Suffusion » Aquoid Themes

Improving the WordPress Theme Review Experiment

Jul 282010

A disclaimer
I would have posted this on WP’s official site if it allowed me to post, but since it doesn’t, I am publishing it on my own blog. This is meant as an appraisal of the new theme approval process on WordPress.

On 9th June 2010 WordPress made an announcement that it was expanding the theme review process. There was a call for volunteers to support theme reviews. This was indeed good news, particularly if you were a theme developer. For a long time Joseph Scott had been the sole approver of themes on WP, and though his work was impeccable and his reviews very good and accurate, if he was traveling or unwell or on holiday theme approvals tended to get delayed. This was by no means a deal-breaker, but having more people looking at themes definitely meant that things would get better.

Soon after the announcement a few things happened that were moves in the right direction:

Quite a few folks signed up in response to Joseph’s post, so there are more volunteers now.
A dedicated Trac project was setup for approvals.
Every time a theme got submitted the corresponding Trac ticket got emailed to the theme author so that he/she could follow what was going on with his theme.
There was much better focus on the quality of code in a theme. Actually the focus was more on writing code that didn’t generate “silent errors” or PHP NOTICE messages, but nonetheless adhering to this is something that keeps down the size of logs on your server.

But that is where the goodness stopped. One of the key things which I had hoped would be addressed, speed of approvals took a nosedive. To cite an example earlier when I submitted a theme version it would take around 1-3 days to get approved. It took 1 day if I submitted it on a weekday and typically 3 days if I submitted it on a Friday. In some cases if it was vacation time then the versions took about a week to 10 days to get approved, but this was more of an exception to the rule. Normally on a day you would see 2-3 versions of different themes getting approved, and on occasion the number of approvals even ran into double digits.

However, with the new experiment somewhere something went wrong. Now you have around 1 theme being approved in 2-3 days, which doesn’t seem right. To drive my point home, version 3.5.7 of Suffusion got approved on 10th July. Today is 28th July and only nine more versions of different themes have been approved (including a version of the WP default theme Twenty Ten). This is a far cry from how things happened earlier. I normally used to wait for about a week before pinging the folks to check the status of a version, so for 3.5.4 I sent out a message asking what was up, and this is what I received:

Thanks for the note. Unfortunately there is currently a backlog of themes in the review queue. We are working on it. Themes are being reviewed in the order in which they were received. Thank you for your continued patience.

I didn’t know at that time how much the backlog was or how much longer the next version of Suffusion would take for approval. I found out later how you can estimate the potential wait time. The backlog, as I know now, is well over 100 theme versions at present. So somehow adding more people slowed down the process.

The delay also brings in a bunch of associated problems. Currently if you have a theme version in the queue and you submit a new version, the older version gets deleted and the newer version goes to the back of the queue. So as a theme developer:

If I have submitted a bug-fix for the theme 3 weeks back and that hasn’t been approved, how do I ensure that my users get the bug-fix? Distribute it from my site (unapproved)? Doesn’t sound safe.
If I have submitted a version 3 weeks back with some bug-fixes, then I discover some more bugs in the submitted version what do I do with them? If I resubmit a new version I go to the bottom. So I add another month or so to something that has already been in for 3 weeks? Ouch. Incidentally I have had this happen to me quite often, most recently with version 3.5.8 and 3.5.9.
If I choose not to submit the bug-fix for the older version but let the bugs be approved (these are niche bugs that cannot be caught in the approval process, mind you) and then I submit the new version, I am risking users staying with a buggy version for an indeterminate number of extra weeks.

So somehow this review process discourages active theme development, which I feel is counter-productive to the whole experiment.

