Suffusion Beta Testers, please provide your feedback on the beta version!! I have only received one person’s response regarding it.

To reiterate, here are the highlights:

1. Mega-Menus:
   To see what the fuss is, go to Appearance → Menus. Then create a menu. For the root level items in your menu you can pick a Mega Menu Widget Area. Pick one, assign it a number of columns and do the other settings as required. Make sure you assign this menu to a menu location.
   Then go to Appearance → Widgets and add widgets to the Mega Menu area that you have selected. Now check it out on the front page.
   Typical things to test would be:
   1. The menu shouldn’t overflow the wrapper’s borders if the menu width is less than the wrapper width.
   2. Check with the different widget height settings, such as “Auto-arrange” or “Equal height for the same row” etc.
   3. Vary the number of columns and see the effect.
   4. If you have picked an empty widget area, you shouldn’t see the tab in the navigation bar.
2. Custom Layouts:
   Go to Templates → Custom Layout Template. Save the settings as you wish. Then create a page and assign the “Custom Layout” template to it. Upon “Save Draft” or “Publish”, in the “Additional Options for Suffusion” box you will see a new tab for “Custom Layout”. You should be able to save the settings. Add the widgets to the widget areas and then visit the page in the front end. Your new page should conform to your selections.
   Typical things to test would be:
   1. You should be able to create different pages with this template.
   2. For each page you should be able to control the number of columns in each Custom Layout widget area.
   3. Each page should respect the corresponding selections.
   4. Try the different widget height settings.
   5. Use this capability in conjunction with Widget Logic and see the effects.
3. Page Layouts:
   Instead of picking a “Single Left Sidebar” page template, you can now pick a “1 Left Sidebar” layout for a page / post. This gives you the advantage of combining third-party templates with Suffusion layouts. With this, the regular page templates with sidebar options are deprecated. You can still continue using them, but using a layout is going to be much easier.
   Things to test would be:
   1. If you have a page template such as “1 Left Sidebar” assigned, then you assign “2 Left Sidebars” layout, your page template will get the preference.
   2. Pick any other page template and assign a layout to it – you will be able to get the combination of both.
4. Featured Content:
   I added a lot of new options to the static Featured Content and widget. You will now have options to display icons, position the slider index and the controls differently etc.
5. Magazine Template / Tiles Layout:
   I have changed the markup here to use div instead of tables. This will now prevent the unbalanced column widths that you currently see. Do give this a thorough test with all your layout combinations.
6. General Checks:
   Try the following general checks (not a complete list, but it should give you some idea):
   1. There were issues with the latest version of the NGG plugin – that should be gone.
   2. Activate another theme, then come back and activate Suffusion – you shouldn’t see any errors of any sort in this process.
   3. Check if the menus are working correctly in terms of custom colours, rightly showing a downward or sideward arrow etc.
   4. Try sharing posts with this release – you shouldn’t see any fatal errors reported when you do this.
   5. You should see some “pointers” with tips in the back-end if you are using WP 3.3.x.

Note that this is a beta release. So please don’t use it on a live site! Feel free to post your comments and bugs here.

1. Mega-menus:
   I know that I have been dangling this carrot for a while, so hopefully the delivered functionality will be worth the wait. Suffusion will be the first free theme with this functionality, so no pressure.
2. Page layouts:
   I did mention this earlier – you will be able to associate a page template separate from a layout for your pages. This will let you utilize templates offered by plugins and bundle them together with a specific layout.
3. Custom Template Layouts: This is another biggie. You will be able to assign a “Custom Template” to a page. That will let you do some awesome layouts by utilizing widgets. E.g. if you want to create a product page, you will be able to define a specific layout that has one row with just one big featured slider, then two rows with 3 boxes each, with specific product features, then one row with 2 boxes, with testimonials and pricing options.
   If this feature isn’t good enough, you can create multiple pages with the custom template and either keep the same defaults across all of them, or create specific layouts for individual pages.
4. Since a very very long time I have had one particular feature request on my plate. Although this request is 2 years old, I have always had it in plan for different releases, but then pulled it when the releases became big. Even during the release of the Photonique skin I wanted to improve the look and feel for the Featured Content and I did make some changes for the same. Yet I chickened out at the last moment when it came to specific aspects of improving the look and feel. This time I bit the bullet and finally put it in place. The Featured Content now has options to do a whole lot of cool things in terms of look and feel.

In addition, the regular improvements to speed, performance and usability are included. I have finished coding all the major items and am hoping to wrap up development in a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, I will be pushing this release out for beta testing.

1. The Flickr shortcode was not able to display photos if only a group_id was specified. This has been fixed.
2. Another fix was for a very specific use case: the album / photoset title in a popup panel was resulting in a JS error when hovered over.
3. The Picasa shortcode inserter was not showing any option to specify the album name. I have added one.

Now, I have to get back to Suffusion version 4.0.0. Cheers.

