Shutting Down the Aquoid Support Forum

For starters, the forum is still available for browsing, but I have shut down two core things:

1. User Registration
2. Posting capability

New users will no longer be able to register there, and old as well as new users will be unable to post to it.

What Next?

There is the GitHub site where I had hosted the last stable version of Suffusion – https://github.com/sayontan/suffusion. New users can consider creating issues there. Regular forum contributors Colin and Drake are set up as collaborators on that repository, so they have privileges to release code / patches there.

This will help / encourage users who wish to fork out Suffusion do so from that website.

Closing Thoughts

Suffusion was created at a time when:

• WordPress was a platform incapable of doing anything apart from very simple blogs. There was no capability to do custom menus, nothing to support custom post types, no post thumbnails etc.
• The “premium” theme market had multiple players who certainly charged a premium, but failed to deliver very basic features without requiring a developer.
• The era of page-builders was at least 5-6 years away

Suffusion offered novel solutions for each of the above and all that for free.

The theme remained a pioneer for several years, but with the ever mounting barriers imposed by the WPTRT it became harder and harder to maintain. Every new whim of the WPTRT would mandate a massive change of code for Suffusion (removal of shortcodes, replacement of theme options with the Customizer, removal of custom widgets etc.).

When finally removed from the repository, what I felt was a mix of rage, resignation and relief. Luckily Suffusion had a bulletproof foundation that several thousands of users still found easy to use, and even 2.5 years after removal the theme still manages to stand on its own for the most part. I had hoped that the theme would die down in the months to come, but it has still lingered on, hence rather than shut it down completely I moved it all to GitHub.

I would recommend, though, for users to pick out newer and lighter themes, because the free themes space is a lot more diverse, and WP itself has managed to integrate many of the features of Suffusion in a native manner. Essentially the niche that Suffusion filled for over 5 years is no longer existent, and you might have a more spiffy blog running something else.