How can the experiment be improved? I have a few suggestions:

Improve targets. Set a target saying that each approver should aim to disposition a new theme for approval every weekday (or some such figure). If you have 10 approvers, this will take care of tackling 10 themes everyday and bring down the backlog much faster.
I can almost hear people say, “What does he know?”, or “He is speaking like a consultant”, or “He is oversimplifying”. Well, I have been doing free support for Suffusion since late last September and that is how I keep my backlog down. Every morning I go through all outstanding support requests, take a crack at answering them if they haven’t been answered by someone else, then carry on with my regular job for the rest of the day. If a request comes in during the day, if I am not doing much then I respond to it (or if I think others can respond, I skip it). This has been a largely successful way of staying on top of things. I have responded to more than 3000 posts on my support forum at around 10 posts per day.
Don’t de-prioritize existing themes in the queue upon newer submissions. I love putting out new functionality in the theme, and anyone with any experience whatsoever with Suffusion will agree with me in the fact what I provide is not just cosmetic, but hard features. Sometimes a new version is required to patch a bug. Getting pushed to the back of the queue is very off-putting, because it simply adds so much more in terms of wait time for approvals.
This simply encourages parallel avenues of theme distribution because developers know that their work will not be approved soon on WP’s official site, so they distribute it from their site. And that is where they can start putting in stuff like tracking code etc into a theme. Mind you, quicker approvals will make this a non-issue, but the current wait of a few weeks is a bit too much.

As a concluding remark, the topic of this post and the issues in the post are not mission-critical and I am sure people have more interesting things to do. However I am sure that the free theme developers would be quite happy with these modifications, particularly since some of them invest a lot of energy in building their themes.

100 Ratings for Suffusion – Hurray!!!

General 12 Responses »

Jul 112010

Earlier today Suffusion obtained its 100th rating on WordPress.org. This puts it it rather exclusive company – it is now the 5th theme to obtain this distinction. The four others to have reached this landmark before me are:

Atahualpa – Really the inspiration behind Suffusion and in my opinion the gold-standard of theme customization, Atahualpa is way ahead on all statistical measures on WordPress: most downloads and most ratings. At the time of writing it has been rated a whopping 418 times on WordPress!!
iNove – Another theme that has been around for quite a long time, iNove has been rated 193 times at the time of writing.
Mystique – This is a really popular theme with WP users because of its catchy design. The only theme younger than Suffusion to have been rated more times than it, Mystique has 140 ratings at this point. Its current popularity will probably ensure that it will go over iNove in the near future.
Thematic – It is no surprise that Thematic is the only free theme that has been in the top 15 popular themes since as long as I can remember, and that is very long! No other theme – Atahualpa, Mystique and iNove included has managed this distinction. Thematic is a very clean and well documented theme framework that most people swear by. If you are a theme developer, look at Thematic (and Hybrid) to see how to do it right. At present Thematic has been rated 111 times.

Though unlikely it is possible that I have missed a few here. So if you are aware of any other themes that should be here by all means let me know.

Thank you users, for using Suffusion and voting for it to let people know that you have liked it!

Suffusion Version 3.5.4

Theme Releases 11 Responses »

Jun 222010

I submitted version 3.5.4 on Sunday, before flying out to the UK. I see that WordPress has still not approved it, so I await the release patiently. This was a big release in terms of the number of fixes and enhancements, so without much ado here is the list:

Optimization
I did some optimization on multiple fronts:
1. I introduced a new section under Blog Features called Site Optimization. Most optimization activities have been moved or added there.
2. I have merged the contents of bgiframe.js with suffusion.js. This is to reduce the overall number of HTTP requests
3. I have merged the contents of dbx.css with style.css, again, to reduce the overall number of HTTP requests.
4. You now have options to choose GZip and minification at various levels. Mind you, different plugins can achieve this at various levels for you. In general the capability built into the theme is competent, but not all-encompassing. If you are using a plugin and are happy with it, by all means stick with it. But if you are not using a plugin or don’t want to use one or you don’t have , feel free to give this a shot. From what I have found out this does improve performance on Google Page Speed and on Yahoo YSlow. Feel free to disable the optimization if it doesn’t work well for you:
  1. You can GZip and / or minify the theme’s CSS files from the Blog Features → Site Optimization menu
  2. You can GZip the internal WordPress JavaScript files (like JQuery). Note that these files are already minified, so you don’t have to do anything on that front. Also note that the GZip process doesn’t apply to Suffusion’s JS files (like the JQuery Cycle script for featured content). This is due to a shortcoming in tying together WP’s inbuilt function wp_enqueue_script with the GZip capability. Plugins can still do this for you.
  3. You can also GZip your main content, all from the same Site Optimization section.
WP 3.0 Retro-fixes
WordPress changed a few things between its last RC version and the final release version. I took care of those in this release:

WP renamed the support type for navigation menus from nav-menus to menus. Because of this the navigation menus seemed to not be working in version 3.5.3 with WP 3.0, while they worked for WP 3.0 RC and Beta versions.
WP also renamed the function is_post_type to post_type_exists. This was causing custom taxonomies to not be associated with custom types in version 3.5.3 (again, this was working for the RC and Beta versions). I have addressed this too.

More WP 3.0 Support
I have added an option to “flatten” the navigation menus of WP 3.0 in the Navigation menus. Using this setting you will no longer see the menu names in the navigation bar. I have also included WP’s standard code to include feed URLs (this is internal and shouldn’t make a difference to you as a user).
New Widget Areas
I added two new widget areas: Sidebar 1 (Bottom) and Sidebar 2 (Bottom). These are respectively positioned below Sidebar 1 and Sidebar 2 and will be on the same side as the main sidebars. You can style these sidebars individually, so effectively you can have two sets of tabbed sidebars in the same column.
As an aside the total number of widget areas in Suffusion is currently 10.
New Action Hooks and Filter Hooks
A lot of new hooks were added, both as action hooks and filter hooks. You can use these hooks to put in some fancy stuff either through the custom PHP method or through the child theme method. Here are the hooks

Action Hooks
These have been added with respect to the sidebars. You can use these to put in some custom markup above your sidebars or between the sidebars or below them.

suffusion_before_first_sidebar
suffusion_between_first_sidebars
suffusion_after_first_sidebar
suffusion_before_second_sidebar
suffusion_between_second_sidebars
suffusion_after_second_sidebar

Filter Hooks
One filter hook has been added:

suffusion_get_post_title_and_link – You can use this hook to append or prefix the post title with some other text. E.g. You can, as one user requested on the forum, have your own image before the post title, or as another user requested, put in a date in the list layout view. Currently the tile layout doesn’t have this hook, but it will have it in version 3.5.5.

Miscellaneous Changes
I fixed a small bug brought about by my use of the post_class function. This was causing attachment views to show up unstyled. Now they will get the post class. Another bug I fixed was related to the “Page of Posts” template. For some users this seemed to be ignoring the “Display All Posts” I also made minor modifications to the different layout files by adding global variables that indicate what kind of layout you are using – blog, tile or list. Again, this kind of a change doesn’t impact you, but it is useful if you are going to write your own templates. The last change I made was the addition of an option to disable the use of the body_class internal WP function, because apparently PHP 5.2 has some issues with it. Frankly, this wasn’t my problem to solve, but then again, such things have never prevented users from asking me to resolve their issues.

Now for the next release. I can say for sure about two new features in 3.5.5. One is a couple more widget areas (a lot of people have been asking for widget areas in the header). Another is the use of TimThumb with WP-MS, something that has been in my To-do bucket ever since I released BP support for the theme. As for more features, I need to see what I can fit in my timeline.

While it has been humorously suggested that I am a machine, and while a lot of users on the support forums make demands from me seriously assuming I am a machine I have to remind you what I mentioned at the start of the post: I am in London this week, hence my response times and development speed will be off. Also note that I am not in charge of approvals at WP, so please don’t keep posting questions asking when version 3.5.4 will be available – I have no visibility into that.

WordPress Version 3.0 is Out

General 21 Responses »

Jun 172010

After months of waiting and after a series of Beta versions and Release Candidates WP 3.0 finally came out today. I encourage all of you to upgrade your installations.

Why Should You Upgrade?

