been taking time.

The light at the end of the tunnel, though, is that once this release is done, you can do pretty much anything with the theme layout. At that point I can focus on the funky features I had promised in the birthday post of Suffusion.

Suffusion Version 3.6.3

 Theme Releases  33 Responses »
Aug 102010
 

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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

      Previous Look


      You now have this:
      New Look

      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.

Improving the WordPress Theme Review Experiment

 General  15 Responses »
Jul 282010
 

A disclaimer
I would have posted this on WP’s official site if it allowed me to post, but since it doesn’t, I am publishing it on my own blog. This is meant as an appraisal of the new theme approval process on WordPress.

On 9th June 2010 WordPress made an announcement that it was expanding the theme review process. There was a call for volunteers to support theme reviews. This was indeed good news, particularly if you were a theme developer. For a long time Joseph Scott had been the sole approver of themes on WP, and though his work was impeccable and his reviews very good and accurate, if he was traveling or unwell or on holiday theme approvals tended to get delayed. This was by no means a deal-breaker, but having more people looking at themes definitely meant that things would get better.

Soon after the announcement a few things happened that were moves in the right direction:

  1. Quite a few folks signed up in response to Joseph’s post, so there are more volunteers now.
  2. A dedicated Trac project was setup for approvals.
  3. Every time a theme got submitted the corresponding Trac ticket got emailed to the theme author so that he/she could follow what was going on with his theme.
  4. There was much better focus on the quality of code in a theme. Actually the focus was more on writing code that didn’t generate “silent errors” or PHP NOTICE messages, but nonetheless adhering to this is something that keeps down the size of logs on your server.

But that is where the goodness stopped. One of the key things which I had hoped would be addressed, speed of approvals took a nosedive. To cite an example earlier when I submitted a theme version it would take around 1-3 days to get approved. It took 1 day if I submitted it on a weekday and typically 3 days if I submitted it on a Friday. In some cases if it was vacation time then the versions took about a week to 10 days to get approved, but this was more of an exception to the rule. Normally on a day you would see 2-3 versions of different themes getting approved, and on occasion the number of approvals even ran into double digits.

However, with the new experiment somewhere something went wrong. Now you have around 1 theme being approved in 2-3 days, which doesn’t seem right. To drive my point home, version 3.5.7 of Suffusion got approved on 10th July. Today is 28th July and only nine more versions of different themes have been approved (including a version of the WP default theme Twenty Ten). This is a far cry from how things happened earlier. I normally used to wait for about a week before pinging the folks to check the status of a version, so for 3.5.4 I sent out a message asking what was up, and this is what I received:

Thanks for the note.  Unfortunately there is currently a backlog of themes in the review queue.  We are working on it.  Themes are being reviewed in the order in which they were received.  Thank you for your continued patience.

I didn’t know at that time how much the backlog was or how much longer the next version of Suffusion would take for approval. I found out later how you can estimate the potential wait time. The backlog, as I know now, is well over 100 theme versions at present. So somehow adding more people slowed down the process.

The delay also brings in a bunch of associated problems. Currently if you have a theme version in the queue and you submit a new version, the older version gets deleted and the newer version goes to the back of the queue. So as a theme developer:

  1. If I have submitted a bug-fix for the theme 3 weeks back and that hasn’t been approved, how do I ensure that my users get the bug-fix? Distribute it from my site (unapproved)? Doesn’t sound safe.
  2. If I have submitted a version 3 weeks back with some bug-fixes, then I discover some more bugs in the submitted version what do I do with them? If I resubmit a new version I go to the bottom. So I add another month or so to something that has already been in for 3 weeks? Ouch. Incidentally I have had this happen to me quite often, most recently with version 3.5.8 and 3.5.9.
  3. If I choose not to submit the bug-fix for the older version but let the bugs be approved (these are niche bugs that cannot be caught in the approval process, mind you) and then I submit the new version, I am risking users staying with a buggy version for an indeterminate number of extra weeks.

So somehow this review process discourages active theme development, which I feel is counter-productive to the whole experiment.

