I know that there is a navigation menu bug in 3.9.0 and that is on its way to being fixed. The reason it hasn’t been done yet is because I have been down in the trenches working on a new skin for the theme, as alluded to in the last couple of posts.
In this post I wanted to give you a feel of what is coming and open it up for feedback. I am calling this skin Photonique (like Photonic, but different) because it is better suited for photo-blogs. Since it is meant more for photo-blogging, the ideal settings for this would be 0 sidebars and an 800px layout. I would like to call your attention to several new features, key among them being the comment display enhancements. The comment form also looks a lot more classy, but that is something you cannot see because I have blocked comments on that site. You can check it out here.
I have also been working on adding a Typography module to the theme and functionality to seamlessly use your own icons.
Stay tuned.
Maybe add some pics so we can tell what it’s gonna look like?
There is a link in the above text, isn’t it? See the text that says “You can check it out here”.
Looks polished, beautiful. Great work Sayontan, we are looking forward to using it.
I clicked the link, but I see no photos on the sneak peek page itself. Maybe I’m missing something?
:-/ That is the theme in action with the new skin.
The skin looks nice. I guess I was expecting to see some photos on the main page since that was mentioned in the post. I’ll poke around the various other categories/pages/etc. and see what I can find. Thanks.
Sayontan, looks good, I like the flourishes are they in the skin? My only comment would be about the choice of the colour black for the background a lot that is written about displaying photos at their best suggests that a mid grey background should be used. Maybe a light and dark version of this new skin? Other than that I am looking forward to you releasing it so that I can see what it looks like in the real world.
By “flourishes” if you mean the “ornaments”, then yes, they are included with the theme files. I am probably going to leave the skin at black for now. The cool thing about this skin is that most elements have their background colour set to transparent, so setting the background to grey in the body should take care of almost everything else. I am guessing you are looking at a colour like #222 for the background. I have tested it and it looks generally good without any other changes. I guess I will leave it to the user.
Hi Sayontan,
nice looking skin, really nice. Personally I´ve been hoping for something likes this, the plainer the better actually, cause it gives you more options to ADD things instead of having to put a “lot” of work in REMOVING things from the beginning. I would love to see this kind of skin with all the margins and paddings and stuff basically put to “0” so one can start working with the theme from scratch and add the rest according to the design one is looking for. Looking forward to start tweaking on this one 😉
Regards
– Mike –
Unfortunately that is not going to be the direction moving forward. I am going to build skins suited to specific purposes, and each of those will be built keeping the right requirements in mind. My philosophy is that a theme should work out of the box when installed … but it should give you ultimate control in terms of how you want to make it work. A barebones theme with no padding or margins is not generally my style of doing things. E.g. Photonique actually uses more padding in quite a few places and less in the others. Same with Minima.
Nice work. Looking forward to trying it out on my blog to see how it looks – it’s a pretty big change compared to the other themes in Suffusion.. Will there be a way to preview it without upsetting any other settings?
There is no “preview” mode in Suffusion. However something like a skin change should normally work just fine, unless you have customized a ton of stuff. Basically you can change the skin, try it out for a few minutes, then change it back. Alternatively you can have a dummy site where you activate the theme and try out various configurations before deciding on the right one for your site.
I am so looking forward to this release. The photo blog is exactly what I want to get moving. Not for photos but for my artwork. It will be perfect and thank you so much for doing this for the Community! Outstanding work!
New skins is what I really am looking forward to. The theme is fantastic, but more skins for it would make it amazing.
I can’t always get the customised professional look I want out of the box, so some more options would really go down well.
Personally I am not a fan of dark themes like this. They might suit gaming sites, but the lighter look and feel is more adaptable.
Sorry, you are probably looking at the wrong theme. I am not a professional designer, but I am a pretty good developer. My designs are going to be restricted to what I think looks nice, and that is often below the level of designs that you see in Pro theme shops.
BTW, dark themes are VERY well suited to photography blogs, which is what this skin was targeting. I do have lighter skins planned, but I don’t know how good or bad they will look.
Really looking good!
Any idea when it will be released? I’m, orienting on a new theme for my photoblog just now.
Keeping up the good work.
It should be released soon. The new skin is about half of the next release. I have been working towards adding a lot more stuff like typography options, better post format support etc in addition to making the photo-blogging features look better.
For my work, I usually tend to use dark to black colors. I’m truly not depressed. 🙂 But at least in my mind, a lighter airy colorful theme seems to draw the eye away from the artwork I want them to see and feel. Without the lighter colorful competition, the artwork stands out. At least that’s the way I feel. My concession to that would be a charcoal grey.
Given that you need a maximum of 5 lines of CSS to get charcoal grey as your background with Photonique, I believe this should be easily achievable.
Hi Sayotan. New skin looks very nice. But i have a question regarding the theme. How can i change the no. of posts to show on homepage?
Hi Sayotan, Great theme but i can’t get it to save many changes eg I can’t get the footer to show, or get the nav menus to save. Is there a bug, can I install a previous version?
Very nice job with this new skin, especially the slicker style of the comments form. Any way that this comment display style can be transferred to other existing skins (e.g. minima)?
Keep up with the good work!
Absolutely! See the release notes for 3.9.1 for how.
Sweet! So looking forward to it! =)
That sounds very good. Thank you!
I meant the charcoal grey sounds very good. 🙂 Not sure why it didn’t attach itself to your answer Sayontan.
I have just built a new genealogy site using the Photonique skin. It took a little more work to get it looking how I wanted over a standard skin but I am very pleased with the result. Have a look if you are interested http://lefever.turnspain.com
That looks wonderful Colin. I know what a chore that is. I traced my family back to the 1500’s in Germany. It’s truly a labor of love, and it seems that every generation has at least one person who is interested in carrying it onward. The theme is truly great and it really showcases a photography, artwork, genealogy site very well.