GD Press Tools is one of the oldest plugins I made, and the first one that was offered as a Pro plugin on Dev4Press website back in 2009. The first stable version of GD Press Tools was released on WordPress.org on March 20, 2009.
When I started with WordPress, I quickly found that there are a lot of small tweaks and tasks that I need on every website, and I don’t want to use functions.php for everything every time. So, I decided to gather things I use all the time, and make the plugin.
GD Press Tools was created on February 10, 2009, and it took a little over one month to get to the 1.0 version. The first version included some database tools for cleanup, various info panels, additional columns for WordPress posts/pages grids, some admin and security tweaks, small tools and simple CRON jobs management tool. Here is the screenshot of the plugin front page in WordPress admin in version 1.0:
And, over the next few months, the plugin was updated often with more and more tools and tweaks, covering SEO, security, debugging and much more. Version 2.0 was released in September of 2009.
And, in December of 2009, the plugin has been updated to first Pro version 3.0. Free versions remained on WordPress.org for a while, using 2.x version, while Pro development was accelerated and in 2010 and 2011 it got quite a few updates and even more and more administration features. With so many other things I had to do, Free version has slowed in development, and version 2.6 was released in July 2011, with last 2.7 version released two years later on June 2013. After that, I decided to stop free version development, and it was retired from WordPress.org in 2016.
But, the Pro version, with 4.x branch has entered a tough development phase. The plugin used old interface based on outdated jQueryUI library, it was huge plugin, a lot of features and very hard to maintain.
So, in 2015, I decided to rewrite the whole plugin, adopt the new interface I already used with some other, younger plugins, and to make one more very crucial change: plugin had to be split into 3 plugins. GD Press Tools Pro 4.x was a very big plugin, and hard to use because it tried to do everything, and I wanted to have smaller plugins that will be oriented to specific things and easier to maintain. And, that’s how 3 plugins were born: GD Press Tools Pro 5.0, GD SEO Toolbox Pro 1.0 and GD Security Toolbox Pro 1.0 in 2016.
All 3 new plugins had the same interface, and they had features that are specific to WordPress administration, website SEO and website security. And, because of that, I managed to rewrite most of GD Press Tools Pro for version 5.0 and make all the features better, all 3 plugins fully modular, with better performance and very much focused on what they need to do.
And, now, with 2019 soon to end, GD Press Tools Pro has reached version 5.9 and will get major 6.0 updated early in 2020. GD Security Toolbox Pro will get 2.3 version later this year, and GD SEO Toolbox Pro will get 3.3 version in November or December also.
Make sure to check out the GD Press Tools Pro and the other related plugins. If you have any questions or suggestions for these plugins, let me know.
