Version 3.7.9 of Suffusion was approved today, and as things happen, shortly after approval I discovered a bug which I fixed. So the new version available is 3.8.0. This version should work on the upcoming WP 3.2 – I have made sure that the admin-side JS doesn’t break.
This version has a very long but hopefully low impact change log. The following are the changes:
- Bug Fixes
- There was a problem with selecting fonts that had spaces in their name in the back-end. This has been addressed.
- In IE7 if you were to use the “No Sidebars” template with the “Widget Area Below Header” enabled, there were markup issues. This has been addressed.
- The “pullout” style displays (like the Minima skin) had an error in the markup – it was missing a closing tag.
- The image resizer was incorrectly creating multiple copies of the source file if the file extension was in uppercase. Now it will not.
- I fixed a bug where the sidebars below Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2 were incorrectly picking the styles defined for the upper sidebars.
- This is not a bug fix as such, but I removed the “Notifier Failed” message that was shown earlier in the options panel if my site was down.
- I fixed a minor problem where the options panel was sometimes showing incorrect values for default colours.
- The sitemap template was not showing contents properly without saving the options for it twice. Now that has been resolved.
- Another minor bug fixed is that in the Alternate Page Title handling. There was a small inaccuracy in the code that would prevent the alternate titles from working under some circumstances.
- Changed Features
- The “Edit” link earlier used to be displayed only on singular views (i.e. on pages and on single posts). I have now made it visible on the archive views too.
- I made the button bar in the back-end a lot less intrusive, based on user feedback. I also made the back-end fluid-width instead of fixed width.
- The Featured Content has always used the JQuery Cycle plugin. Cycle was meant to cycle through a series of images, so it displayed a blank box whenever you had a single post in your featured content. I worked around this – you can now have just one post in your featured content and it will work just fine.
- Code Housekeeping
- IE6-specific Cleanup
- In an effort to clean up for IE6, I replaced Microsoft Expressions with JavaScript. As an end user you will not see any impact, except that it speeds up a few things. Not that I expect you to use IE6, but even so.
- I also got the IE-specific fixes to enqueue instead of including them directly. Again, you can safely ignore this – it will not impact you as a user.
- I swapped out some of the admin panel checks with standard WP functions like
checked()andselected(). - There are some minor CSS cleanups done.
- I have swapped out the use of
$post->post_titlewithget_the_title(). so that the right filters are applied. - I have removed the scripts for JQuery Accordion – it was something erroneously included in the first place, so removing it should have no impact on you.
- IE6-specific Cleanup
- The replacement text for […] in excerpts now supports HTML in addition to plain text.
- New Features
- This is something that folks might like: I introduced a method to search for options in the back-end. It is not perfect, but it should help people find options a lot quicker. You will see a box called “Quick Search” in your options screens – that is where you can start typing what you are looking for.
- Magazine and Tile Layout
- Now there is byline support for the Tile Layout and the Magazine Template. Hopefully you will like what has been implemented. To save on real estate, this has been implemented as clickable icons, which you can click to see the details.
- Additional modifications to the Magazine Template include the ability to control the number of sidebars in there. This too makes its way after quite a few requests.
- Custom thumbnail sizes can now explicitly be defined for the Tile Layout. Earlier the thumbnail inherited the sizes from the Magazine layout.
- Widgets
- There is a new Flickr widget to help display your Flickr stream. It is not as fancy as what I had put together for the gallery short-code extension, but it does its job as it should.
- The Twitter Widget got a rewrite! It now displays your Avatar for your tweets, and the Avatar of the original tweeter in case of a retweet.
- The Category Posts widget (and the static category posts in the magazine layout) got a rewrite too! It now displays a post thumbnail, in addition to an excerpt if you wish. You can additionally control the length of the excerpt and make it different from that of a standard excerpt.
- Special Handling
- Support for post formats has been significantly improved. For each post format you can control how the bylines should appear etc. Check out Other Graphical Elements → Post Formats.
- You can now control the number of sidebars on single posts. In your “Edit Post” screen you will see a drop-down that says “Select the sidebar layout to apply to this post” under “Additional Options for Suffusion”. You can pick the layout you wish for that.
