Suffusion Version 2.5.6

Version 2.5.6 of Suffusion should be out in a day or so. I know that the next version was supposed to be 2.5.5, but I had a coding inefficiency that I had to correct, so 2.5.6 it is.

And now for a list of things I forgot:

• I forgot to edit the description in the stylesheet, but we have a new translation! Wim Scholtes volunteered a Dutch translation that I have included with the theme.
• The last release had a pretty big feature – custom width. Earlier the theme had a fixed width of 1000px and options to “adjust” the width if you had more than one sidebar. I have gotten rid of the “adjustment” feature, because it was too restrictive. Instead you can now have the width you want, within restrictions. The first restriction is that the width cannot be less than 600px. The second is that it still is a fixed width theme. In other words you cannot put in “100%” for the theme width and expect it to occupy the entire width of the window.
  While I agree that I could have supported flexible widths as well, the main difficulty is with one particular element on my screen – the date. The date is 48px wide, whatever be the case, so I cannot specify a percentage for the title next to it – it wouldn’t work. Till I figure out another way and another place to display the date, it will continue to be this way.
  Users who were using the “adjust” features can select the “1200px” width to meet their requirements.
  In the near future I will provide another mode, where you will be able to individually define the width of your post area and your sidebars, and that will compute the overall width for you.
• Don’t know if you folks realized, but I had provided support for the WP-PageNavi plugin in a recent release. Additionally there are options that will let you show your pages and comments in a numbered list, even if you don’t have that plugin installed.

Now for what’s coming in 2.5.6

• A category template and support for the Category Icons plugin – I was missing a category template in the theme, so I created one. In addition I included the category icons functionality from this plugin to help pull the icon associated with this category.
• Some bug fixes – I had missed a very obvious bug that was preventing the correct comment count from appearing. I have fixed that and submitted it. I had also procrastinated about fixing another bug, which shows up when you view a single post on a blog where you have only one post. I thought that people would rarely find themselves in a situation where you will have only one post in your blog, so I kept postponing this fix, till someone explicitly asked me to fix it. There was a third bug where Pages (not posts) were showing up in an excerpt mode – I fixed it.

And now for what is in store for the next few weeks

• More templates – I intend to build a “magazine” mode for the theme and then add a “photoblogging” mode. These are quite time-consuming, so features might be out of the gate rather slowly. Providing more templates is going to be an enabler for these special modes.
• Support for more plugins – If there are a few specific plugins that you want me to support please let me know. Please note that I have NOT been able to get WordPress MU running, so I cannot try out BuddyPress related things unless you provide me with an installation.
• Widgets – At the very least I intend to build an “RSS Subscription” widget that people can place anywhere to bundle their subscription links. I will also be enhancing some of the standard widgets, like Categories and Pages. I don’t have an ETA for this, though.
• Enhancements to the “Featured Content” section – I have received one request for enhancing this section by allowing other effects to be shown. As I announced in my previous post, the main slider script is based on s3Slider, with some changes from my side. This script will have to be significantly modified to tackle this request. I want to do this in as risk-free a manner as possible to avoid total chaos. So this will take time, too.
• Enhancements to the “Excerpts” – I believe that the control I offer for excerpts is awesome. But some users don’t believe so :-). Nonetheless I am going to support showing of embedded videos in an excerpt – I have one request for that. Again, this is somewhat low on my priority list, so it might not get done for the next 2-3 weeks.

I find it surprising that after repeatedly saying that development on Suffusion is winding down, I have gone ahead and added new features – my to-do list is quite big, if you noticed. Ah, the pressures of open-source!

That’s it for updates. I am glad to report that the support forum is alive and kicking!