It has been almost 2 months since version 3.7.8, so I believe an update is due.
I have been working on and off on building version 3.7.9 and I have so far made a bunch of changes already. The last few remain, but as it is said, the last 385 yards in a marathon are the toughest. Here is what I have completed so far, a lot of which was promised and a lot of which was reactionary:
- Photo-blogging support
- Flickr support: Almost done. I just need to support pagination of photos
- Picasaweb support: Almost done, though this is decidedly less powerful than Flickr. The reason has more to do with the shortcomings of the Picasaweb API
- Native galleries: This is actually the backbone of my gallery implementation (including both the above). What I have done is that I have overridden the native gallery shortcode of WordPress to make it ultra-powerful. Here is what it can do:
- You can pass certain parameters to the native gallery shortcode of WP, like type=’flickr’ and display a Flickr gallery. Current supported parameters for this are “default”, “flickr” and “picasa”. This part is done, and I can reliably retrieve galleries from each of these sources. In case of Flickr things are very advanced: you can get photo-sets, collections, galleries, searched photos etc – it all works.
- Once a gallery is retrieved there are different ways to display it. You can show the thumbnails for the gallery, then have the image displayed above or below the thumbnails. Alternatively you don’t have to display the full image in the page. Instead you can launch a slideshow overlaying the page using Fancybox, Slimbox2 or Colorbox. This has been implemented for native galleries, but the integration with Flickr and Picasaweb is underway.
- YAPB support: Some work remains, though the basics are in place.
- Support for miscellaneous types: Done.
- Mosaic Layout: This is complete.
- Magazine Template Enhancements
The magazine template was in dire need of a facelift in quite a few departments. I have addressed some of them: - Byline information can be displayed on both, the magazine template as well as the tile layout. I had to think outside the box to come up with a way to do this, which took time.
- I am making some enhancements to the featured content in terms of positioning the pager, the previous and next controls etc. This is still underway.
- I have enhanced the Category Post widget and the static Category Post feature in the magazine template. You can now make it show a thumbnail for the post along with a brief excerpt.
- Other enhancements (all complete)
- The Twitter widget is now much better looking and it can display avatars. I have built it intelligently enough so that in case of re-tweets you get to see the original user’s avatar.
- You can now use post formats much better. Post formats refer to the long list that you see on the right of your Edit Post screen. It has things like “Standard”, “Aside” etc. Suffusion intelligently removes things like post titles from some of these formats (like asides and quotes). Of course, this is configurable. Also you can display bylines differently for different post formats.
- You can now control things like the number of sidebars in individual posts.
The release should take a few more weeks to wrap up. Though the list of activities is quite big, the changes are of a much lower impact than it would appear. Hence I am not foreseeing any major issues with the release.
This is great news Sayontan. I can’t wait to check out the new gallery improvements. When using “defaul” will we still have all the other options by the built-in wordpress shortcode? like calling specific images from a post and stuff?
In anyway, Thanks for keeping up with the development of this theme. Its awesome.
Absolutely. If you pass “default” as the type or if you don’t pass any type, you get the native WP short-code with all its options. In other words, when you upgrade your current galleries will behave precisely the same way as they are behaving now.
Awesome. Thanks again man. many thanks.
Looking forward to seeing it.
Can you expand a little on the Miscellaneous type? Would this allow retrieval from Coppermine or one of the other similar galleries? Would it allow import form a folder outside of WordPress hierarchy (I am thinking of pulling from another of my sites)?
Thanks as always for a great theme.
Colin,
Coppermine / ZenPhoto / PixelPost / Gallery2 etc will be added later. I believe anything that supports a MediaRSS format can be tackled in one shot (my guess is that all of these support MediaRSS – I know for sure that ZenPhoto does).
From a technical point of view I cannot support importing folders – the theme would never get approved. A thought might be to build a plugin for this kind of interaction, but then again, probably such plugins are a dime a dozen.
Thanks for the reply.
Good news about the other Gallery support later shame about the folder BUT I understand why you can’t do it. (I have several hand coded galleries in another site that I would like to bring over without reloading them as they are on the same server in a different domain).
Looking forward to seeing the next version.
Please let me know if you need a tester.
Hello,
I was looking for a free wp theme with decent features and found Suffusion, It’s one awesome wordpress theme that I can’t beileve it’s exist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THANK YOU FOR MAKING AND SUPPORTING SUCH A GREAT FREE THEME 🙂
BTW, I’m ready for beta testing Suffusion in rtl and will update Persian translation 😉
I’ll be looking forward to the new version.
Do we have the ability to specify specific categories/tags to be displayed on a Page like the “Post Page Associator”. We currently have the “Page of Posts” template but it has generic settings and are not specific to each page.
Thanks
Hi –
Do you have an ETA on 3.7.9?
Thanks much 🙂
No, no ETA yet. Some tasks are taking a lot of time to resolve, plus I was away on vacation last week.
Ok. Thx for the response. Enjoy your summer 🙂
Congratulations on the theme! It is very good indeed.
My suggestion is that the properties of the header could be uploaded to a SWF.
Thanks!
Will the new release also be supporting round corners in Internet Explorer ?
Kind regards,
Dick
IE9 yes, other versions of IE no.
I know that you don’t like feature requests very much… Last days, I worked with Googles Font API to use the fonts provided by Google which are available on nearly every computer or mobile device. I don’t want to be dependent on the fonts that are preinstalled on the machines from my visitors and readers.
Are you interesten in implementing support for Google Font API?
Best regards
Lothar
Not really sure how this is relevant to the theme – Google Fonts don’t require that a font be installed on a machine beforehand.
You can also try using @font-face declarations as I have done on http://mynethome.net. Check out http://www.fontsquirrel.com/ – it gives you the syntax and everything else for this.
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