- You can now hide the page title for pages. In the “Edit Page” screen you will see a checkbox that says “Do not display the page title” under “Additional Options for Suffusion”, which upon selecting will hide the page title.
- For posts without a title, a specific “Permalink” is displayed. This is turned on by default and can be switched off in Other Graphical Elements → Post and Page Bylines.
- A search form has been added to the 404 page, as per WordPress requirements.
- For image attachments you can display all available image sizes at the top. Take a look at Templates → Attachments.
- Rounded corner support has been extended to IE9.
- There is a new “Mosaic Layout”. Consider this an apology for not including the photo-blogging features I had thought I would, but this was the least I felt I could do. The mosaic layout will display just the thumbnails of your posts in an archive view, nothing else. In many ways it is like the List Layout, except that this shows thumbnails instead of titles.
- There is a new short code that accompanies the Flickr Widget, called suffusion-flickr. It takes the same parameters as the widget, so you can pass the following
id– Mandatory, can be obtained from http://idgettr.com using your photo stream’s URLtype– Mandatory, legitimate values: user, groupsize– Optional, legitimate values: s (square), t (thumbnail), m (mid-size); default: snumber– Optional, default 10order– Optional, legitimate values: latest, random; default: latestlayout– Optional, legitimate values: h (horizontal), v (vertical), x (no layout – user-styled); default: x
- There are a couple of new filters:
suffusion_comment_form_fieldsandsuffusion_permalink_text. The former can be used if you want to override the fields in the comment form, while the latter can be used to override the “Permalink” text that you see for the newly introduced permalink byline. - In the previous version I introduced WPML support for text fields entered on the admin side. In this release this support has been extended to fields that are of type “textarea” as well. E.g. The 404 page content under Templates → 404 is a text area, so the text you have there can be translated into multiple languages using WPML.
- Removed Features
- I removed the ability to load JS files in the footer, because this was causing a lot of dependency issues. Most caching plugins will let you do this, though, so you are not really losing out on much by means of functionality.
There is one thing I am not pleased with for this release, and that is a lack of polish on some of the new functionality, like the enhanced Post Format support, the Mosaic Layout etc. Believe me, I would have done things much better if I had more time to spare, but having got caught up between releasing the theme to be WP 3.2-ready and adding features and working full-time elsewhere, I had to make some sacrifices. Rest assured that I will improve on these in the near future.
I would again like to reiterate something that I touched upon in my last few posts. Suffusion is almost 2 years old and has evolved into something that I am very proud of. However, due to several factors I believe now is the time to wind down the development of the theme:
- The theme has reached a level of complexity beyond which it will become more of a liability than an asset. So from now on, big ticket new features are a strict no-no, except for some things documented below.
- I am trying to reclaim some time for myself. Thanks to all volunteers on the forum (you know who you are!) the load on me has reduced quite a lot, however with every new feature comes a new set of support questions. Juggling between coding, supporting and working is turning out to be a strain.
However, in the light of the queries posted in response to my previous post I must hasten to point out:
- Incremental development will continue, like new skins, new templates, support for newer WP versions.
- Some big ticket items are still in scope for the theme, specifically in the area of sidebars, and making the theme more of a customizable framework.
- I will channel my energy into building some plugins that you can take with you to any theme. As mentioned in my last post I will bundle the photo-blogging features into a plugin. In addition I will build some plugins to manage fonts etc.
- I will improve theme documentation.
- I will also switch back to mini-releases instead of humongous ones. Though a lot of people don’t like frequent updates to the theme, from my experience over the last few releases, smaller updates are easier to process and definitely easier to support.
Cheers.
Can’t wait to try the new version! Thanks Sayontan for improving an already incredible Theme.
[…] improvements as well as functionality in this already feature-packed Theme. As noted by the Theme developer/author here are some of the […]
I love the new Category Posts widget. But how can I use the thumbnail square image? I don’t think it looks right having multiple AR’s there. All squares would be awesome!
Great work!
Nevermind… I rebuilt my thumbnails and it looks fine now.
Love the theme, great work again!
My site seems much faster after this latest update, well much being relative but faster anyway, webpage tests are giving it higher marks too so that corresponds well with my feelings about it being faster.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110701_V9_YXH1/
93/100 where before the site gave it 86/100 so something must be improved.
