Comments on: Ideas for Redesigning Suffusion’s Options

By: Henry Mea

Henry Mea — Sat, 08 May 2010 01:21:48 +0000

I agree with Elle. I’ve ever been used atahualpa, I think Suffusion more understanding-theme, even it is not easy at first.
I hope you can make Suffusion’s admin theme follow wordpress admin theme wrapper because it hard for me when using my 10″ netbook..

By: Hoangxm

Hoangxm — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:36:56 +0000

And any chance for end user to use as much as options and great themes! thank in advanced!

By: Marc Urselli

Marc Urselli — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:48:06 +0000

Personally I don’t care much if the buttons/menu is on the top or at the left. I grew used to your options menu on the left but since WP already has their menu on the left it would certainly make sense to have yours all on the top, for screen real estate…

What I think is more important that that is simply how you categorize all the options. I don’t know how you are doing your backend coding and I didn’t read your theme tutorials you mention, however it seems you are just doing a series of hide/show collapse/expand type of changes in order to display or not all the options.

I believe that if you wanted to re-design it you could simply re-group all the options so that they are more easily identified and accessible.

I also second your words for the use of pictures. Having a preview of what the option does would really be helpful in knowing if you are looking at the right thing. And if you see right away what that option is you can then read less of the verbose description and look for whatever it is your are looking for…
In order not to have too many pictures, which would make it heavier and even more big on the screen, you could just have the title of the option and then some onMouseOver (hovering) type links that display a preview and/or the description.

I think you could do all of this without recoding the entire backend.

By: Elle

Elle — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 22:19:49 +0000

I’m very new to WordPress but I find Suffusion intuitive and easy to use. Yes, all those options look overwhelming at first, but when I viewed my site after installing Suffusion I was quite happy with how it looked in the interim. I’m very slowly working through the options and picking up ideas from the other Suffusion users who have been mentioned in the blog and forum. What I would find useful is a few screenshots or diagrams illustrating what section of the screen is referred to, or even a hyperlink to a showcase site that shows some of the terminology used on the area it refers to and illustrates what the latest release covers.

Oh, and thank you for creating this amazing theme.

By: Connie

Connie — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:53:02 +0000

The idea of different levels seems not handy to me, too.

1) everybody claims himself advanced, who will start with the “simple” version?
2) the users of the “simple” version will cry for options which are normal part of the “advanced edition”
3) as more and more untrained users come to the forum, we need better and more tutorials for the users, a wiki or an enhanced “Howto-Section”

I notice that most users seem to come to the forum directly so they do not notice that there are other informations at hand as well, the tutorials here on that page are not in the focus of the forum users

so, a wiki would be good, but
the wiki, the main site of aquoaid.com and by this the tutorials should be integrated somehow.

By: Sayontan

Sayontan — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:59:45 +0000

Colin,
I did start setting up a Wiki and I will be happy to add folks on to it. It is on Google, so if you are interested send me a PM through the support forum.

Also, splitting it into a simple theme vs a fully loaded one was my first idea. Version 1 of Suffusion was a very plain release. It had no options!! So when I released Version 2 with a different name, the WP reviewer rejected it saying that the layout looked very similar to my first version and so I shouldn’t create a new theme for it.

I will think about categorizing options as Beginners / Intermediate / Advanced, though technically there is nothing Advanced yet.

Sayontan.

By: Sayontan

Sayontan — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:53:00 +0000

Connie,
Thanks for the suggestions. The thought of creating a further level of division in the options has occurred to me. E.g. If you see the options for “Top Navigation Bar Setup”, I can group the options into “Look & Feel” (things like alignment, navigation bar effects etc. would fit into that) and “Content”, sub-divided into “Pages”, “Categories” and “Links”.

Save buttons on the top are a different prospect, particularly if you want them to stay in place while you scroll through the rest of your page – you will have a second scrollbar, which looks really ugly in a GUI.

Thanks.

By: Colin

Colin — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:10:05 +0000

Sayontan,

I agree that the options now are becoming confusing and also the amount of scrolling one has to do to go up and down some of the options page IMHO is a bit excessive. I think that it will, however, be a challenge to update the options pages.

A suggestion to help with regard to the forums, where the same question is asked time and again and also to assist new users would be to create a ‘how to use Suffusion’ Wiki. I am sure that several people, myself included, would be willing to contribute to assist in this area. The only challenge for this will be the speed at which you add new functionality which could make some of this content redundant before it is even written.

It may be sacrilege to suggest a may be a slow down in development OR a simple theme like V2.x and a fully featured theme like 3.x? Or for a real challenge how about a novice and an expert options pages?

By: Connie

Connie — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 12:31:29 +0000

1) I am checking constructor’s options and I find it very hard to distinguish which themes and layouts are activated.
Activated options need a checkbox or a radiobox-button in any case!

2) As that theme comes without too much explanations it is difficult for first users.You should keep your way of explaining the options

By: Connie

Connie — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:30:08 +0000

Well, Sayontan, I am not a programmer, but I can list some points which are in my mind for some time:

1) out of historical reasons there is no real separation between “Visual” and “Blog Features” as the Custom CSS-area sits in the “Blog Features” but is expected in the visual section.
Maybe a release jump could split this organisation? :;)

2) it is difficult for an admin to identify which options belong together, when scrolling down. Have a look at the template / magazine-templates, a lot of options are for excerpts, others for categories.
why not group options with “Collapse/Expand” ?
Or give them different colors?

3) a very fast FIRST AID would be to place the “Save”-Buttons on top + at the bottom or as one user suggested to have these buttons scroll with the page

I will download and check Contructor, I don’t know it

Cheers Connie