150 Ratings and a New Translation Process

To all users of Suffusion – a BIG THANK YOU!! On 5th December 2010 Suffusion reached 150 ratings on WordPress.org! A couple of months back I had excitedly announced the milestone of 100 ratings, whereby Suffusion became only the 5th theme to reach that landmark. I am happy to announce that Suffusion is now the 4th theme to get to 150 ratings, with only Atahualpa, Inove and Mystique ahead of it. Thanks to all of you!

As you are well aware, I don’t work on the theme with the expectation of monetary gain, which is why Suffusion is one of those rare themes that is truly free in every sense. In fact some of you have even sent me messages offering to pay me for customization and I have always given you the same response – I don’t do freelancing, because my family, my day job and the constant work on Suffusion to keep it good pretty much consume all the time I have. I don’t even try to market the theme because I cannot take on the extra load.

As a result, your appreciation through my coffee fund and being rated on WordPress.org are pretty much priceless as rewards, because it means that the 30000+ lines of code I have written for the theme have some value to someone!

Now for some more good news – at a recently conducted poll on WLTC, Suffusion got voted among the top 5 favourite themes by users, ahead of a lot of personal favourites of my own (you can check my own favourites out there). So thanks to all of you who voted for Suffusion there, too!

Now for the big announcement that I mentioned in my last theme release post.

I am moving translations out of core Suffusion. This means that individual language translation files will no longer be distributed with the theme.

But don’t worry. I am not leaving you in the lurch. I have set up a page called Translating Suffusion for your use. The page is very well detailed and has a lot of information:

1. You can download individual language translation files.
2. I have explained how you can set up your sites so that translations don’t get overwritten when you upgrade the theme.
3. I have even provided guidelines for you to create your own translations. Well, not really, but I have provided references to great tutorials and tools to help you do that.

Why did I do this? There are several reasons:

1. Quite simply, the theme package was getting extremely large – at 1.7MB it was larger than most themes I have seen. Removing all the translations reduced the size by around 400KB. Mind you, most of the theme’s users use the English version of the theme. Folks using localization use just one localization language, hence the extra files are meaningless to most users.
2. The Translating Suffusion page provides a centralized view of the different translations, including information about the freshness of each translation. If you believe you can bring one of the translations up to date, please take a shot at it.
3. I wanted to provide better visibility to the contributors. Earlier I simply used to mention the names of the contributors in release announcements. Now you can see the names of all contributors for every single translation in one place.

Starting from version 3.7.2 I will be removing all the translation files from the theme, but the process I have outlined in the Translating Suffusion page should work right away.

Do let me know if you have any questions / concerns / feedback.