How can the experiment be improved? I have a few suggestions:

  1. Improve targets. Set a target saying that each approver should aim to disposition a new theme for approval every weekday (or some such figure). If you have 10 approvers, this will take care of tackling 10 themes everyday and bring down the backlog much faster.
    I can almost hear people say, “What does he know?”, or “He is speaking like a consultant”, or “He is oversimplifying”. Well, I have been doing free support for Suffusion since late last September and that is how I keep my backlog down. Every morning I go through all outstanding support requests, take a crack at answering them if they haven’t been answered by someone else, then carry on with my regular job for the rest of the day. If a request comes in during the day, if I am not doing much then I respond to it (or if I think others can respond, I skip it). This has been a largely successful way of staying on top of things. I have responded to more than 3000 posts on my support forum at around 10 posts per day.
  2. Don’t de-prioritize existing themes in the queue upon newer submissions. I love putting out new functionality in the theme, and anyone with any experience whatsoever with Suffusion will agree with me in the fact what I provide is not just cosmetic, but hard features. Sometimes a new version is required to patch a bug. Getting pushed to the back of the queue is very off-putting, because it simply adds so much more in terms of wait time for approvals.
    This simply encourages parallel avenues of theme distribution because developers know that their work will not be approved soon on WP’s official site, so they distribute it from their site. And that is where they can start putting in stuff like tracking code etc into a theme. Mind you, quicker approvals will make this a non-issue, but the current wait of a few weeks is a bit too much.

As a concluding remark, the topic of this post and the issues in the post are not mission-critical and I am sure people have more interesting things to do. However I am sure that the free theme developers would be quite happy with these modifications, particularly since some of them invest a lot of energy in building their themes.

100 Ratings for Suffusion – Hurray!!!

 General  13 Responses »
Jul 112010
 

Earlier today Suffusion obtained its 100th rating on WordPress.org. This puts it it rather exclusive company – it is now the 5th theme to obtain this distinction. The four others to have reached this landmark before me are:

  1. Atahualpa – Really the inspiration behind Suffusion and in my opinion the gold-standard of theme customization, Atahualpa is way ahead on all statistical measures on WordPress: most downloads and most ratings. At the time of writing it has been rated a whopping 418 times on WordPress!!
  2. iNove – Another theme that has been around for quite a long time, iNove has been rated 193 times at the time of writing.
  3. Mystique – This is a really popular theme with WP users because of its catchy design. The only theme younger than Suffusion to have been rated more times than it, Mystique has 140 ratings at this point. Its current popularity will probably ensure that it will go over iNove in the near future.
  4. Thematic – It is no surprise that Thematic is the only free theme that has been in the top 15 popular themes since as long as I can remember, and that is very long! No other theme – Atahualpa, Mystique and iNove included has managed this distinction. Thematic is a very clean and well documented theme framework that most people swear by. If you are a theme developer, look at Thematic (and Hybrid) to see how to do it right. At present Thematic has been rated 111 times.

Though unlikely it is possible that I have missed a few here. So if you are aware of any other themes that should be here by all means let me know.

Thank you users, for using Suffusion and voting for it to let people know that you have liked it!

Suffusion Version 3.5.4

 Theme Releases  11 Responses »
Jun 222010
 

I submitted version 3.5.4 on Sunday, before flying out to the UK. I see that WordPress has still not approved it, so I await the release patiently. This was a big release in terms of the number of fixes and enhancements, so without much ado here is the list:

  1. Optimization
    I did some optimization on multiple fronts:
    1. I introduced a new section under Blog Features called Site Optimization. Most optimization activities have been moved or added there.
    2. I have merged the contents of bgiframe.js with suffusion.js. This is to reduce the overall number of HTTP requests
    3. I have merged the contents of dbx.css with style.css, again, to reduce the overall number of HTTP requests.
    4. You now have options to choose GZip and minification at various levels. Mind you, different plugins can achieve this at various levels for you. In general the capability built into the theme is competent, but not all-encompassing. If you are using a plugin and are happy with it, by all means stick with it. But if you are not using a plugin or don’t want to use one or you don’t have , feel free to give this a shot. From what I have found out this does improve performance on Google Page Speed and on Yahoo YSlow. Feel free to disable the optimization if it doesn’t work well for you:
      1. You can GZip and / or minify the theme’s CSS files from the Blog Features → Site Optimization menu
      2. You can GZip the internal WordPress JavaScript files (like JQuery). Note that these files are already minified, so you don’t have to do anything on that front. Also note that the GZip process doesn’t apply to Suffusion’s JS files (like the JQuery Cycle script for featured content). This is due to a shortcoming in tying together WP’s inbuilt function wp_enqueue_script with the GZip capability. Plugins can still do this for you.
      3. You can also GZip your main content, all from the same Site Optimization section.
  2. WP 3.0 Retro-fixes
    WordPress changed a few things between its last RC version and the final release version. I took care of those in this release:
    1. WP renamed the support type for navigation menus from nav-menus to menus. Because of this the navigation menus seemed to not be working in version 3.5.3 with WP 3.0, while they worked for WP 3.0 RC and Beta versions.
    2. WP also renamed the function is_post_type to post_type_exists. This was causing custom taxonomies to not be associated with custom types in version 3.5.3 (again, this was working for the RC and Beta versions). I have addressed this too.
  3. More WP 3.0 Support
    I have added an option to “flatten” the navigation menus of WP 3.0 in the Navigation menus. Using this setting you will no longer see the menu names in the navigation bar. I have also included WP’s standard code to include feed URLs (this is internal and shouldn’t make a difference to you as a user).
  4. New Widget Areas
    I added two new widget areas: Sidebar 1 (Bottom) and Sidebar 2 (Bottom). These are respectively positioned below Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2 and will be on the same side as the main sidebars. You can style these sidebars individually, so effectively you can have two sets of tabbed sidebars in the same column.
    As an aside the total number of widget areas in Suffusion is currently 10.
  5. New Action Hooks and Filter Hooks
    A lot of new hooks were added, both as action hooks and filter hooks. You can use these hooks to put in some fancy stuff either through the custom PHP method or through the child theme method. Here are the hooks:
    1. Action Hooks
      These have been added with respect to the sidebars. You can use these to put in some custom markup above your sidebars or between the sidebars or below them.
      1. suffusion_before_first_sidebar
      2. suffusion_between_first_sidebars
      3. suffusion_after_first_sidebar
      4. suffusion_before_second_sidebar
      5. suffusion_between_second_sidebars
      6. suffusion_after_second_sidebar
    2. Filter Hooks
      One filter hook has been added:
      1. suffusion_get_post_title_and_link – You can use this hook to append or prefix the post title with some other text. E.g. You can, as one user requested on the forum, have your own image before the post title, or as another user requested, put in a date in the list layout view. Currently the tile layout doesn’t have this hook, but it will have it in version 3.5.5.
  6. Miscellaneous Changes
    I fixed a small bug brought about by my use of the post_class function. This was causing attachment views to show up unstyled. Now they will get the post class. Another bug I fixed was related to the “Page of Posts” template. For some users this seemed to be ignoring the “Display All Posts” I also made minor modifications to the different layout files by adding global variables that indicate what kind of layout you are using – blog, tile or list. Again, this kind of a change doesn’t impact you, but it is useful if you are going to write your own templates. The last change I made was the addition of an option to disable the use of the body_class internal WP function, because apparently PHP 5.2 has some issues with it. Frankly, this wasn’t my problem to solve, but then again, such things have never prevented users from asking me to resolve their issues.

Now for the next release. I can say for sure about two new features in 3.5.5. One is a couple more widget areas (a lot of people have been asking for widget areas in the header). Another is the use of TimThumb with WP-MS, something that has been in my To-do bucket ever since I released BP support for the theme. As for more features, I need to see what I can fit in my timeline.

While it has been humorously suggested that I am a machine, and while a lot of users on the support forums make demands from me seriously assuming I am a machine I have to remind you what I mentioned at the start of the post: I am in London this week, hence my response times and development speed will be off. Also note that I am not in charge of approvals at WP, so please don’t keep posting questions asking when version 3.5.4 will be available – I have no visibility into that.

