Suffusion Version 3.8.9

No, you didn’t read it wrong. The released version of Suffusion is not 3.8.4, but it is 3.8.9, thanks to a series of astonishing blunders on my part, albeit on a fairly small release with the following:

Bug Fixes
1. There was a bug in the “highlighting” feature of the navigation menus. That should be gone now.
2. There was a bug in the breadcrumb functionality for pages, where if the user asked to remove the breadcrumb, it still stayed. This should work now.
New Features
1. The “post” class now will tell you if you are looking at an excerpt or a full content post.
2. As promised earlier, I have started expanding support for post formats:
  1. I have added specific support for the “Chat” post format. This takes an IRC-style chat log and formats it nicely.
  2. Post format files can be added via a child theme to a directory called post-formats. You can create a file called content-image.php, for example, to support the Image post format … or you can wait for me to add support for all the types.
  3. I have also added icon placeholders for post formats. Very soon I will release a new skin that has the icons integrated.
3. I have also added the skin name as a part of the body class.
4. Most of the sidebars have their own files now. E.g. A file called sidebar-above-footer.php stands for the Widget Area Above Footer.
Changes
1. All BuddyPress CSS has been culled from the theme. If you are a BP user, the last release of the Suffusion BP Pack should be adequately geared for this release.
2. I have made some more improvements to the speed. The improvements are smaller compared to the previous release, though:
  1. I have split out the CSS generator class into two smaller files. I have also ensured that the files are loaded only when necessary.
  2. Suffusion had the funky capability to dynamically retrieve the theme version. This was a somewhat heavy action, so I got rid of that. I will figure out a way to bring this back in.
  3. I have streamlined some of the admin code even further by separating the JavaScript from the PHP.
  4. I have done some more code rearrangement and deletion of redundant functions to streamline things.

Most of the errors that came up in the intermittent versions (3.8.4 to 3.8.8) were thanks to my zealous optimization overdrive. So I have decided that for now I will keep optimization efforts slightly low until I change my mind, and instead focus on look-and-feel for the next couple of versions. In 3.8.3 and in this release I have taken off several computation intensive items from the theme, so memory issues shouldn’t bother you much.

This version was approved early last week, however it only went live this morning, 6 days after approval. In the meanwhile I have been working away at version 3.9.0. That is going to be a nice release with, finally, a new skin and some pretty cool look and feel improvements.