Suffusion Version 3.4.7

Note: If you are upgrading from a version prior to 3.4.5, please read this.

Version 3.4.7 of Suffusion was submitted last night, and I wonder why it hasn’t been approved yet. Anyway, it has been 2 weeks since my last update, and I don’t know when I will be publishing my next update – I will be vacationing in Las Vegas and Grand Canyon starting Friday. So once again I am posting the release notice before the approval of the theme. Here are the changes:

1. A Pseudo-Bug Fix:
   One of the biggest irritants of the last release was an incompatibility that a certain database encoding had with Suffusion. This was an extremely weird problem, where on the screen for Suffusion Theme Options → Visual Effects → Sidebars and Widget Areas if you had an “Up Arrow” (↑) or a “Down Arrow” (↓) saving the options would end up corrupting the options array and all your options would be reset. This was a sporadic problem, but enough to cause me serious concern. I did a lot of investigation, including posting on the official WP forum, but essentially drew a blank. I eventually cut the Gordian Knot by changing my default options to exclude the arrows. Now it works fine.
2. Real Bug Fixes:
   I fixed a bug in the author template that was causing posts to repeat if the display type in Suffusion Theme Options → Blog Features → Layout: Excerpt / List / Tile / Full was set to “list”. Another bug I fixed was in the “No Sidebars” template, where full width images were getting resized.
3. Speed Improvements:
   I have added the capability to use the Google CDN version of JavaScript instead of WordPress’ version. This will ensure that people who have the CDN JQuery scripts loaded in their cache (due to visits to other sites) get those files, thereby reducing the load time at least the first time they visit your page. I would recommend setting this option to use the CDN version in Suffusion Theme Options → Blog Features → Custom Includes → Custom JavaScript. Note that the CDN version of JQuery is newer than the WP version, so you might have conflicts with plugins that rely specifically on the older versions of JQuery, though this will be a rarity.
   Another enhancement I made was to the Suffusion Theme Options → Blog Features → Featured Content → How to Show  section, where I provided an option to include a “Lite” version of JQuery Cycle. This is just 3.6KB as opposed to the 29KB that the full version takes, so if you are willing to compromise on some effects, you should use the “Lite” version. Note that with the “Lite” version the only effect you will get is “Fade In”, and you will not be able to display an index of posts. The “Previous”, “Pause” and “Next” buttons will work, though.
4. Updated Translations:
   Wim provided the updated Dutch translation file for 3.4.6 and Connie did the same for the Sie version of the German translation. These have been included. My apologies to Vitaly – I forgot to include the updated Russian version.

That’s it for now. Do try out the new version when available. And do forgive any support delays that you might experience over the next week.