Suffusion Version 3.7.4 Update 2: Beta Release 1 Available

Finally, after months of effort I have been able to give reasonable shape to the first Beta release of version 3.7.4. Please excuse the weird numbering for this release – I was trying to come up with a numbering scheme that would enable some notification functionality.

In my previous post I highlighted some of the key changes in this version. I will not elaborate on that list here. Instead I will try to enumerate how to go about doing Beta testing.

One thing, though: due to a change of rules established by the WP Theme Review Team I had to again move back to providing a single link for the options of the theme. So instead of a separate menu for Suffusion at the bottom of the left side in the admin section, you again have something like this: Appearance → Suffusion Options. On the positive side, I hopefully managed to make the back-end look a lot better than a high-school web-design project.

Warning: Please don’t install this on a live site! Since this is a Beta release not all functionality is iron-clad.

How to Set it Up

  1. You can download the beta version here. Save the downloaded file locally.
  2. Unzip it. The zip file has a folder called suffusion.
  3. If you do not have an online test environment read through the following steps. Otherwise see point #4.
    1. Export your current live blog. You don’t have to take a copy of the database – you simply need to go into Tools → Export in your admin panel (this is different from Suffusion’s Import/Export settings). After making the appropriate selections click on “Download Export File”. Save the XML file.
    2. You can set up a new WP installation through your host’s control panel.
    3. Once you have set up the installation, go to Tools → Import in your new installation. Use the WordPress importer and import the XML file you just downloaded.
    4. Go to Settings → Privacy and block out search engines.
  4. Go to the folder wp-content/themes/ in your WP installation and upload the suffusion folder you unzipped locally. If you have an existing folder called suffusion already there, either rename the old folder to suffusion-old or  the new folder to suffusion-new.
  5. Activate the theme.

What to Test

The following is a list of items you should look out for:

  1. Setup
    On the back-end:
    1. You shouldn’t see any “white screens of death” when you activate the theme. This should be true for installations where this is your second installation of Suffusion, as well as those where this is your first.
    2. You should see a single menu item under “Appearance” as stated above.
    3. Saving options on a particular screen, as well as under a whole section should both work. Correspondingly you should be able to reset options and delete the entire option set.
    4. Importing/Exporting of options and migrating options from older versions should work.
  2. Layouts
    Check for the following:
    1. Pullout/corner style bylines.
    2. Individual templates (No Sidebar, Single Left, Single Right, Double Left etc., Page of Posts, Magazine).
    3. Different types of sidebar arrangements on your regular site without using templates – single left, single right, single left single right, double left, double right.
    4. Conditional sidebars – on your blog page you can have a different number of sidebars from say, a single post page.
    5. Wide sidebars and static tabbed sidebars should work.
    6. Header inside wrapper, outside wrapper etc.
    7. Navigation bar inside wrapper, outside wrapper etc.
    8. Footer inside wrapper, outside wrapper etc.
  3. Skinning
    Check if the following are getting saved and appropriately picked up.
    1. Font changes
    2. Borders
    3. Backgrounds
    4. Setting of colors – a new library is being used (Farbtastic) instead of the old one (JSColor)
  4. Images
    Since I have removed TimThumb, this will need special care:
    1. Static Featured Content: Test for both, full size and custom size
    2. Featured Content Widget: Test for both, full size and custom size
    3. Excerpts: Custom thumbnail size and standard thumbnail/medium/large size should be tested
    4. Magazine headlines: Custom size, or inherited from excerpt
    5. Magazine excerpts: Custom size, or inherited from excerpt
    6. Preference of picking up images should work (native WP featured image vs. custom field vs. embedded URL vs. attachment).
    7. Test for Zoom-crop (proportional resizing) for all cases of resizing. This should work for everything except native WP featured images and attachments (that is a WP limitation).
    8. The quality setting should be picked up.
    9. On the back-end test the new image uploader. You no longer need to explicitly enter the URL – using the uploader will automatically populate the URL for you. Clicking “Reset” should remove the URL.
    10. Test resizing on a multi-site installation.
  5. Miscellaneous
    1. Test for social networks setup under Suffusion Options → Back-end Settings → User Profiles. You should be able to manage the selected networks from Users → Your Profile.
    2. Verify that WP 3.0 menus are working

This is a very long list, and trust me, the checks I put the theme through while developing are even more (which is why I request for more volunteers to do the support – this is too much work for one person). If you are doing the beta test you don’t have test everything out unless you want to. Instead you can pick a scenario that you want and run the tests for that. For example, if you are in the habit of playing with images on your site, the Images tests are what should be of greatest benefit.

