Suffusion Version 4.0.2

Thanks to a pretty good beta phase, very few issues were found in 4.0.0. Of course, some issues that are much older than 4.0.0 did come up and they have been fixed appropriately in 4.0.2, which was released today. But before I proceed with details of this release, I would like to point out things that are not bugs but came up in 4.0.0.

Non-Bugs

1. If you had tweaked your menu’s CSS to change the height of the tabs or the widths of the drop-down lists, you will need to make a minor adjustment. Basically tabs with drop-downs now get an additional class, dd-tab. You have to add this class to your selector. E.g. if you had this:

    #nav ul ul { ... } 

   … it will become:

    #nav ul .dd-tab ul { ... } 

2. Another common question on the support forum pertained to inappropriate use of menus. The ONLY right places to add menus for navigation are the navigation bars, not the widget areas in the navigation bars. The menus have to be added in the navigation bars themselves, either by assigning them appropriately through Appearance → Menus, or by adding pages / categories / links through Suffusion Options → Other Graphical Elements → Navigation Bar Above Header (or Navigation Bar Below Header). If you have added menus through widgets in Right Header Widgets or other widget areas in the navigation bars, they will not work.
3. If you are using a caching plugin, make sure you rebuild your CSS files – I had quite a few queries telling me that the magazine layout was showing an incorrect number of columns per row.

Now for the enhancements in this release:

1. New Features
1. In keeping with custom templates, I added yet another powerful capability. For every page you can choose to hide the navigation bars, header and footer. When you use this capability with Custom Layouts, you can create splash pages as you please. Earlier you would require custom CSS for doing this, however that approach had a drawback: you were still executing server processes and fetching the content. Now when you hide the content, the server will not fetch it at all.
2. I extended the “get image” capability of the theme to fetch YAPB images if available. Now if you have YAPB installed, its thumbnails should be fetched by Suffusion for excerpts, mosaic layouts etc.
3. A little known but long-existent feature of the theme is the capability to add user contact methods, since version 3.6.6. If you are wondering what these are, go to Users → Your Profile. You will see things like “AIM” for you to add links. In addition to those that exist, Suffusion lets you add a lot more. Visit Back-end → User Profiles for a complete list. Whatever you select from this list will show up under Users → Your Profile. I added “Google” to this list for your Google Plus Profile link.
4. The above addition is very significant in the context of another feature that I added – authorship. Now, if you have provided links for any of your additional profiles, they will automatically show up in the Author page. Check my page on this site to see what I mean. What this does is, when Google is generating snippets for your site via search, it can automatically pull information about you, such as your picture, based on your Google Plus Profile that you have linked. Note that Google doesn’t guarantee that it will show your picture.
5. You can now style the title for your Custom Layouts template.
2. Bug Fixes
1. There were some small unreported bugs in the Custom Layout options, which I detected and fixed:
1. It wasn’t respecting the “display title” selection for a particular page.
2. The rightmost widget in a widget area in the Custom Layout was not being floated right if it wasn’t on the first row.
3. IE9 had some issues with the display if a widget area spanned multiple rows.
2. The new featured content settings had a couple of minor issues:
1. The numbered index in the featured content wasn’t showing any numbers in a unique combination of options.
2. If overlaid icons were used for Previous / Next, the icons in the static featured content showed a background colour upon hover instead of being transparent.
3. IE had an issue with the navigation menus showing some unstyled content before popping into place. This has been addressed.
4. There was a conflict between the 1 Left, 1 Right Sidebar layout and the 1 Right Sidebar Layout, where the maximum width settings were not taking effect.
5. There was an incorrect label in the Featured Content widget, which I have fixed.
3. Changed Behaviour
1. The review team wanted me to include some additional translations for the backend, so I have put those in.
2. I have moved the Google Analytics script to the <head> section instead of the end of the <body> section. Note, though, that you might be better off using a plugin for analytics, as I cannot guarantee that the analytics script will be the last piece of code before the ending </head>.
3. I have modified some backend strings for better consistency.
4. I had introduced a capability to blank out the Widget Area Below Header and Widget Area Above Footer if they had no widgets. It turns out that some plugins strip out all widget formatting, and in such cases the widget area was killing these entities as well. I have changed the behaviour so that the widget areas get removed only if empty.

I have been working with Miguel Koscianski Vidal to build a plugin or some theme capability to make the backend options panel translation capable. Hopefully we can come up with something.