It has been brought to my attention that an old problem with corrupted download files from the WP site has cropped up again. If you are seeing a message saying that the “Theme is broken” or if you get a “white screen of death” upon activating the theme, follow the instructions here.

Version 3.6.5 of Suffusion went live today. Actually first 3.6.4 went live, then some users pointed out a rather serious flaw, then I immediately patched it. The theme approvers, who have really improved their approval process a few notches up approved it rather quickly too. The following are a part of this release:

1. New Features:
   One of the key focus areas of this release was server load reduction. The overall list of additions is as follows:
   1. There is an option to not include the generated CSS code in your page header. Instead the CSS gets written to a file and that file is linked in the page. This is good news for SEO. The bad news is that it needs some tweaks and some trial and error to get to work properly, like changing of the .htaccess file, or making use of Suffusion’s internal compression techniques etc. You can try enabling the option from Blog Features → Site Optimization → Auto-generate CSS file for customization options.
   2. In addition now all the options can be cached in the database. Earlier I was storing only the saved options in the database and leaving aside the default options. The downside of the older approach was that as my options page got massive, the memory footprint of the front-end pages started increasing. This will reduce memory footprint by at least 2MB – a significant reduction. You can control the settings here: Blog Features → Site Optimization → Cache dynamic options.
   3. Judging by the massive outrage on the support forum due to a change in the featured content behavior, I have added an option to let you include duplicate content from the featured content section on your main page as well. Control the settings from Blog Features → Featured Content.
   4. I have added options to include posts by post id or by tag in the featured content. Control the settings from Blog Features → Featured Content.
   5. I have also enhanced the Search results page to show the search term at the top. Additionally now there is a search form included on the search results page, along with an ability to highlight the matches.
   6. A user on the WP forum pointed out that if your posts were in multiple pages (in an archive view), subsequent pages didn’t show the page number in the title. I have addressed this. The page number is now appended to the title if you are on the second page or higher. Additionally the blog sub-title is a part of the page title on the home page or on the front page.
   7. I have added “nonce” checks to the admin pages to ensure better security.
   8. There is a new Turkish translation, thanks to Metin Selçuk.
2. Bug Fixes:
   1. If you were using Suffusion’s inbuilt compression techniques, the page would fail XHTML validation. I thought that I had fixed it last time, however that was not the case. It is now truly fixed, I hope!
   2. In case of archive views with no posts (e.g. nothing found in the search results page) there was no content displayed. This has been fixed.
   3. While working at a furious pace to support some of the review criteria at WP I had broken backwards compatibility for menus. If you were on a WP version older than 2.9 you would have seen a fatal error. I have rectified this. Of all the bugs I have had to fix, I am sorry about this one most, because I am normally very good with backwards compatibility.
   4. There was another backwards-compatibility issue, but this time with PHP. There was a call to memory_get_usage, which is not available in really old versions of PHP (< 4.3.2) and is available with partial support in other versions of PHP. I have fixed this too.
   5. I have fixed a bug that was preventing child theme CSS from loading correctly. Note that if you have Suffusion’s GZIP compression disabled, child themes need to have all stylesheets explicitly invoked. In other words, not only the base style.css, but all the skin-specific CSS files have to be added.
   6. There was a bug introduced in the comments section, where a CSS element was being declared twice. I have fixed this issue.
3. Changes:
   1. Again, there are minor stylesheet tweaks to the Minima skin
   2. As a part of some code housekeeping I have enqueued the stylesheets for the admin pages.
   3. I have also replaced the call to get_bloginfo('name') in the header with get_bloginfo('name', 'display') so that plugins that apply filters to the blog title work in tandem with the theme.
   4. I have restyled the blockquote element so that it looks a bit better.
   5. There are updates to the German (Du and Sie), Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Polish and French translations. Thanks, translators!

On a side note, I have closed the “Feature Requests” section of the support forum. As the theme grows in complexity and popularity, the support forum has been swirling out of control and I had to draw the line somewhere. Since the Feature Requests section saw a lot of traffic and a lot of requests for features that I simply am not in a position to provide, I have closed off that section of the forum.

After the long wait for the previous version, 3.5.7 got approved rather quickly. As stated in my earlier post of today, there was a critical bug in 3.5.6 that had slipped through unnoticed. This is the change summary:

1. Fixed a critical bug that was causing the “White Screen of Death” issue while posting comments.
2. Fixed a bug where the “full content” posts feature was not working in the Excerpt, Tile and List layout modes.
3. Did some minor code cleanup.