Version 3.0 is a significant release that has a lot of terrific features. Here are some:

Menus
This is arguably the most awaited feature of WordPress. This is a huge relief for developers more than users as we don’t have to code our themes to provide you with a mechanism to select pages / categories / links to build the menu. As long as the themes offer basic WP 3.0 menu support you are good to go. You can build and structure your menus as and how you want with very little restrictions.
Suffusion has supported native menus from version 3.5.0.
It has been brought to my notice that WP pulled a little trick here. In the release version they changed a call ever so slightly, thereby making it seem like menus don’t work in Suffusion 3.5.3 (and a bunch of other themes that claim to support menus). To fix this:
1. Open functions.php in your theme editor
2. Search for the line that says add_theme_support(‘nav-menus’);
3. Change that to say add_theme_support(‘menus’);
That’s all.
Integrated Multi-User Code
With WP 3.0 the two branches of code, WP-MU (multi-user) and WP have been merged. You need to tweak a few settings to convert your site from a regular WP site to a WP-MS (multi-site) installation. You can start by creating a network.
Suffusion can be used for WP-MS and can be made to work with BuddyPress too for a better experience.
Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies
The next big feature for folks wishing to use WordPress as a full-blown CMS is the concept of Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies. This offers limitless possibilities. If you have a site where you do reviews of books, movies and music, you can create custom post types for each of those, then associate custom taxonomies to them, like authors for books, actors and directors for movies and artists for music albums. In a theme that supports child themes you can suitably create your own templates for each of these post types and make them appear very different from the regular “blog” look.
Suffusion added a plugin-like feature to let you define custom post types and taxonomies in version 3.5.3. This functionality will be enhanced in the next few releases.
Native Support for Custom Header and Custom Background Images
Now theme developers don’t have to code up a bunch of stuff to handle custom header images and background images. Of course, if you are like me you might still want to code up things – coding definitely gives you a lot of flexibility.
Suffusion doesn’t support this feature at present, but it will, very soon. I couldn’t beat the WP 3.0 deadline, to be honest

Why Shouldn’t You Upgrade?

Simple answer – themes and plugins. Before you upgrade make sure that your theme is tested to work for the theme you are using. I am assuming that you are not necessarily a Suffusion user, so if you are using a theme that is not compatible and you upgrade, you will find yourself on a sticky wicket.

Another reason why you shouldn’t upgrade is if you have some indispensible plugin that is not tested on WP 3.0.

How Should You Upgrade?

If you don’t see an option on your admin Dashboard to upgrade, head over to Tools → Upgrade and then do the upgrade.

There is always the manual upgrade option, where you can download the zip file from WordPress, unzip it and overwrite everything apart from the wp-content folder.

What? No Suffusion News?

Come on! You cannot expect me to sign off without talking about the progress on Suffusion!

I have been busy the last week adding some optimization-specific stuff to Suffusion, like an ability to use GZip compression and minification on CSS and JavaScript. I have been largely successful in improving a lot of things, significantly bumping up the scores on Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow. Mind you, YSlow is quite hard to please – Yahoo’s own site scores a “B” grade on its performance test.

I have also been working on a ton of other stuff, small and big. Stay tuned – a new version will be submitted soon.

Ah, the Vagaries of WordPress Approvals!

Theme Releases 6 Responses »

Jun 032010

Six days after submitting version 3.5.2 of Suffusion for approval I contacted the folks who do the approvals. The news I received was somewhat discouraging. Since I tagged my theme with “buddypress” because it is now BuddyPress-enabled, it goes into a different review queue. The person who does the approvals there is apparently behind, so I don’t know when this version will be available. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, because there were a lot of things in 3.5.1/3.5.2 that were non-BP features.