WordPress Version 3.0 is Out

 General  22 Responses »
Jun 172010
 
Announcement

After months of waiting and after a series of Beta versions and Release Candidates WP 3.0 finally came out today. I encourage all of you to upgrade your installations.

Why Should You Upgrade?

Version 3.0 is a significant release that has a lot of terrific features. Here are some:

  1. Menus
    This is arguably the most awaited feature of WordPress. This is  a huge relief for developers more than users as we don’t have to code our themes to provide you with a mechanism to select pages / categories / links to build the menu. As long as the themes offer basic WP 3.0 menu support you are good to go. You can build and structure your menus as and how you want with very little restrictions.
    Suffusion has supported native menus from version 3.5.0.
    It has been brought to my notice that WP pulled a little trick here. In the release version they changed a call ever so slightly, thereby making it seem like menus don’t work in Suffusion 3.5.3 (and a bunch of other themes that claim to support menus). To fix this:
    1. Open functions.php in your theme editor
    2. Search for the line that says add_theme_support(‘nav-menus’);
    3. Change that to say add_theme_support(‘menus’);

    That’s all.

  2. Integrated Multi-User Code
    With WP 3.0 the two branches of code, WP-MU (multi-user) and WP have been merged. You need to tweak a few settings to convert your site from a regular WP site to a WP-MS (multi-site) installation. You can start by creating a network.
    Suffusion can be used for WP-MS and can be made to work with BuddyPress too for a better experience.
  3. Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies
    The next big feature for folks wishing to use WordPress as a full-blown CMS is the concept of Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies. This offers limitless possibilities. If you have a site where you do reviews of books, movies and music, you can create custom post types for each of those, then associate custom taxonomies to them, like authors for books, actors and directors for movies and artists for music albums. In a theme that supports child themes you can suitably create your own templates for each of these post types and make them appear very different from the regular “blog” look.
    Suffusion added a plugin-like feature to let you define custom post types and taxonomies in version 3.5.3. This functionality will be enhanced in the next few releases.
  4. Native Support for Custom Header and Custom Background Images
    Now theme developers don’t have to code up a bunch of stuff to handle custom header images and background images. Of course, if you are like me you might still want to code up things – coding definitely gives you a lot of flexibility.
    Suffusion doesn’t support this feature at present, but it will, very soon. I couldn’t beat the WP 3.0 deadline, to be honest :-)

Why Shouldn’t You Upgrade?

Simple answer – themes and plugins. Before you upgrade make sure that your theme is tested to work for the theme you are using. I am assuming that you are not necessarily a Suffusion user, so if you are using a theme that is not compatible and you upgrade, you will find yourself on a sticky wicket.

Another reason why you shouldn’t upgrade is if you have some indispensible plugin that is not tested on WP 3.0.

How Should You Upgrade?

If you don’t see an option on your admin Dashboard to upgrade, head over to Tools → Upgrade and then do the upgrade.

There is always the manual upgrade option, where you can download the zip file from WordPress, unzip it and overwrite everything apart from the wp-content folder.

What? No Suffusion News?

Come on! You cannot expect me to sign off without talking about the progress on Suffusion!

I have been busy the last week adding some optimization-specific stuff to Suffusion, like an ability to use GZip compression and minification on CSS and JavaScript. I have been largely successful in improving a lot of things, significantly bumping up the scores on Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow. Mind you, YSlow is quite hard to please – Yahoo’s own site scores a “B” grade on its performance test.

I have also been working on a ton of other stuff, small and big. Stay tuned – a new version will be submitted soon.

Ah, the Vagaries of WordPress Approvals!

 Theme Releases  6 Responses »
Jun 032010
 

Six days after submitting version 3.5.2 of Suffusion for approval I contacted the folks who do the approvals. The news I received was somewhat discouraging. Since I tagged my theme with “buddypress” because it is now BuddyPress-enabled, it goes into a different review queue. The person who does the approvals there is apparently behind, so I don’t know when this version will be available. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, because there were a lot of things in 3.5.1/3.5.2 that were non-BP features.

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