A rather serious bug was brought to my attention a couple of hours back, that would prevent users from posting comments (I had been wondering why I had received no comments yet on my last announcement!). This bug was causing the ill-famed “white screen of death” whenever users tried to post comments. I took quick steps to resolve this and I have provided the patch at two places:

1. The original post reporting this on support forum.
2. At the WordPress forum itself.

And for good measure I am reiterating the fix here:

1. Open the file comments.php.
2. Look for this block of code near the top:

          global $suffusion_unified_options, $post;
          foreach ($suffusion_unified_options as $id => $value) {
             $$id = $value;
          }

3. Either delete it or comment it out.
4. Use this code instead:

          global $options, $suffusion_options, $post;
          foreach ($options as $value) {
             if (isset($value['id']) && isset($value['std'])) {
                if (!isset($suffusion_options[$value['id']])) {
                   $$value['id'] = $value['std'];
                }
                else {
                   $$value['id'] = $suffusion_options[$value['id']];
                }
             }
          }

5. Save and you should be fine.

I have already submitted version 3.5.7 to address this, but given that 3.5.6 took such a long time to get approved I wanted to provide this code to users upfront.

Finally! Finally a version of Suffusion got approved! This is the longest it has ever taken between two versions to be approved. And also, this is the first time in the last 3  months that I am actually posting the release note after the actual release!

This release is actually quite a big one from several points of view. Firstly it has all the changes that I documented in the release notes for version 3.5.4. This includes key features like CSS compression, some new hooks, flattening of the WP 3.0 menus etc.

In addition here are the changes for this version:

1. Code Housekeeping
   Normally code housekeeping is a footnote in my release notes. But in this release it does get the spotlight and with good reason.
   1. After some feedback from the reviewers at WP I put in numerous checks at various places in the code that shouldn’t impact you as a user, but they do minimize the volume of your server logs. Mind you, this was a very large-scale effort that completely diverted the focus from my main goal for this release. But I guess it was worth its while.
   2. I have reduced repeating CSS code for two sets of elements: the l3nav … l8nav elements, which you see in the “full-sibling view” in the breadcrumbs for pages, and the navigation menus. Again, these were quite big as changes, because of the large-scale visual impact.
   3. I have modified the framework to handle compression better in case you are using a child theme. Some parameters have been provided in Blog Features → Child Themes to let you control the different stylesheets you want to include in your child theme. You can ignore this if you are broadly staying within the confines of the the theme’s look and feel even in a child theme.
   4. Another thing I did was to move the individual skin files into their own sub-directories. This gave me the advantage of defining custom configurations for each skin.
2. Bug Fixes
   1. In cases where the number of posts was very high (a few hundreds if not thousands) the magazine template tended to fail. Apparently this was a problem with a standard WP function call, get_posts().  This has now been fixed and in the process the magazine template has been made lighter too.
   2. There was one bug that was showing incorrect WP 3.0 menus in the top navigation bar. This has been addressed.
   3. A very long-standing issue was the fact that TimThumb refused to work on WP-MS / WP-MU. Apparently the “issue” was my own absentmindedness, which resulted in my wrongly assuming that the problem was more complex than it actually was. Anyway, this issue is now fixed. WP-MS users can harness the full power of TimThumb image resizing in their installations.
   4. In cases where the static tabbed sidebar was enabled, the special page layouts like “Singe Left, Single Right sidebars” were going completely haywire. This issue has been addressed.
   5. There was a bug that was causing an inaccurate rendition of the header and the top and main sidebars when all of them were set to have backgrounds as wide as the window but contents aligned to the wrapper. Though this was never reported, it needed fixing for a very important reason (see below)
3. New Features
   1. After several months Suffusion has a new skin!!! This is truly a different skin in terms of styling, look and feel etc. The skin is called Minima and is currently available on a white base with some black highlights with very very few images. Of course, you can pick and choose whatever you want as your colors. I have changed my personal blog to use the new skin. Check it out. There might be some chinks with specific GUI functionality like widget drag-and-drop on the blog pages, but if you stick to something that doesn’t use fancy features you should be okay. As compared to the standard Suffusion look, there are a few things that will jump right at you in Minima.
   2. One of the things you will see that will jump right out in Minima is a continuous navigation bar, instead of the traditional tabs. Particularly if you are running a news site this kind of a look will serve you well. You can control this setting in Blog Features → Main Navigation Bar Setup and Blog Features → Top Navigation Bar Setup, by having a tabbed vs. continuous look. I am not very happy with the color combinations that I managed to get on the dark themes for the continuous navigation bars, but that is something I will fix in the near future.
   3. I have added a new option to switch rounded corners off across the site. Check out Visual Effects → Theme Skinning for setting this.
4. Feature Changes
   1. I have made significant typographic enhancements to the theme. I have basically followed best practices and guidelines for this, so if you don’t like the new tweaks to line spacing etc you know whom to blame!
   2. Also in typography I changed the base font size from 0.75em to 12px. Apparently some people were having issues rendering the fonts on their browsers because of different browser setups. All other font sizes are left as percentages.
   3. I have modified the theme option menu to be enabled if the user had the capability to “manage options” rather than “edit themes”. This is of particular impact to folks using WP-MS, where previously only the Super Administrator was able to manage theme settings. Regular Administrators were unable to do so even in themes that they owned.

Now a few lines about what didn’t make it to this release. One feature that I really wanted to put in was a few more sidebars, particularly in the header area etc. But unfortunately due to the extremely high volume of work that I had to do, this got pulled. But I promise it will be there in the next release. That’s about it – I am off to relax after a few very taxing weeks working on the theme.