The new major release of GD bbPress Toolbox Pro is here. Version 4.6 has the longest changelog from any other version so far, and this includes many new features, updates, and bug fixes.
GD bbPress Toolbox Pro brings several major updates related to forums front page, unread forums and forums with new posts badges, specialized BuddyPress module, many updates to topics and replies read status, big performance improvements and changes to JS and CSS files organization and loading.
Forum Updates
The plugin adds to major new areas on the forums home page, one above the list of forums, and other below. Welcome back top area shows quick stats from the last time user visited the forums and some quick access links. Previous simple statistics area now has many more things displayed, including newest member, the list of users (online, or active in the previous period), the color legend for listed users. All this is controlled with many more new settings (Settings -> Forums panel), to fine tune what you want to display. And, you can still override templates that display all this in your theme. This feature, with some minor customization, is now also live on the Dev4Press Support Forums page.
Similar to tracking new and unread topics added in the previous version, the new version now adds badges in the list of forums for forums with new posts or forum that are yet unread by the user. This is available to log in users only, non-logged in visitors can’t be tracked for this to work properly.
Performance Optimization
For the most part, GD bbPress Toolbox Pro relies on the bbPress to get data, but for some specific things, the plugin has to use custom SQL queries. Version 4.6 brings a lot of changes under the hood to improve support for threaded replies and in the same time improve all custom SQL queries to get topics and/or replies for New posts widget and other areas.
In the same time, parts of the code are reorganized, and main database handling object is expanded to handle all the changes.
BuddyPress Support
Due to many features request related to integration with BuddyPress, GD bbPress Toolbox Pro will have more features related to BuddyPress in the future. For now, new Toolbox has laid foundations for this with new module dedicated to BuddyPress. And, to start things, the plugin adds support for Extended Profile to integrated Signature editor field. Old implementation of signature editing for BuddyPress is removed, and XProfile is expanded with new field and settings to control this integration.
For next versions of the GD bbPress Toolbox Pro, there are already several new BuddyPress related features planned.
JavaScript/CSS changes
This version has major changes in the way it loads JS and CSS files. All files are renamed, some parts of the code reorganized and some third party libraries are removed. All the code related to BBCode toolbar and Signature editing is moved into own files and loaded when needed only.
And even more…
And, that’s not all. New posts widget has an option to specify forums to limit the list, unread topics, and replies badges include the title (tooltip) attribute, the signature can be limited to plain text only, many changes and updates to the plugin admin interface, including some settings reorganization.
As for the bugs, the new version fixes few attachments related problems, some widgets related issues, some notify on edit issues and minor problems on the admin side interface. There are many more features and updates in this version, and you can check out the plugin changelog for full list of changes.
If you find any issues or problems with the plugin, please report them in the support forum.