I am going to break my rule here about posting on the forum. For the beta tests alone, you can put in comments about any bugs that you encounter over here.

Thanks for helping out!

14 Responses to “Suffusion Version 3.7.4 Update 2: Beta Release 1 Available”

  1. Hi Sayontan,

    I’m testing Suffusion 3.7.4 Beta 1 using XAMMP on my local Windows PC. At first, compliment for the new backend, very nice :). I found a bug in the Minima-Theme (the Minima-Theme is my favourite theme by the way). The page itselfs looks good, but at the very bottom of the page I get an PHP-Error:

    Warning: Missing argument 1 for esc_attr(), called in C:xampphtdocswp-contentthemessuffusionfunctionsactions.php on line 766 and defined in C:xampphtdocswp-includesformatting.php on line 2325.

    I also want to ask you wether you want to integrate an option to change the font size? At the moment, I have to change it manually in the CSS file (because for me the fonts are a bit too big). An option for choosing the font size in the backend would be nice (and I think useful too for many users).

    Best regards,
    80486er

    PS: Best theme I’ve ever seen, will donate soon!

    • Thanks for the report. That looks like a rogue paste error. I will fix it. You can make the correction at your end: open actions.php, go to line 766 and delete the “esc_attr()” at the end of the line. I wonder why my debugger is not catching this error.

      Regarding font sizes etc, I will focus more on typography / fonts in a couple of releases.

      • The fix works, I found no more problems. I will keep on testing 🙂

  2. Just a little report. I installed over the previous version of Suffusion on my development site. No white screen of death and activation went okay. The theme looks the same, including a custom background image with transparency for the main wrapper and the post background. The transparency slider is working now in Firefox (previously it worked only in IE for me). The theme options look great now! If I see something out of the ordinary I will let you know. Maybe I buy you another tea!

    • Thanks, Marcel.

    • I got this warning with the beta, which block some plugins doing its work (because ‘Cannot modify header information – headers already’):

      Warning: call_user_func_array() [function.call-user-func-array]: First argument is expected to be a valid callback, 'suffusion_update_generated_css' was given in /home/bokhorst.biz/www/dev/wp-includes/plugin.php on line 395

      Maybe you can fix it.

  3. A report about a couple of problems. I was already planning to move my personal site to WordPress and had started the conversion with the current version of Suffusion. I decided that this would be a good way to help out by Beta testing this build on this site as it isn’t live yet and was partially set up. I therefore unzipped the beta and just over wrote the existing Suffusion install via FTP.

    1: The site is no longer centred and I can’t find anywhere in the wrapper options to do this. I could of course do it with custom CSS.

    2: The biggie. Whenever I make any changes in the Suffusion options and then save them options.php is reloaded after the save and the screen goes white. I can manually alter the browser url to return to the dashboard and then carry on making changes.

    I only have one plug-in installed and enabled and that is the NextGen gallery plugin.

    URL as above running WP 3.05 and Suffusion 3.7.3.08b

    I do like the new graphical layout of the options pages.

    • Colin,
      Thanks for the report. I fixed the first problem (it was a minor one).
      The second problem is more concerning, though. Can you provide this information?
      1. Was Suffusion already installed at this location when you brought the new version in?
      2. Do your options go through in spite of the white screen?
      3. Can you provide me with access to your site to take a look at what is going on?

      Thanks!

      • 1: Yes it was the current version (installed last week)
        2: Yes they do
        3: You have mail (gmail address)

  4. […] Beta Release 2 Available General Add comments Feb 162011 Folks, thanks to all of you who gave Beta 1 a shot. Particular thanks to Marcel Bokhorst, Colin Spencer and 80486er for all your critical bug […]