1. RTL Layout Fixes
   I have managed to fix almost all issues here except some quirks with the navigation bar in IE6 and IE7 (the other browsers are fine). If you are not using an RTL language this will not impact you.
2. Minor Bug Fixes
   There were some minor bug fixes done. First, the “target” setting for links in the drop-down menu in the navigation bars was being ignored. This has been taken care of. Mind you, the target setting is working fine if the links are not in a drop-down but are rather displayed as individual tabs in the navigation bar. Second, I put in a minor piece of code to order pages in ascending order for featured content. Apparently without this ordering the sequence was not being obeyed for some users.
3. Options Changes
   I extended the “grouping” feature to the most popular options page, “Custom CSS, JavaScript and RSS”. I also made a very subtle change in the list of categories displayed in the options page for selection. Earlier if a category had no posts associated with it it wasn’t available for selection in say, the navigation bar setup. Now it will be available.
4. The Norwegian and Hebrew translations have been updated. I received a new Hebrew translation, thanks to Tal Surasky.

I am gradually reaching saturation point with the 3.x releases. I have a list of around 15 more items that I would like to tackle before moving to the 4.x releases (with photo-blogging templates), but in the meanwhile here is a sample of what will be added to the 3.x releases:

1. A few more widget areas and widgets.
2. Full BuddyPress support, though I would like to wait for release 3.0 of WP before tackling this well. In the interim I will add inbuilt support for the BuddyPress template pack.
3. Full integration with WPML.
4. Better typography support, with ability to use custom fonts.
5. Support for a few more plugins. One plugin that I really like is the Now Reading plugin by Rob Miller. I will provide a skin for the theme for this plugin. I will also extend support for some other common plugins.
6. Some more tweaks to the options menus. The changes I have made so far have not received negative comments, so I will take that as positive feedback and continue doing those. I will also try to expand the use of JQuery and / or AJAX to the options pages.

As you can guess I have slowed down considerably with my development. However I do intend to fully deliver on the list above.

1. Look and Feel Modifications in Admin Menu
   Based on the feedback I received for my attempts to group options, I went ahead and added this functionality to a bunch of other screens, like the Custom Emphasis Elements, Main Navigation Bar Setup, Top Navigation Bar Setup and Posts and Pages.
2. Look and Feel Modifications for End Users
   I added new positioning options for information like “Posted By”, categories, tags and the comments link. You can now use the options to position these in any of the four positions available, or hide it altogether.
3. Plugin Compatibility Enhancement
   There was a stylesheet compatibility issue with the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin. That has been fixed. Additionally I have enhanced WPML compatibility by adding support for the home page link and ensured that the category drop-down menu is working for other languages.
4. New Languages
   There is a new Hebrew translation, courtesy Avi and a new Russian translation thanks to Vitaliy Treyvus.

1. New Option Grouping
   I tried experimenting with some option grouping and put in a proof of concept in the Visual Effects –> Sidebars and Widget Areas section. Let me know if that makes things easier or tougher for you. I managed to add this functionality without really butchering the code, so that was good. If this feature is liked by folks I can consider extending it to other screens and add fancy stuff like expanding / collapsing of a whole group of options.
2. New Widget Area Style – Sliding Panel
   I introduced a hopefully cool feature for the Top Bar Right Widgets – you can now make it a sliding panel!! I know that a lot of people like to have a login widget and some other content as a sliding panel, so hopefully this feature will benefit folks. You can set this through the Visual Effects –> Sidebars and Widget Areas section.
3. Fixed a bug that was hiding the top navigation bar if the header was not “open”
4. Fixed another bug in the Royal Blue theme where visited links upon hover were not getting the blue background.

As I indicated last week I am going to slow down with the release process. That might still mean around one release a week and higher if I go crazy. But for now, enjoy release 3.3.6.

1. New option to create a full-width header. You can now set your header to be full width, beyond the wrapper it is currently constrained under. You can make the settings under Visual Effects –> Header Customization
2. New option to create a full-width main navigation bar. You can also set your main navigation bar to be full width, outside the wrapper. Mind you, if you pull your header outside the wrapper your navigation bar too will move out of it, and only if the header is outside the wrapper can you use the full width option of the navigation bar. You can control the settings from Blog Features –> Main Navigation Bar Setup
3. Fixed an issue that was causing the Single Left Sidebar template and the Single Right Sidebar template to misbehave if the blog had 2 sidebars. Do let me know if problems persist
4. The custom image size was not being picked up for the featured posts widget. This has been fixed. You might need to clean up your cache to get this working right.

I will slow down a bit for the next few releases, since I have not been doing very well health-wise, plus my workload has shot up.

1. Fixed a bug with the AdSense short code. The short code should now work perfectly
2. Fixed a bug where the default post thumbnail, if used in an excerpt, was not linking back to the original post
3. Fixed a sidebar positioning issue with the “Single Left and Single Right Sidebar” template, where the settings for the sidebar positions were being ignored
4. Changed the Twitter widget’s tweet icon to a comment bubble instead of a bullet
5. Added a new Estonian translation (et.po and et.mo), thanks to Viljar Hera!

I had bigger plans for this release, unfortunately I have been suffering with a neck and shoulder injury which cripples my ability to type.

When the options in Suffusion were a lot fewer (think release 2.0.x) the interface was perfect. But as the power of the theme grew, so did the list of options. And it becomes particularly taxing on the eyes of the administrators who have to change the options. There is something that is stopping me from changing the structure of the options page and that is the fact that it is incredibly easy to code it up the way I have it. I started a handful of tutorials on how to write a theme options page a few months back. In that you can see how absolutely easy it is for me to add new options, given the modular structure of my code. I simply need to figure out the option type, provide some option values for it and bingo! The processing code is very straightforward and it automatically picks the options and formats them as appropriate.