Good work, i’ll try popping into the forums and helping out sometime in the future but i have been too busy to even work on my own site much of late.
Dear Sayontan, this is an impressive list!
I am so baffled by all these points and I must apologize that I wasn’t active in the forum in the last time, due to other obligations, working an a small CMS….
I congratulate you to your work, will update all my installations and I whish you to find some time to relax!
Cheers, Connie
I tried … It just died.
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/xxx/public_html/xxx/index.php on line 12
Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_header() in /home/xxx/public_html/xxx/index.php on line 16
I gotta reinstall afresh later. Hopefully not that painful.
Anyway, I am not complaining. Just wanna let you know, you should consider to design one photoblogging alone. I just can find a good one so far … The only reason why I decided to upgrade earlier is because I though it will be cool to have a mosaic interface.
Thanks anyway.
The
get_header()function is a standard WP function. If your site is reporting an error then you have a problem with your WP installation.Looking forward to trying some of the features on my sites.
Just a comment I thought that you might have dropped the ‘edit’ from the posts and pages when logged in, now that WP has these, rather than increasing its use. Maybe in a future release have it as an option on or off?
I’m just moving my changes to the theme to a child theme, than I’ll perform an update.
Sayontan, thanks again for this great theme. It’s FAR more powerful and more beautiful than many many paid themes I know. Just amazing. Also very nice that you want to add support for future WP versions. But your’re right with stopping active development: Suffusion is such a “complete” Theme, there’s nothing more to add 🙂
I *LOVE* this theme and would *love* to use it on my site; however the fact that it’s not fully compatible to WPML stopped me from doing so in the past.
Is this new version full compatible to WPML or should I wait for the next version?
Suffusion supports a lot of WPML features, including admin string translations. It is likely that WPML added something that I don’t have, so I might have missed the more recent features. Is there something specific you are expecting?
Well the main problem (which actually still exists, I just checked it!) is the fact that the ‘top’ navigation gets totally messed up in Suffusion. In my case, in the ‘English’ version, it is “doubled” (=shown twice), while in the German translation, it’s nonexistant.
This isn’t exactly a ‘new’ problem, as verified by Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=Suffusion+WPML+navigation&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&rlz=
Also, the footer is pretty much messed up. And I *think* there were some other problems which I can’t see right now if I activate Suffusion right now, but I’m pretty sure I’d find them if I’d activate it for a longer browsing session.
Unless those problems are solved, I can’t use the theme 🙁
Looks like your problems are pretty specific (e.g. the main nav bar works quite smoothly with WPML). I would advise you to move on and use another theme as I don’t know when I would be able to add the level of support you are looking for.
I think you are right Lothar, all that we could really ask for is some new themes, hopefully some dark ones and some tweaks here and there.
I love the fact you can now add a sidebar to posts, that means i can put Google ads or something more creative on individual posts but not have to display them on every post, a really nice feature to have.
There will be new skins, for sure, and that is something you don’t have to ask for. However I must add that I am a much better coder than designer, so the new skins might not be as pretty as what you get from pro themes or even some other free themes.
Thank you very much for your work and the passion with which you do.
It is thanks to your theme if my site is still online..
I appreciate very much the ease of customization offered by Suffusion!
Good to know about the Back-End search and Magazine&Tile Layout . These are the feature I wanted
BTW, there is a problem with ‘Import Options’ (Checked Older version on Multisite environment) . I will check it with present version
Thanks !
Can you post the issue on the support forum please?
Yes ! I wanted to post it there . You can expect the post in a few hours
Thanks !
Thank you Sayontan. The update is working great so far and my site seems faster too 🙂
WOW! Incredible, amazing. Thanks for everything! Category Posts Widget works perfectly and realy beautiful.
Cheers.
Thank you for this great work, again.
I updated to 3.8.0, everything goes fine but featured content.It seems just like if I have only one featured post. With fade in transition effect it shows one single post and nothing after it (blank), with zoom transition effect it shows one single post and stay there… I can’t understand how to fixe that. Could you help me, please ?
(sorry for this probably bad english, I’m not)
Thanks so much for your hard work. Suffusion was the best choice for my needs. I donated a month or so ago because your theme is worth it and more!
