Sayontan

May 082012
 

For the longest time I have wanted to write a font management plugin to facilitate the easy addition of fonts to a user’s font stack. Finally last week, after submitting the HTML5 edition of Suffusion I had some breathing room to fit the development cycles required for such a plugin.

I would like to introduce you to “FontMeister – The Font Management Plugin”. FontMeister is being written with the goal of bringing together fonts from all big sources into your WordPress dashboard. In this first release I have built support for Google Web Fonts, Typekit and Fontdeck. In subsequent releases I will be extending the support to other providers and I will also include the capability to upload @font-face kits.

As a bonus for Suffusion users, the fonts that you pick in FontMeister automatically get added to the drop-down lists in the Typography section of Suffusion’s options.

You can download FontMeister from WordPress. Enjoy!

May 072012
 

Okay, so now I can finally check the HTML5 box off Suffusion’s checklist. Version 4.2.0 was approved earlier today and it has the following changes:

  1. New Features:
    1. HTML5 and Semantic markup

      I have converted Suffusion from being an XHTML transitional theme to an HTML5 theme. Often when theme developers say their theme is HTML5 compatible, they mean that their theme uses <!DOCTYPE html>. Suffusion does that of course, and also gives you nice semantic markup out of the box. If you are wondering what semantic markup means, I explained the term and the attendant changes in a post in March. If you go through that post, you can see the list of markup element changes as well.

      If you have Custom Styles, make sure you are using the new selectors for them, as per the linked post above.

    2. Extensive Support for Custom Post Types
      I have done two things on this front:
      1. Provided a new page template called “Custom Post Type Archive”: When you create a page, you can assign this template to the page and save this page as a draft. Upon saving you will see a new tab in the Additional Options for Suffusion titled Custom Post Type Archive. In this tab you can pick things such as which post type you want to show, what kind of layout you want for it (Full posts, Excerpts, Tiles, Mosaic or List), what taxonomies you want to show for it, where you want the bylines displayed, etc.
      2. Provided a new set of options under Suffusion Options → Custom Types → Layouts: This is for the single post displays for Custom Post Types.
    3. New Action Hooks
      The following new action hooks have been added:
      1. suffusion_before_post – Executed before every post. This takes 3 parameters: the post id, the layout (blog, tile or mosaic) and the current post index.
      2. suffusion_after_post – Executed after every post. This takes 3 parameters: the post id, the layout (blog, tile or mosaic) and the current post index.
  2. Changed Features
    1. I changed the tile layout / magazine layout / custom layout from a JavaScript-based layout to a CSS3-based layout. This should make sure that the tile spacing is more accurate. Of course, there is IE, which doesn’t support the requisite CSS attributes. For them the JS-based former approach should be used.
    2. I have upgraded the embedded JQuery Masonry script to the latest version.
    3. I have also optimized some of the JS and CSS within the theme appropriately.
  3. Bug Fixes
    Since I released a bunch of patches over the past few weeks, there is only one fix, which is for the bug with respect to duplicate content from the Featured Content section showing up in the posts below.

There are a couple of minor niggles, neither of which is a bug. These come down mostly to my extreme level of exhaustion last week:

  1. I forgot to update the version number that shows up in the back-end. It still shows up as “4.1.5.b4”, while it should be “4.2.0”. This doesn’t affect any behaviour, mind you. It is just something that I missed changing.
  2. I also forgot to update the PO file for translation. Again, the main impact is in the back-end translations and it will not affect your site’s visitors.

A big thank you to the beta testers for this version, Mark et al!

Apr 132012
 

Version 4.0.6 of Suffusion got approved a little while back. This is mostly a small release with the following changes:

  1. I added the capability to store the generated CSS as a CSS file. If you go to Back-end → Site Optimization, you will see the option to store the CSS as a file, which is the new default.
  2. There was a minor issue with the “Additional Options for Suffusion”, where the contents of the box were overlapping with things like the Media Upload panel. This should be fine now.
  3. I put in a conditional check for loading the JQuery Cycle script, so that if Photonic exists, the script will not be double-loaded.

Enjoy this release and let me know of any additional issues that you find with the beta version.

Mar 272012
 

Version 1.21 of Photonic addresses 2 things:

  1. SmugMug password-protected photos will now be visible to users who have authenticated into the system and have access to the photos.
  2. There was a bug in SmugMug’s popup albums that was killing the last photo. So you would always see one photo less than the total if the number of photos was more than 1. This should now be working fine.