Suffusion Version 4.2.3

Version 4.2.3 of Suffusion was approved today. This is a small update with the following changes:

  1. The Magazine template was not showing any <h1> tag. This has been addressed.
  2. I made a small change to the way Suffusion interacts with the Category Icons plugin. In some cases the plugin was displaying 2 category icons. This shouldn’t happen now.
  3. This was a weird one. The site that distributed the original “Now Reading” plugin is currently infected. Suffusion’s admin pages had a link to this plugin, and some “security” plugins were reporting this as a critical problem, indicating that your site and / or Suffusion were infected. Be assured that there is nothing wrong with either. Nonetheless I have changed the link to the “Now Reading Reloaded” plugin’s WordPress page, which in turn points to the infected URL.
  4. The date box wasn’t lining up properly in IE. This has been fixed.
  5. Custom Background Changes:
    1. I wrote about this in depth in my previous post (see the “Impact on Suffusion” section).

      If you are using a custom background from Appearance → Suffusion Options → Skinning → Body Background, there is a high likelihood that your background will not work.

      Don’t be alarmed – this is very easy to fix. Just go to Appearance → Background, and restore the settings to the defaults.

    2. This is essentially a BP bug – BuddyPress doesn’t respect the custom background defined via Appearance → Background, so I took care of it in Suffusion. A custom background will be preserved on BP pages as well.

Baby Steps Towards “Responsive” Design

Version 4.2.4 will take baby steps towards responsive design. The first thing it will do is add device-specific classes to the <body> element. I lifted most of the code for this from the “Mobble” plugin. The second thing it will probably do is shuffle the sidebars around for narrower layouts. Of course, if it does this, it will be configurable, entirely optional and switched off by default.

My thoughts around this kind of design are no secret – I believe that is defeating the true purpose of mobile design. All it is doing is saving the users the effort to do a pinch / zoom and a horizontal pan (never mind that the effort for the vertical pan increases). It is not going to save any bandwidth. However, till I come up with more innovative ways to make sites truly responsive, this is the best I can offer.

Time Out

It has been a while since I have visited India – back then the football and cricket World Cups hadn’t happened and Roger Federer was still the master of all he surveyed. I am looking forward to my vacation a good bit, and needless to say, I will not be logging into the forum for support requests on a daily basis. Hopefully the galaxy of Suffusion will not collapse. Don’t panic!

15 Responses to “Suffusion Version 4.2.3”

  1. “Don’t be alarmed – this is very easy to fix. Just go to Appearance → Background, and restore the settings to the defaults.”

    On my installations there was no option to restore defaults but the same thing was achieved by clicking ‘Save’ as my background is a solid black which was displayed in the selection box already; before saving though the frontend had reverted to the default background colour. Just a very small clarification for what is an excellent theme. Thank you for your work.

    • Ditto for me, no default option but my previous background was still selected and choosing Save re-applied it to live site – thanks for the hint AWOL.

      And thanks again to Sayontan for a great theme – hope you have a great vacation, you deserve it!

  2. Have a great vacation. Again, thanks for this excellent theme.

  3. I’m a bit confused regarding the “restore defaults” thing in the Appearance -> Background. I don’t have such an option and whatever change I make there will appear on the blog instead of the background settings I have selected in Suffusion.

    • If you have no “Background” menu item in “Appearence” you most probably haven’t updated to WordPress 3.4, where this option was introduced.
      If for any reason you don’t want to update, you can always write this into your custom style sheet file:
      body { background-color : white !important; }

      Hope that helped.

      • I have “Appearance -> Background” I don’t have a “restore default” there.

        • As I mentioned in my response to your post on the forum, you will only see the “Restore” option if you “Remove” the existing background.

  4. What happened to adding hooks to the bylines to add custom headers for each taxonomy?

  5. Glad to hear the news about responsive design. When I see the update about version 4.2.3 . I suspected that there will be something about responsive design. So visited the news section and surprisingly found the news ‘ Baby Steps Towards “Responsive” Design ‘. I am very about it and hope it turns into a full responsive style once

    Thank you !

  6. I have updated the theme today, and now Í have troubles witg my blog
    My background uses to be black, but now it’s showing the header (repeating the header)
    and pluginas aren’t working?

    • Linda,
      You can go to Appearance → Background, then set the background colour there.

  7. okee thanxs it worked ,
    but my plugin socoal blogrol isn’t working

  8. Version 4.2.2 and 4.2.3 doesnt work with bbpress 2.0.3 (some css issue, post broken), I must restore 4.2.0 from backup. Any idea?

    • Suffusion is not written with bbPress compatibility in mind, so I will not be surprised if it doesn’t work out of the box.

  9. But 4.2.0 works fine. Do you plan compatibility with bbpress? Should I look for other solutions?