I just updated and have this ‘–>’ in the upper left-hand corner of my site when using IE9. I use wordpress’ admin bar on the front-end only. Could there be an issue?
Can you please verify if this solves your issue?
I’ll look in to that fix today and get back to you.
Thanks for responding Sayontan.
No change after following your instructions.
There’s still an arrow in IE. Nadda for Firefox and Chrome.
Are you sure? Another user did report it fixed with this.
No, you were right.
Only.. it didn’t change anything when I last commented.
I just went back to check and there’s no arrow.
I run my site on a dedicated server with APC.
Thank You So Much Sayontan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wonderful 🙂
Respect.
i’m using your themes for about few months and i love it, thank you sayontan
I love the Suffusion theme but I can’t seem to find the code where I need to put a meta-tag for the Bing Webmaster tool.
If its just to verify your site for Bing so they know you own it then you put that in your root folder, not within Suffusion, for example use something like Notepad II and create an html file and insert the Bing verification code and save it, then use FTP and upload to your root folder which is your public html folder.
Thats you verified and ready to go, i did the same for Google webmaster tools.
Heres some instructions.
http://solutionsforofficelive.com/livewebmastertools.aspx
If you want you can also try Suffusion Options – Back End Settings – SEO/Meta Settings and Home Page Meta Settings, put the verification code on the line after your keywords and not before them.
Not sure if that would work and i’d do it the first way i describe.
Thanx I will give it a go.
In other news, I want to thank Sayotan for his great theme and quick response to my question.
You, sir, make blogging on WordPress that much easier for us tech-amateurs.
*add an ‘n’ to Sayontan name in my last comment.
Todo actualizado…
http://viajarsinprisa.net/
http://www.xanarts.com/
http://redblogs.org/
http://www.muchachadesal.com/
http://www.trianarts.com/
Thanks
[…] Suffusion Version 3.8.0 has been released and the following sites have been successfully upgraded. […]
Some of my Chrome users report a small gap (1-2px) showing up between the menubar and drop down menus, and between drop down menus and submenus — I can’t reproduce this myself, but the screenshots don’t lie. 🙂 Was this addressed? (And if it isn’t, are you at least aware of it?)
Thanks for making a great theme!
Sayontan,
Great work,….Some lovely new features, will get to play with them soon !!!
I can report that ALL my sites have upgraded to the latest version,.. no Problems.
bellezadelujobarata.com
briofruitsspain.com
briofruitsspain.com/de/
briofruitsspain.com/es/
briofruitsspain.com/fr/
briofruitsspain.com/it/
villa-florencia.be/alphabetel/
villa-florencia.co.uk/alphabetel/
villa-florencia.es/alphabetel/
villa-florencia.nl/alphabetel/
wearechange.com.es
wearechange.es
wearechange.org.es
a2host-spain.com
alphabetel.biz
alphabetel.com
alphabetel.info
alphabetel.net
alphabetel.org
aprendeinglesgandia.es
as-vision.org
bedandbreakfast-spain.com
bedandbreakfast-spain.es
blogdemo.com.es
camaras-de-alta-velocidad.com
culturespain.com
culturespain.com/travel
ditoro-game-lodge-south-africa.com
ewine.es
flowebservic.es
gandia.be
gandia.nl
gandiacasarural.com
gandiacasarural.es
gandia-web-design.com
host-spain.com
jaqiscraftycorner.com
mdttrades.com
movesafelytospain.com
nicholassnelling.com
photoblog.host-spain.com
spain-food-wine.culturespain.com
spain-football.culturespain.com
spain-property.culturespain.com
spain-travel.culturespain.com
villa-florencia.be
villa-florencia.co.uk
villa-florencia.es
villa-florencia.eu
villa-florencia.nl
Many thanks for all the ongoing work and support, It remains a pleasure to work with your theme.
Regards & Respect
From Sunny Spain
Hi, can anyone tell me how to decrease the vertical spaces between sidebar widgets. It can be seen on my home page (www.apnatime.com), they are more than i wish them to be.
Thank Sayotan . . . great work Bro . . . Can’t wait to try the new version.
I upgrade it, and it works very well, Thanks a lot.