Suffusion Version 3.5.2 and Child Themes

Recipes, Theme Releases 6 Responses »

Jun 012010

Minutes after making my submission of version 3.5.1 I realized that there were some errors that had inadvertently crept in because I used the body_class() method. So I had to fix the errors and resubmit the theme, but as version 3.5.2. Now, I had already laid out plans for 3.5.3 before making these changes, so another feature found its way in. So here are the changes for 3.5.2:

Support for Child Themes
This was another of those long-time to-do activities that I finally got around to delivering. This was surprisingly easy to incorporate and I just had to make a handful of changes. You can now define child themes for Suffusion. This is very easy for you as well. Let us assume that you will create a child theme called “Son of Suffusion”. Here is what you will do:
1. Create a folder called son-of-suffusion under wp-content/themes.
2. Create a file called style.css in this folder. Put in these lines:
```
/*
Theme Name: Son of Suffusion
Theme URI: http://your-theme-url
Description: Child Theme based on Suffusion
Version: 1.0.0
Author: Your Name
Author URI: http://your-url
Template: suffusion
*/

@import url("../suffusion/style.css");
```
3. The last line in comments, “Template: suffusion” is critical. It tells WP that your theme is based on Suffusion. Make sure that what you put in there is the directory where Suffusion resides.
4. The first line after the comments is important if you want to use the Suffusion stylesheet. If you don’t have it, Suffusion’s styles will not be loaded.
5. That’s all, really. You can add additional styles if you wish. This would be one way to not use the “Custom Styles” option. You can also add a functions.php and define your own PHP functions there. That would be one way to avoid using the “Custom PHP” functionality. Note the following:
  1. What you define in functions.php adds on to the existing functions in Suffusion’s functions.php file.
  2. Any other template file that you add overrides Suffusion’s templates. So if you create your own author.php file, that will take precedence over Suffusion’s author template. One very important use of child themes is if you want custom templates for custom purposes. E.g. You can create a file called category-16.php and define a special layout for your category with id 16. You can also create author-specific templates for WP 3.0. See WP’s template hierarchy for more details regarding how to add custom templates.
6. Suffusion’s huge array of options will all be available to you using this method. Ensure that you keep the theme up-to-date.
Bug fixes for some errors introduced by the body_class() function, for static pages. Of course, after submitting 3.5.2 I caught another of these errors for author pages, but I am not going to bother with another release before WP approves my current release.

That’s it for now. I guess 3.5.2 will be a significant release for you users because it will come armed with both BuddyPress support and Child Theme support. So just keep waiting for WP to approve, while I figure out how to make some more WP 3.0 functionality available to you.

Suffusion Version 3.5.1

Theme Releases 8 Responses »

May 282010

I submitted version 3.5.1 about a couple of hours back today, which is a pity because I believe I missed the bus for it being approved today, which is an even bigger pity since it will probably not be approved before Tuesday (1st June). Sad, because it has one HUGE feature.

BuddyPress Compatibility
After quite a few months of procrastination I finally bit the bullet and built full BuddyPress integration capabilities with the theme. It was not a difficult task thanks to the BP Template Pack plugin, but it took a really long time to implement. I had to go through a large number of files, check the layouts for each of those, modify all my stylesheets etc, because the output that I was getting was simply ugly. Also, the BP Template Pack plugin is still in its evolving stages, so there is a lack of consistency in the way it does its HTML markup.
Mind you, you don’t need the BP Template Pack plugin to enable BP integration with Suffusion. This release takes care of that. Of course, you do need the BuddyPress plugin itself .
As I mentioned, this was a very long exercise and I got a bit desperate towards the end last night. As a result some minute errors might have fallen through the cracks. Please feel free to post them on the support forum.
Bug Fixes
Surprisingly there were some unexpected bug fixes. I say unexpected because they came up in functionality that has existed for a long time.
The first was in the “Page of Posts” template, where if you chose to display posts in the “List mode” the output came out wrong.
The second was a 2-pronged bug in the image fetching function. The “Tiles mode” and the “Magazine layout” were not picking up an image defined as a thumbnail through WP’s native thumbnail feature. Plus under certain conditions TimThumb was not being invoked for resizing the images. I have fixed both of these. Note that if you are using WP’s native thumbnails you will not be able to resize them using TimThumb (I will have to investigate if it is possible to integrate TimThumb with native thumbnails)
The third was in the Search results. I had never realized that the Search results were showing a date box and categories even for pages. Combined with the fact that I recently added some support for WP’s post_class() function, the net result was that the date was showing up for pages in search results in a really ugly manner.
The fourth fix is for the static tabbed sidebar, where a div element within the custom tabs would automatically get hidden. Now it won’t.
New Features
I added a capability to disable the “date box” on the search results page. This will ensure that a page returned in a search result doesn’t look dramatically different from a post.
I also added in the body_class() call to the body element of the HTML markup.

