Suffusion Version 3.5.1

I submitted version 3.5.1 about a couple of hours back today, which is a pity because I believe I missed the bus for it being approved today, which is an even bigger pity since it will probably not be approved before Tuesday (1st June). Sad, because it has one HUGE feature.

1. BuddyPress Compatibility
   After quite a few months of procrastination I finally bit the bullet and built full BuddyPress integration capabilities with the theme. It was not a difficult task thanks to the BP Template Pack plugin, but it took a really long time to implement. I had to go through a large number of files, check the layouts for each of those, modify all my stylesheets etc, because the output that I was getting was simply ugly. Also, the BP Template Pack plugin is still in its evolving stages, so there is a lack of consistency in the way it does its HTML markup.
   Mind you, you don’t need the BP Template Pack plugin to enable BP integration with Suffusion. This release takes care of that. Of course, you do need the BuddyPress plugin itself :-).
   As I mentioned, this was a very long exercise and I got a bit desperate towards the end last night. As a result some minute errors might have fallen through the cracks. Please feel free to post them on the support forum.
2. Bug Fixes
   Surprisingly there were some unexpected bug fixes. I say unexpected because they came up in functionality that has existed for a long time.
   The first was in the “Page of Posts” template, where if you chose to display posts in the “List mode” the output came out wrong.
   The second was a 2-pronged bug in the image fetching function. The “Tiles mode” and the “Magazine layout” were not picking up an image defined as a thumbnail through WP’s native thumbnail feature. Plus under certain conditions TimThumb was not being invoked for resizing the images. I have fixed both of these. Note that if you are using WP’s native thumbnails you will not be able to resize them using TimThumb (I will have to investigate if it is possible to integrate TimThumb with native thumbnails)
   The third was in the Search results. I had never realized that the Search results were showing a date box and categories even for pages. Combined with the fact that I recently added some support for WP’s post_class() function, the net result was that the date was showing up for pages in search results in a really ugly manner.
   The fourth fix is for the static tabbed sidebar, where a div element within the custom tabs would automatically get hidden. Now it won’t.
3. New Features
   I added a capability to disable the “date box” on the search results page. This will ensure that a page returned in a search result doesn’t look dramatically different from a post.
   I also added in the body_class() call to the body element of the HTML markup.

With this release I can lay serious claim to be able to support the multi-site capability of WP. If you weren’t aware, WP and WP-MU (Multi-user) are merged in version 3.0 of WP. So you can run WP in a single-site mode (default) or in multi-site (MS) from the same installation. Suffusion always worked fine with WP-MU, but BP integration had been a headache.

I still have to test out one tiny little to-do item – TimThumb integration with WP-MS, and I promise to do it soon.

This whole process of making the theme extract full mileage from WP 3.0 is getting very exciting. Let’s see what I can do with the remaining features.