Version 3.0.8 was released today. This release took time, but that was because of one of the pieces in it:
- A Featured Content Widget
So far we have had Featured Content that could be placed at the top of certain pages. By creating this widget I have extended the capability – you can even place this widget in your sidebar if you wish. Using the widget in conjunction with the Widget Logic plugin you can exclude this widget from certain pages. There is one minor annoyance – if you have both, the classic Featured Content and the new Featured Content widget displayed on a page, for some reason the “Pause” button works incorrectly. I couldn’t figure out why. But then again, I hope nobody uses both on the same page!
Also, this cannot replace the classic Featured Content yet, because there is no “narrow” widget area above the posts – the only widget area there is as wide as the header - Latest Posts in Featured Content
You can now add the latest posts to your classic Featured Content. Of course, this has been added to the new widget too. - Bug Fixes
I patched a WPML SitePress Multilingual CMS plugin incompatibility and fixed some minor RTL layout issues.
I wanted to outline the plan for the next few releases:
- I have some feature requests on the Magazine template and on the classic Featured Content functionality. The next release (3.0.9) will address those.
- I have also decided to embrace JQuery in a bigger way, particularly for the drop-down menus. This is because after so many months on the theme I discovered a bug on IE 6 for nested levels in the drop-down, which is a bummer for my current CSS-only menu. By letting JQuery do the menus I will be able to add things like “HoverIntent” for a delayed menu etc.
- I also intend to deprecate the option to “fix the layout” by JQuery, and instead fix it by default.
- There is a small bug in the Twitter Widget, which causes its format to go wonky if you are displaying its title and the JQuery fix is turned on. I will fix it in the next release. In the meanwhile you can disable the title for the Twitter widget if your JQuery fix is causing it some issues.
- In my previous post I spoke about the next version of the magazine layout. I have been working diligently towards that. The “Category Posts” and “Featured Content” widgets were developed as a part of that effort. Over the next few weeks you should see something for “Headlines” and a “Single Post Excerpt”.
- Very soon there should be new widget areas for you to play with. I also had some very big ideas for formatting the sidebars and widget areas.
- I will introduce the concept of a custom layout, where you will be able to define custom layouts not covered by Suffusion and build pages with those.
All in all we have a few very exciting weeks ahead!
What are the patches you did in WPML?
We need to fix the RTL handling and would like to include that in the plugin.
Amir,
Thanks for contacting. The incompatibility was that I have multiple calls to “get_pages”, which is filtered by WPML to remove the list of pages in the original language first. This was causing Suffusion’s call to get_pages to return null. So some “foreach” loops in the theme were breaking. Note that get_pages by default returns an empty array (not null) if nothing is present, so I wouldn’t be checking for the return value ordinarily. In any case, I got around this by checking for null values in my theme before operating on the array. However, after the fix one of the users reported a different kind of problem with the integration of the two: https://aquoid.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=314 .
I don’t know if it is an issue with WPML or if I need to handle get_pages differently.
Sayontan.
If you find anything that needs changing in WPML to make its behavior more WP-compliant, let me know. You can email me directly, or better open a thread in our forum:
http://forum.wpml.org
We’ve created compatibility packages to several themes and we’d be interested in creating one for Suffusion. These packages help users run the themes multilingual without coding anything.
Amir,
I am a big fan of the work you folks do at WPML – I always use the PO file generator at ICanLocalize before making a theme release.
When you talk about a compatibility package do you mean things like the language selectors etc will be bundled with the theme itself? That would be a really nice thing to have with Suffusion, given the popularity of your plugin! What do I need to do from my side to get this running? Also, Suffusion is a fairly young theme with frequent additions for new functionality. Will this need special attention for doing the compatibility packs?
Thanks,
Sayontan.
PS: I am going to start a thread on your forum for this, to help keep better track.
please add and support :
– distribution of themes to folders
So as to facilitate editing and reading and import and export .
– “Contact Form ” .
– Prin Pages .
– ads .
– Social Network .
– “related posts” link and thumbnail .
– Google Adsense .
– photo galleries page + video .
Hi,
I am not sure if you are asking me to build all this functionality or if you are telling me that I should support these plugins. Apart from a specific print.css all the others can be handled by plugins:
– Contact Form 7 works with the theme
– You can use text widgets for ads and Google AdSense: several users use them
– You can use Sociable or Sexy Bookmarks for social networking. I myself use Sociable
– You can use YARP (Yet Another Related Posts) plugin for related posts. Didn’t really understand what you mean by “thumbnail”, but in the theme if you are displaying an excerpt a thumbnail is automatically generated. I use YARP, by the way.
– NextGEN is supported for galleries, but I will be building a photoblog template later.
I didn’t really understand the point about distribution of the themes to folders – can you please elaborate?
Sayontan.
thanks
I mean :
– create a folder themes so that we can add theme new to suffusion and exported .
For example, create a folder “themes” and add files css & images .. so on .
– Previous proposals by which I mean Direct added to theme .
Important (add album pictures and videos with support for thumbnails)
Because , many of the bloggers they need album
I do not write English well
OK, I see your points. You want me to make Suffusion a “theme framework”. I believe most of the work is in place, but to make it a fully functional framework like Hybrid or Thematic will take some more effort. I will work on it though.
For the plugin functionality that is another activity that will take time. Some of them are easy and some are difficult. I may do some of these.