With this release I can lay serious claim to be able to support the multi-site capability of WP. If you weren’t aware, WP and WP-MU (Multi-user) are merged in version 3.0 of WP. So you can run WP in a single-site mode (default) or in multi-site (MS) from the same installation. Suffusion always worked fine with WP-MU, but BP integration had been a headache.

I still have to test out one tiny little to-do item – TimThumb integration with WP-MS, and I promise to do it soon.

This whole process of making the theme extract full mileage from WP 3.0 is getting very exciting. Let’s see what I can do with the remaining features.

Suffusion Version 3.5.0

Theme Releases 14 Responses »

May 202010

I submitted version 3.5.0 of Suffusion a few minutes back for approval. With this release, as promised, I have taken a major step towards supporting WP version 3.0. Here are the key features of this release:

Support for WP 3.0 Menus:
Initially this was a desperate measure. Some folks testing with WP 3.0 Beta 1 complained that they could not see the list of pages in the navigation bar setup. I did some debugging and found that this wasn’t a fault of the theme, but rather the functionality in the beta release itself was broken. Not knowing when the WP bug would be fixed, I decided to support the menu feature provided in WP 3.0. Of course, by the time I actually started writing the functionality Beta 2 was released and it fixed the original problem. I introduced the support, nonetheless. To use this feature go to Suffusion Theme Options → Blog Features → Main Navigation Bar Setup and Top Navigation Bar Setup and scroll to the section that says WP 3.0 Navigation Menus. This will only work if you have WP 3.0. Before you rush off to install 3.0 be warned that it is still in Beta, so a lot of things will not work as desired.
Native Tabbed Sidebars:
This was something I had in mind since a really long time, but I had never gotten around to coding it. This is similar to the “Tabbed Sidebar” setup you do in the Blog Features, but with a huge difference: it applies directly to the sidebar!!! In other words, if you go to Suffusion Theme Options → Visual Effects → Sidebars and Widget Areas and set the style of Sidebar 1 to be “Tabbed”, you can add widgets directly to your sidebar and have them show up as tabs. You don’t need to search for short codes to enter in the Custom Tab setup that Suffusion had so far.
Mind you, there are some caveats – the widgets you add to the sidebar must have a title. Also, they must be “good” widgets following standard coding practices. In other words, the widget authors must take care to use the standard WP tags, $before_widget, $after_widget, $before_title and $after_title while coding their widgets. That means the NextGEN Gallery widget will not work in the tabbed sidebar (Apologies to fans of that plugin, but the widget that comes with it doesn’t follow WP coding guidelines).
As far as I know Suffusion is the only free theme (and possibly the only theme, free or premium) that offers the capability to have your sidebar show tabs natively. Isn’t that cool? I am going to write up a tutorial on how to do this in a few days.
Bug Fixes:
I fixed a bug that was causing the title of the magazine section excerpts to show up supersized. Another bug that I fixed was that the JQuery Cycle script was being included twice. Thirdly, there was a minor alignment issue in the comments section, brought around by the relative font-sizing. That is now fixed.
General Changes:
I have merged the content of plugin.css with the main content. This should reduce one HTTP call from the page. I have also made the fonts for different headers slightly smaller, just to make things appear more pleasant.
New Translation:
Abe Li has graciously provided a Chinese translation that I have included in this version. Thanks Abe!