But as is the case very often, what is easy to code is not necessarily easy to look at. I did a good bit of redesigning during Christmas last year and came up with two sets of tabs, a horizontal set of tabs for high-level grouping and a vertical set of tabs within each horizontal tab. This at least made the vertical list look a lot smaller. But as I continue to add options, that page is again threatening to look daunting. So what do I do now?

I looked around to see how some other themes do this and here is what I saw in two really good themes:

The Options Page of Atahualpa

The Options Page of Constructor

Suffusion’s options look to a large extent like Atahualpa’s. However, given Atahualpa’s incredible number of options it too probably faces the same fate as Suffusion to a degree. Where it does gain an edge is in the fact that it uses pictures to illustrate what it is talking about and doesn’t rely on text like Suffusion does. I will be the first to admit that Suffusion’s options are verbose.

The other theme presented here is Constructor. If I were to use one word for the options page for Constructor, that word would be lovely. Its options are much fewer in number than Atahualpa’s or Suffusion’s, but the page is truly nice looking. It makes liberal use of JQuery, and is the perfect advertisement for the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. But here is a catch – every option has been manually coded. This is fine with a small set of options, but it will require an effort of Herculean proportions if I were to adopt that approach for Suffusion.

My feeling is that the options page should be something in between the two styles. If I could figure out a way to automate the generation of pages like Constructor’s, that would be perfect. What do you think? How do you feel I can move to a structure more like Constructor’s?

1. New Widget Area
   There is a new widget area now called Left Header Widgets, to the left of the main navigation bar. I have currently positioned this at the bottom of the widget area list in the admin menu, but I will move it up after a few releases. This brings the current total number of widget areas to 8 – soon reaching double figures!!
2. Removed the option “Enable Widget Area on right side of navigation bar”
   This option caused more hassle than it was worth. Now if you simply set “Show Search in Widget Area on right side of header” to hidden, this widget area will be hidden. Hopefully this will resolve issues about the navigation bar spilling into two rows.
3. I have put in some tweaks to automatically size images to fit in your post windows. Hopefully you will not have to go through the painful process of resizing your post images.
4. I added a call to “language_attributes()” to the document header. This will ease integration with FaceBook.
5. Bug Fixes
   I had inadvertently put in a major bug in 3.3.1. That has been fixed. I have also gotten rid of a “locking and popping” issue on IE7, making the theme much more responsive there.

I fixed this problem and submitted the correction in 3.3.3 a few minutes back to WordPress, but in the meanwhile if you are using a specific column template, please move down to a lower version, like 3.3.0. You can download it here.

As a person who spends a good deal of time coding this, I fully sympathize with the time and effort this might have cost you. Terribly sorry for the same.

1. Export / Import Theme Options
   This is quite big. Though this was not on my immediate agenda, some unsavory incidents on the support forum during the weekend precipitated this fix. This feature is going to be a must if you are running several blogs and you want to replicate the settings across them. 
   You can go to Suffusion Theme Options –> Introduction –> Export / Import to see this. You can export your current theme settings as a file called “suffusion-options.php”, then copy it to the folder called “import” under suffusion/admin/ in your new blog installation, then click “Import” on your new blog installation.
   All your look and feel settings plus blog features etc will be copied over. What will not be copied over is the list of pages / categories / links you have selected in one installation, because the page ids may be different between your installations.
2. New Widget Areas
   The Top Navigation bar has two widget areas – one each on the left and right. You can add small widgets to these widget areas to enhance your site’s look.
3. You can now choose alignment options for the drop-down menu in the top navigation bar – left or right.
4. Code Housekeeping
   I made a small tweak to the code for the search widget. Earlier I had set it up such that if the “before_title” and “after_title” elements of the widget’s definition were empty, the title wouldn’t print. I have reversed the condition – if the title is empty, the “before_title” and “after_title” elements will not print. I have also added a function that checks if a widget area has any widgets associated with it. If it doesn’t, the widget area is not printed.

Up next, a few more widget areas.

1. Mixed mode layout
   One of the features that had been requested was the ability to display full contents for the top x posts and excerpts for the subsequent posts. I am happy to say that this release features this capability. You can have full contents displayed for a handful of posts and show excerpts, lists or tiles for the remaining posts on that page. You can control the settings via Blog Features –> Excerpts / Full Contents
2. I have deprecated a few options: "Category Info in ‘Display List’ option", "Author Info in ‘Display List’ option" and "Tag Info in ‘Display List’ option". You can use the controls in the individual templates for Category, Author and Tag respectively instead.
3. There is now a new control to display the tag description in the Single Tag template. Earlier you couldn’t see the description.
4. Fixed minor bugs in the “List” layout
5. I cleaned up some code for the different layouts, making things a lot more streamlined behind the scenes.
6. Thanks to Harry Karayannis, the Greek translation of Suffusion is now 100% complete.

Now for the feature that I had to pull. I had provided a really cool short code that would let you execute any PHP function as a short code. However I have had to remove that call, because in a multi-user blog you could have unauthorized people with author privileges call admin functions unchecked. If you are running a personal blog you can create the short code yourself, though. To do this, add the following PHP code to functions.php:

function sc_php_function($attr) {
    $function = $attr['function'];
    $params = $attr['params'];
    $params = explode("||", $params);

    if (is_callable($function)) {
        $ret = call_user_func_array($function, $params);
    }

    return $ret;
}

add_shortcode(‘php-function', 'sc_php_function');

Cheers.