The work is underway for the next major GD bbPress Toolbox Pro release, version 7.0. As announced previously, this version will be a huge update over previous versions, and this time I can share more information about the progress and major new features.
So, GD bbPress Toolbox Pro 7.0 development is coming along nicely, but I can’t give precise release date yet, because two major new features coming in this release will take time to test properly. When it comes to current progress, all the features implemented by the plugin are consolidated into the Features panel, with total number of features going over 50 this time (it will be 53 or 54 most likely). The plugin has been switched to the latest Dev4Press Shared Library, and it will benefit from the improved interface, improved loading and other performance benefits. The whole plugin has been updated to the namespace based code organization, many old deprecated functions have been removed, and more will be deprecated for future removal.
As for the new features, 2 old features have been rewritten into new Features structure: Online Tracking and Read Tracking. And, the plugin will get two new major features: Marked As Read and Booster. Marked as Read is one of the most requested features in the past few years, and it will allow you to mark everything read, or just topics in specific forums. But, the most interesting new feature will be Booster. It will add some additional database tables to cache the ID’s for topics and replies, and use that for various forums related queries. The way the bbPress works right now, it uses postmeta table for most of the queries, and for medium and big forums, that can cause significant performance issues. The Booster will modify many queries to use the new tables instead of postmeta for gaining a lot of performance.
The plugin development is no track, more or less as planned, but, some of the new features will require more time to test. Booster feature is going to be in Beta for at least next few versions, because it will depend a lot on testing process and potential issues with some queries on different websites.
For now, this is it, I hope to share more information about the development soon.
