Since it has been exactly 2 weeks after my submission of version 3.5.2 and I have heard nothing useful from the folks at WP despite my queries, I have decided to take some drastic measures resulting in some bad news and some good news.
The Bad News
I have pulled BuddyPress support from the theme. All the folders have been removed and a trimmed down version has been resubmitted as version 3.5.3 to WordPress for approval. I would have liked to be a complete theme with BP support, but 2 weeks for approval is simply not acceptable. I hope all of you agree.
The Good News
Of course, my conscience wouldn’t let me leave you in the lurch, so you will get the next best thing – a plugin that you can use on Suffusion and any child theme.
The Bad News – 2
Given the nature of changes in 3.5.3 I couldn’t do the theme AND the plugin. So the plugin is not yet developed.
The Good News – 2
While I haven’t got the plugin ready, you certainly can try out the BP functionality!!! Head over to the plugin page, or what will become the plugin page – right now it has instructions for you to make this work. Go ahead and give it a shot and let me know what you like / dislike.
And now for the details of version 3.5.3:
- Removed BuddyPress Support
As described above. I haven’t removed the style information from the theme’s stylesheets, though. Just the files for BP have been removed. - Bug Fixes
There were some issues with BP styles, particularly for IE. Those have been addressed. Also the introduction of the body_class() call caused some unexpected styling issues – they have been addressed, too. Then there was an issue with the registration on the multi-site setup of WP, where the form was not rendering correctly. That has been taken care of. - Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies
This is the biggest feature of this release. Custom Post Types have been supported in version 2.9 of WP, but WP 3.0 takes it a lot further. I have provided a UI for you to add custom post types and custom taxonomies. This development took a good bit of time and testing. Here are the highlights:- The Options menu has been subtly reorganized. You earlier had the options accessible through the “Appearance” menu:
Now Suffusion has its own menu with an ability to set theme options or define custom types:
- The major sub-feature here is the use of AJAX in the “Custom Types” section. People have complained regarding the fact that Suffusion does a “resubmit” of the options, reloading the page. What is not often understood is that the options UI for Suffusion is phenomenally complex and handling it all through AJAX is not feasible because you will lose the spiffiness that you currently have in the back-end. However I gave AJAX a shot in the Custom Types menu and tedious though it was, I might consider extending AJAX support to the main options page. The UI is still rough around the edges, but I will polish it in the coming weeks.
- You can set up custom post types for books, movies, music albums, support forums etc. You can associate your own taxonomies to these, like genre, rating, writer, support-type etc. You can include these in WP 3.0 menus and a bunch of other places, and in general you can make your site a true CMS site.
- In conjunction with child themes you can create your own custom layouts for each custom post type.
- The Options menu has been subtly reorganized. You earlier had the options accessible through the “Appearance” menu:
- Support for hAtom Microformats
Your posts and pages now support the hAtom Microformat, which will help microformat-capable browsers and browser-plugins detect post content much better.
I am sincerely hoping that 3.5.3 will get approved quickly. And I am hoping even more that you will like this triple release.
Hey Sayontan-
I just came across this theme and it’s awesome! This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. What’s the difference between using bp suffusion pack and just using the bp template plugin to move the bp directories over to the suffusion theme. The only reason I ask is because I plan to use this on a number of buddypress sites and saw that your no longer supporting bp with this theme.
Greta Job!
-Ken
Yay! 3.5.3 up on wordpress.org as of late last night!!!
Thanks Sayontan for bringing us this theme!
Just adding another mindless “your theme is brilliant!” comment. Sorry, but it is.
Thanks, Elliot!
Hey, I use your theme for my graphic novel End of All, and I love it, BUT I have a question.
Question: Is there an easy way to add the page navigation that appears on categories pages to the home page? Or is there a way to make the category the homepage so that when someone goes to the homepage they see the navigation for the pages above the newist post? In this case it would only show previous page.
Please post questions on the support forum
I tried the BP pack, really amazing work! yet it keep saying the theme is not compatible to BP…a bit annoying -.=
See the instructions in point #6 here: https://aquoid.com/news/plugins/suffusion-buddypress-pack/
Your theme is excellent! thank you Sayontan!
This is a top class. Thanks for all the hard work
Thanks, Darren!
this is the best theme created for wordpress users.
Sinha jee zindaabaad – your theme zindabad.
You work very hard. Your theme is great. Don’t forget to give yourself a break sometime. 🙂
I have a problem updating from version 3.5.0 to version 3.5.3. When i do that I lost my Theme setting version of of Suffusion. Please advice.
Geghna
You might want to clear your browser cache.
Please post issues / questions on the support forum.
A dumb question… what does a theme need to make it BuddyPress compatible? I have a client who’s site uses Suffusion, and we are debating whether to self-host using BuddyPress (and potentially have to upgrade our server package) or to use Ning, and pay them…
Any opinions?
Thanks,
Peter
Peter,
I am not sure if I understand your question correctly. Are you asking about system resources required to add BP on to an existing WP installation? If so, I don’t know the answer. Most people manage to get it working without any special considerations so I don’t really know if and when you would need extra resources.
If you are asking about just adding BP compatibility to a theme, this should be easy. For Suffusion you can use the specially designed Suffusion BP pack and for a lot of themes you should be able to use the BP Template Pack plugin.
I don’t know what Ning is, unfortunately.
Sayontan.
Sorry to be unclear. My question is essentially about Hosting. Shared hosting, as far as I understand, is best for middle-sized sites with medium traffic. The website that I am considering for use with BuddyPress may have 10-20,000 hits a month, with Buddypress interactions. Do standard shared hosting accounts have the capacity to run this traffic, without slowing down substantially? Or do I have to get a more expensive dedicated WordPress/Virtual Server package where there are more resources available for a SocialMedia active site?
Ning.com is a SocialMedia site, until recently free, allowing users to setup networks & groups, similar to Yahoo Groups. They have just announced they are changing to a subscription model, which could cost $499/ year. I need to balance this potential cost versus a server with more resources, running BuddyPress.
Thanks
Peter
I am not qualified to answer this, unfortunately. I can say this much, though. I get a fair number of hits on Aquoid each month (occasionally over 1000 a day) and this is co-hosted with a handful of other sites with varying degrees of popularity, though none as consistently popular as this one. All in all my cumulative web-traffic across sites is well over 30,000. I do face occasional outages, but nothing severe. But I also take care to ensure that my key sites aren’t heavy, and I try to optimize image quality etc. So I have not really been spiked that much.
That being said, VPS hosting is a good option since it costs only marginally more. The downside is that you need to have a person maintaining the servers. So in terms of cost it might be cheaper to go with Ning. I don’t know, really. You have to ask folks who have dealt with both ends of the spectrum. My belief is that Ning might be cheaper for you, because you might need to get a Pro theme on WP that offers you the full range of features that Ning does.