After many delays, the GD bbPress Toolbox Pro 7.0 is now very close to the release date, and the first Beta version is going to drop next week, a few days before the end of this year, with a stable release planned for the first half of next month.
Finally, version 7.0 is almost ready, and the Beta #1 version will be released very soon. The testing process is currently underway, and the plugin is about 95% complete and ready for release. Still, to ensure everything is fine, especially with such a huge release, at least 2-3 weeks of Beta testing will be required to iron out all the issues.
The plugin will include many new features, but 3 features are currently not completely stable, and all 3 are very often requested, and, finally, will be a part of the plugin.
- Markdown: yes, the plugin will include Markdown processing for topics and replies content.
- Booster: very complex feature aims to replace some of the slower SQL queries in bbPress with more efficient ones that use physical tables for some of the forum’s data instead of relying on the postmeta data.
- Mark As Read: the most requested feature in the past few years, allowing to mark one or more forums as ‘read.’ This feature works in tandem with the Activity Tracking feature.
Activity and Online tracking are previously existing features, now rewritten and optimized, and also able to use Booster to improve performance.
The new version still has a Settings panel, only to control JS and CSS files enqueue, some smaller advanced features, and activation of widgets plugin adds (or can disable in bbPress). Everything else is now controlled via the Features panel, and the plugin has a total of 54 features included.
So, the proposed timeline for the release is as follows: Beta #1 should be released on December 29, 2022. Beta #2 should follow a week later, on January 5, 2023, with a stable release ready by January 16, 2023. Stay tuned for more…
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Some very impressive features.
Booster sounds amazing – to be able to modify core processing to improve efficiency and presumably server load is a great achievement.
Look forward to it.
Dale.
Thanks, Dale! Booster is a challenge, but the queries it modifies right now are, on average, 20 times faster (yeah, twenty times). It is a damn shame that bbPress core development is not focused more on performance, there is so many things to do to make it faster, but it would require huge code rewriting effort.