After months of waiting and after a series of Beta versions and Release Candidates WP 3.0 finally came out today. I encourage all of you to upgrade your installations.
Why Should You Upgrade?
Version 3.0 is a significant release that has a lot of terrific features. Here are some:
- Menus
This is arguably the most awaited feature of WordPress. This is a huge relief for developers more than users as we don’t have to code our themes to provide you with a mechanism to select pages / categories / links to build the menu. As long as the themes offer basic WP 3.0 menu support you are good to go. You can build and structure your menus as and how you want with very little restrictions.
Suffusion has supported native menus from version 3.5.0.It has been brought to my notice that WP pulled a little trick here. In the release version they changed a call ever so slightly, thereby making it seem like menus don’t work in Suffusion 3.5.3 (and a bunch of other themes that claim to support menus). To fix this:- Open functions.php in your theme editor
- Search for the line that says add_theme_support(‘nav-menus’);
- Change that to say add_theme_support(‘menus’);
That’s all.
- Integrated Multi-User Code
With WP 3.0 the two branches of code, WP-MU (multi-user) and WP have been merged. You need to tweak a few settings to convert your site from a regular WP site to a WP-MS (multi-site) installation. You can start by creating a network.
Suffusion can be used for WP-MS and can be made to work with BuddyPress too for a better experience. - Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies
The next big feature for folks wishing to use WordPress as a full-blown CMS is the concept of Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies. This offers limitless possibilities. If you have a site where you do reviews of books, movies and music, you can create custom post types for each of those, then associate custom taxonomies to them, like authors for books, actors and directors for movies and artists for music albums. In a theme that supports child themes you can suitably create your own templates for each of these post types and make them appear very different from the regular “blog” look.
Suffusion added a plugin-like feature to let you define custom post types and taxonomies in version 3.5.3. This functionality will be enhanced in the next few releases. - Native Support for Custom Header and Custom Background Images
Now theme developers don’t have to code up a bunch of stuff to handle custom header images and background images. Of course, if you are like me you might still want to code up things – coding definitely gives you a lot of flexibility.
Suffusion doesn’t support this feature at present, but it will, very soon. I couldn’t beat the WP 3.0 deadline, to be honest 🙂
Why Shouldn’t You Upgrade?
Simple answer – themes and plugins. Before you upgrade make sure that your theme is tested to work for the theme you are using. I am assuming that you are not necessarily a Suffusion user, so if you are using a theme that is not compatible and you upgrade, you will find yourself on a sticky wicket.
Another reason why you shouldn’t upgrade is if you have some indispensible plugin that is not tested on WP 3.0.
How Should You Upgrade?
If you don’t see an option on your admin Dashboard to upgrade, head over to Tools → Upgrade and then do the upgrade.
There is always the manual upgrade option, where you can download the zip file from WordPress, unzip it and overwrite everything apart from the wp-content folder.
What? No Suffusion News?
Come on! You cannot expect me to sign off without talking about the progress on Suffusion!
I have been busy the last week adding some optimization-specific stuff to Suffusion, like an ability to use GZip compression and minification on CSS and JavaScript. I have been largely successful in improving a lot of things, significantly bumping up the scores on Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow. Mind you, YSlow is quite hard to please – Yahoo’s own site scores a “B” grade on its performance test.
I have also been working on a ton of other stuff, small and big. Stay tuned – a new version will be submitted soon.
Oh i am in love with your last paragraph it took me 3 weeks to try to minify and compress all the scripts and css with the theme and got so many issues it was crazy. I currently have w2 total cache to cache and minify both html and javascripts but the css minify would not work at all i then got php speedy to work with w3 total cache and it seems to be able to minify the CSS without error altho the speed tool says it can be minified a bit further this was how i was able to get it done. Having these added into the core of the theme would make me so excited
If I were you I wouldn’t jump on the bandwagon of switching plugins. I know for sure that a lot more optimization can be done, and there have been some limitations to what I have been able to achieve, so don’t discard your plugins yet. Suffusion’s optimization is significant and will work very well for most people, however I am sure that there are plugins that can do a better job.