I have been delving deeper into WP 3.0 and there are a lot of things I can see that I like:

One big “to-fix” item on my list is full BuddyPress support. In WP 3.0 WP and WP-MU have been integrated, but with one major caveat. Previously you could install WP-MU in a sub-directory on your site, but with the merger, WP cannot be installed in its own directory. This poses a challenge for me, as I have to figure out how to test this setup – I always have WP installed as a sub-directory and I don’t have domains where I could test this.
Another really interesting feature is “Custom Post Types” and “Custom Taxonomies”. The reason I call this interesting is because the themes that will truly benefit from this are full-blown frameworks (like Thematic, Hybrid etc) rather than classical themes like Atahualpa or Suffusion. Of course, Suffusion has enough hooks to have its own child themes, so I have to give this some more thought.
Some rather basic capabilities have been provided like native support for custom headers and custom backgrounds. Since Suffusion already has extensive capabilities in this space, this is not urgent on my priority list.

Suffusion Version 3.1.9

Recipes, Theme Releases No Responses »

Jan 192010

It was quite a surprise to see WordPress approve version 3.1.9 before 8:30 AM on the Pacific Coast. Nonetheless, here are the highlights of this release:

“Update Available” notification:

I am happy to announce that I have put in support for a long-requested feature: an “Update Available” notification!! Mind you, if you have problems with automatic upgrades in general, this feature might not work. However, in general it should. After you install version 3.1.9, whenever you have a new version you should see something like this:
User Profile Enhancement:
There were some nifty enhancements in WordPress 2.9. This release takes advantage of one such feature – custom contact methods. Under “Blog Features” you will now see a section called “User Profiles”. You can then choose to include things like your Facebook and Twitter information in the Users –> Your Profile section.
Author short codes
A nice addition in this release is a set of very useful short codes. The short code is called “suffusion-the-author”. You can invoke it in your posts / pages by writing this:
```
[suffusion-the-author display=’what-to-display’]
```
The complete list of arguments that you can pass to the ‘display’ parameter is as follows:
1. author – Shows the author name as defined in the “Display name publicly as” setting for the user
2. modified-author – Shows the author who last modified the post
3. description – Shows the author description, as filled in the profile page
4. login – Shows the login id of the author
5. first-name – First name of the author, as filled in the profile page
6. last-name – Last name of the author, as filled in the profile page
7. nickname – Nickname of the author, as filled in the profile page
8. id – Id of the author
9. url – Website of the author, as filled in the profile page
10. email – Email of the author, as filled in the profile page
11. link – Shows the website of the author if available, otherwise shows the display name
12. aim – The link to the AIM profile
13. yim – The link to the Yahoo IM profile
14. posts – Number of posts by the author
15. posts-url – A link to the author page for the author
16. twitter – The link to the Twitter page, available only if Twitter is included in the user profile.
17. facebook – The link to the Facebook page, available only if Facebook is included in the user profile.
18. technorati – The link to the Technorati page, available only if Technorati is included in the user profile.
19. linkedin – The link to the LinkedIn page, available only if LinkedIn is included in the user profile.
20. flickr – The link to the Flickr page, available only if Flickr is included in the user profile.
21. delicious – The link to the Delicious page, available only if Delicious is included in the user profile.
22. digg – The link to the Digg page, available only if Digg is included in the user profile.
23. stumbleupon – The link to the StumbleUpon page, available only if StumbleUpon is included in the user profile.
24. reddit – The link to the Reddit page, available only if Reddit is included in the user profile.
“About the Author”
You can now display an “About the Author” section for posts and pages. Fill in the contents in the “Author Information Content” section of the “User Profiles” section. You can mix and match the author short codes in this option:
```
[suffusion-the-author display=’description’]
[suffusion-the-author] has written <a href=”[suffusion-the-author display=’posts-url’]”>[suffusion-the-author display=’posts’] posts</a>. 
```
This will generate put in the author description and add a line indicating how many posts the author has written.

I would like to take a moment and thank Connie Müller-Gödecke and Scott Beardsley for the incredible help you have been on the support forum. You have both considerably eased my workload!