Folks, I have another update on Version 3.7.9 of Suffusion. Unfortunately it is not all good news.
Bad News 1
The feature most looked forward to for this release was undoubtedly photo-blogging. Unfortunately I had to pull this to a large extent. The reason was that I have been quite busy on both, personal and professional fronts and I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time to the theme as I used to earlier. As a result, the last 20% of the features that needed to be fixed for photo-blogging became too daunting to tackle. Eventually I culled the features from the theme.
The reason was that WP version 3.2 is almost upon us, and I am pretty sure that due to the JQuery library changes in the core, version 3.7.8 is going to break on the admin panel side of things (the theme itself would work). So I had to fast-track the development and remove things that were taking too long to build.
Good News 1
This was something I had been debating for a while – should the photo-blogging support be a part of a plugin? Eventually I decided “yes”. As I wrote earlier, I have done a lot of work on the integration of WP galleries with Flickr and Picasa and it would be a shame to throw it all away. So I decided to make a plugin with it. Strictly speaking it is an enhancement of a standard short-code, hence it does fit in the plugin territory. I will keep you posted about the developments on that front.
Bad News 2
I had also hoped to revamp a few things like how the featured content slider looks, in terms of placement of the post index etc. Another area I was working on was the look and feel for the tiles and the magazine layout. Again, these have been relegated to the back-seat for now.
Good News 2
There are, however, several improvements to the magazine layout in general and to the theme overall, like some new widgets, some improved widgets etc. I will publish the full change log once the release is done. The change log is not small by any means.
I should be submitting the new version in a day or two. Hope you will like it.
On a personal front, I believe I have almost reached saturation as far as Suffusion is concerned. I will actively try to avoid big ticket new features from now on and instead focus on releasing functionality as plugins. I will also try to improve my site design skills and make Suffusion look pretty on the front. I believe I have built a unique framework in the sense that it works for people who are not very code savvy, so my goal has been more or less achieved.
Thanks. Takes the guessing out of the game. Can’t wait. Cheers!
Thanks for all the work. Suffusion is my favorite WordPress theme.
God Bless You, Thanks for effort.
Thanks, looking forwart for the new release.
Do you will stop the complete development for Suffusion in future or do you will add support for further WordPress versions?
Support for future versions will continue and bugs will be handled too. What will stop is active development.
Thank you for your great work o.O
Hi, Sayontan –
I wanted to say “hello” and let you know that my mentoring program, The Rural Design Collective, chose to use Suffusion for a project we are working on. We were very impressed by it, and I wanted to give the theater group we are building the site for plenty of flexibility to change things without learning code.
What are the implications on the admin panel side of things? Will you be stripping out a lot of the customization features, or are you updating those to work with jQuery?
Thanks for all the great work!
I must confess I didn’t fully understand your question. The new version (which has been submitted and approved, but is not yet live) has the same features that exist today, plus a lot more. The only difference is that some things had been planned, and they didn’t make the cut. That’s all.
If you don’t upgrade Suffusion, but you do upgrade WordPress to the upcoming 3.2 release, you will face issues on the admin panel – that’s all I meant. I have put in the code to handle 3.2 in the next release.
Thank you – you answered a lot of my questions with the upgrade path! Thanks again – we think Suffusion really fills the bill for what we are trying to do (build a media rich site with a compelling design). We’re going through the features of the admin panel today – so I wanted to make sure that everything we cover is still relevant in future upgrades.
For me the best of him are the great variety of widgets areas and the “custom includes”. I do not need anything more if I could put Flash (.swf) in header.
Thanks for the update on the update. 🙂