Guess I will give it a shot…. hrmmmmmmmmmmmmm wish me luck… Okay, maybe not today =)
Hi Sayotan! As a non-tech blogger I really appreciate your step-by-step on how to update to WordPress 3.0. Worked like a charm! Love you theme!!
You are welcome, Amy.
Hi Sayontan
I just upgraded to WP3.0, and have Suffusion 3.5.3 installed. Went to the new Menus option in the dashboard and received the following notice:
“The current theme does not natively support menus, but you can use the “Custom Menu” widget to add any menus you create here to the theme’s sidebar.”
Any ideas where to start?
Phil
I noticed that. I amended my post (see above).
Sayontan… am I going crazy, or does your addendum to the Custom Menus have duplicate info in steps 2 & 3? I can’t figure the difference!?!
Many thanks,
Peter
Peter,
Must have been my insomnia. Fixed.
Sayontan.
Hi Sayontan,
I am not planning to upgrade to 3.0 soon… will your future suffusion releases be compatible with 2.9.2?
-Sudipta.
Yes, the releases should be backwards compatible up to at least 2.8.
As part of the WP3 changes, the Suffusion Options tag from drop down Appearance menu is gone. This is somewhat kinda like grab candy from …*beep*…
Anyways, is there a possible way that I can still access the decoded control panels like in WP2.9.2, before next Suffusion theme update?
I think you are confusing 2 things – WP 3.0 and Suffusion 3.5.3. You probably missed point #2 in the upgrade notes for version 3.5.3 of Suffusion. See point #3.
Sorry for the earlier question… I saw that separated menu after scrolling down 150px…on my 13″ tiny screen.
…I must be sleepy as I typed that…x_x;
Thanks for your fast and patient reply, Sayontan!
your theme and the admin-overview etc. is genious!!! big up for that
but i miss flexible width!
… and the same possibilities for the main navi as for the top navi bar
doin great job, hope you keep on rockin
Ahhhhh, new to WP tweaking here, cannot for the life of me find “add_theme_support(‘nav-menus’);”
Is this in functions.php of the set of code for Suffusion, WordPress Class, or WordPress Default? I seem to always have plenty of trouble figuring out where exactly individual bits of code are, that I want to edit.
I’m using the built-in editor in the WP admin interface.
WordPress Class = WordPress Classic
Found it, never mind, please delete this and previous comments. And thanks again, for such a kick-a** theme!
Okay, so I upgraded to WP 3.0 and made the HUGE mistake of migrating in the theme…lost all my settings! However, I have WP send me backups to my e-mail. Will this include my theme settings? If so, how do I upload the file? Non-techie here wishing I have the $ to let someone else deal with technical aspects. Disgusted as today is my first big feature on a blog tour. UGH! Why did I upgrade of all days!!!?? Any help would be great appreciated! If twitter would decide to work efficintely today – tweet me @shelbylyn1982 as I am in a panick. 🙂
Michelle,
If you have made edits to your theme files, then that is a recipe for disaster when you upgrade – your files WILL be overwritten. As far as your theme settings are concerned (i.e. things that you maintain from Suffusion Theme Options) they should be untouched during the upgrade process.
When I look at your site I see that it uses the style “Gray Shade 1 on a Light Theme” and there are some configurations in place, like the positioning of the navigation bar, the ability to do drag and drop on the sidebars etc. These indicate to me that your theme settings have migrated over seamlessly.
Please post further queries on the support forum, not here.
I have already upgraded 🙂
[…] a Suffusion user on a version of WP older than 3.0, now is a great time to upgrade. Version 3.0, which came out in early June has been stable for a while now and has some great features. If you haven’t upgraded you are […]