Once again I break my habit of posting a release announcement before my theme submission is approved. However, given that I am on a flight and I just submitted version 3.4.9 and I have nothing else to do for the next 2 hours, I thought this time was best utilized in writing up the announcement.
Over the past few weeks you might have seen a dip in Suffusion-related activity from my side. The reasons have been manifold – high work pressure, a full house with a lot of chores, back-breaking travel and what not. I have also started taking it slow on the development side, focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements primarily, laying the foundation for bigger things to come.
Anyway, this release has been cooking for 2 weeks (WP approved version 3.4.8 rather late):
- Bug Fixes
- I have fixed the problem with the CDN JQuery script. Now the script will be loaded only if you are not in the admin dashboard, thereby letting you continue your admin activities as usual.
- I have also fixed a bug in the font selection option that was adding a “” to the font name if it had spaces.
- The CSS file rtl.css used to be loaded twice for sites using an RTL language. I have fixed this.
- Code Housekeeping
- I have changed all fonts to relative sizes. In other words I have moved away from using “px” (pixels) as my unit for font sizes to using “%” (percentages) and “em” (Em-dash). This will help with future enhancements, where I can provide universal font-resizers.
- I have removed the “PHP Safe Mode” check from the “Follow Me” widget loading. I had earlier put that in thinking that it would help resolve a permissions issue that people were facing with that widget. Since the permissions issue has been resolved a while back, I decided to take the check off.
- I have separated the options page code from functions.php. This doesn’t impact you as end-users, but it helps me manage things better.
- I have also streamlined the admin page and made it load Suffusion-specific JavaScript and CSS only if the options page is being displayed. This is in response to a request on the WP forum.
- I have replaced the classes assigned to a post from something I had coded manually to something that WordPress provides. This will offer you a lot more flexibility in terms of how you style your posts.
People who have defined a custom class called “sticky-post” will have to rename it to “sticky”, in accordance with the WP function.
- New Functionality
- You can now hide the date icon on posts. This seemed to be a very frequently asked question and I was tired of repeatedly telling people how to do it. Now you can go to Suffusion Theme Options → Visual Effects → Theme Skinning → Data Box Settings and configure this. As a bonus I also provided options to skin this, like using your own image, setting your own fonts etc.
- Updated Translations
- The Arabic translation has now been updated and is 100% translated.
That’s it for this release. I will be focusing on further streamlining and supporting WP 3.0 in the next few releases.
Always the greatest Sayontan! Thank you very much.
Cesca
Thanks, Cesca!
Good job, Sayontan.
Your theme is just awesome, I am using it with one of my blog.
But I found this theme does not support Chinese characters well enough, therefore, I think it’d be better if a chinese version is introduced, I’d love to help with the translation, email me if you think I can do a favor.
Best,
Abe Li
Abe,
Thanks for the offer – I would love a Chinese translation! Chinese characters do work fine on the theme – I have seen blogs using the character set. You might want to check your encoding. See here: http://leepingloon.com/?p=13.
Sayontan.
Sayontan,
Thanks for the response and the kind tips, I will check my coding.
Yes, Chinese characters can be shown fine in this nice theme, but you can see in the photo (http://a.imagehost.org/0461/2010-05-16_130734.png, http://www.techcrunchchina.com/?p=272) that there are “bigger” spaces in some lines, this doesn’t happen normally. And I am not sure it’s a theme problem or something else.
I have been a translator (between Chinese and English) for 6 years. As I said in last comment, I’d like to translate a Chinese version of this cute theme. However, I don’t know how to help with the translation, because I almost know nothing about the code thing. So is there a way for me to just translate the English into Chinese, and nothing coding involved?
Abe
Abe,
Translating a theme is easy. First you need to download POEdit. Then you need to go into the folder called “translation” (inside Suffusion) and make a copy of the file suf_theme.po. Call the copied file zh_CN.po. Open this file in POEdit. You will see all the untranslated strings on the left and you can specify the translations on the right. When you save, this will automatically create a file called zh_CN.mo. You can email both the files to me. See here for a tutorial.
Thanks,
Sayontan
Sayontan,
Thank you for the good tip. Now I think I got it, I’ll start working on it today with my part time. The finished time depends on how many words to translate, but I will try my best to get it done soon. Ideally I will you throw you some emails that report the progress 🙂
Best regards,
Abe
Hi, Sayontan,
Followed your tips, I learnt that there are not too many words to translate, thus, it’s possible the job will be done within two days at the soonest, then the two files will be sent to you. And in case of translation errors or improvements as time goes by, I will also notice you of that by email.
Abe
Thanks, Abe!
You are welcome. The translation work has done ahead of expection, and the files have been sent to you.
I’ve test these file with my own blog, which works fine. The updated version will be sent in case of any found mistakes or translation improvements.
Abe
It may be just a “perception” but the Suffusion Theme Options panel does seem to load a little faster. Great work as always!
Thanks!
Fantastic template.Thanks for the regular updates. Ozy