Current users of the theme see an option, Templates → Magazine to change → Sidebar layout to adopt, where you can pick a particular layout. If that is set to “Default” for you, you have nothing to worry about. But if you are using a specific layout, this will temporarily stop working. The fix though, is very quick. You have to open the Magazine page for editing, and go down to “Additional Options for Suffusion”. There you can pick the appropriate page template and save the post. Things will work as usual after that.

I will be doing a beta release for 4.0.0 in a couple of weeks. Hopefully this beta will be fine, unlike the fiasco of 3.7.5!

An update on version 4.0.0 – I have finished most of the work on Mega Menus: just some stylesheet changes are pending. I have also finished making a lot of other changes. One key thing to note: the page templates “Single Left Sidebar”, “Single Right Sidebar” etc. are being deprecated in the next version in favour of layouts. This doesn’t impact you in any way, however it provides a new dimension of flexibility. E.g. Currently if you have a page where you want to use a custom template, you cannot assign your custom template plus a different sidebar configuration because a page can only get one template. With the change I am providing, you can assign the custom template and a page layout with a different sidebar configuration. There are lots of other nice changes coming by in 4.0.0.

This is a quick release for Photonic, to address the following:

1. Google changed the Picasaweb API to return a maximum image size of 512px. I have made changes in the code to override that.
2. I have updated the code to use the latest WP 3.3 functionality. This should be transparent from your point of view – only the workings behind the scene have changed.
3. IE users of the Fancybox script within Photonic would be presented with “Not found” messages in their log. I have rectified this.

There were a few changes requested for SmugMug, like supporting protected albums, buying etc. I haven’t been able to add that, but I will do so pretty soon.

1. If you tried to save your settings having selected rotating images for your header, you would receive a “Fatal error”. You should be good to go now for this.
2. In the Static Tabbed Sidebar, if you used a custom tab name, that name wouldn’t show. I have taken care of this as well.
3. Another issue I fixed was one with tall site footers getting cropped.
4. There is a cosmetic change in the back-end, where nested pages were not showing up in a nested manner.

Please note that I am busy with release 4.0.0 (the first release in a long time when I will be jumping versions). This release should be ready for the new year. If there are other minor issues discovered in the interim I will release patches leading to their resolution.

You can get the patch from the Google Code page. I have deliberately left the version number at 3.9.4, so that you can update it directly from WP when they approve it there. For instructions on how to install the patch, see the “Having Installation Trouble” section.

1. New Features
   1. I added a new capability to turn off automatic thumbnail generation for a variety of sizes. This was based on requests from some users.
   2. I added support for Google+ and YouTube in the “Follow Me” widget, again, bowing to popular demand. In addition I added an option in that widget to enable the links to open in a new tab/window.
   3. I added support for a good number of WP 3.3 features. So Suffusion is now compatible and optimized with WP 3.3.
2. Changes
1. The docking boxes code has been abstracted to a file called dbx.php in the custom folder. Translation: this is something you can customize in a child theme.
2. Optimization:
1. Continuing my trend with optimization, I have optimized the fetching of post meta information at various places. This reduces the number of queries being run.
2. I have optimized how options are saved and the CSS is generated.
3. I have also fine-tuned how files are included and functions are invoked in the options pages to reduce the load further. Note that I am going all-out on this in the next release and I intend to take this a few steps further.
3. If the drop-down menu was very long, it automatically introduced a vertical scrollbar and displayed empty space at the bottom of a page. This led users to wonder why this was happening. I have made some modifications so that the scrollbar is displayed only if you hover on the menu and the menu is long. Otherwise the page looks nice and compact. Curiously though, this doesn’t work in Chrome and works in IE. Of course, the ever-reliable Firefox does have it working.
4. Removals:
1. As announced about a month back, Custom PHP inclusion is not a part of the theme anymore. You can move your custom PHP to a child theme and have it work seamlessly.
2. I removed a handful of image files from the theme because they are not used. More will be cleaned up in subsequent versions.
3. I also removed the ability to turn off caching dynamic options – it seemed as counterintuitive as this sentence reads right now.
3. Bug Fixes
1. There was a styling issue with font colors in some buttons. Now it should be fine.
2. There was an issue with padding in the “bubble” type of comment displays. I have taken care of it. On a related note there was an issue in Chrome when you selected “Author above comment” type of a comment display, which too has been fixed.
3. In the last version I introduced the capability to “Disable comments on attachments”. There was a bug there, which showed the link to “Add Comments” even if the commenting was disabled. I have fixed this.
4. I also fixed an annoying bug in the Minima skin that was causing the comment reply button to lose its text color.

Hope you like this release. The next release will have some nice premium features (not that Suffusion lacks in premium features at this point) in addition to some more stuff on the optimization front, and will be available in the new year. Hopefully I will be able to push out the next iteration of Photonic by then too.