GD Knowledge Base Pro 3.0: 2nd birthday anniversary edition

GD Knowledge Base Pro 3.0 is a major new release coming out just in time to celebrate plugin’s second birthday, with a lot of new features, improved styling and theme compatibility, new widgets and shortcodes, bug fixes.

Over the past two years, GD Knowledge Base Pro has grown into the most powerful knowledge base plugin for WordPress, and the new 3.0 version expands the plugin features even more with search and rating analytics, new content types, new widgets, new shortcodes, improved performance, improved theme compatibility and styling and much, much more.

Content Types

The plugin has two new content types: User Guides and References. For references, you have a new taxonomy called Reference Topics. User Guides are meant to be used as a more complex content type for longer posts, in contrast to articles, that were meant to be used for tutorials or shorter instruction posts. With references, you can create posts dealing with specifications: for example, if you write about software, references can be functions, methods, classes… using reference topics for classification.

To make things easier to handle, plugin includes metabox that you can use to change the type from one content type to another, allowing you to turn articles into user guides or references, or references to something else. If you have already made your knowledge base, and you want to take advantage of new types, you can convert them.

Rating Feedback Comments

To make ratings more useful, feedback/rating block is expanded to include feedback comment. Plugin settings allow you to control comments, so you can require comment only for negative rating, and it can be controlled for each content type. Rating display block is restyled and looking more compact.

To view all comments, the plugin has new admin side panel to list all feedback comments.

Analytics

The major new addition is analytics allowing you to track views, unique users active, rating (helpful and unhelpful feedback), feedback comments and search effectiveness.

There are additional panels to list all the feedback comments and Search log to analyse all the searches made.

Themes Styling

All plugin templates are reworked and improved, and the default styling almost completely replaced. The new styling is made to make plugin looks consistently across different themes. Theme compatibility system is improved to fix some issues and add support for new content types. Taxonomies are now supported under the theme compatibility too.

The plugin includes many more new child themes examples for download based on the TwentyTwelve default theme and Divi theme from ElegantThemes.

Shortcodes and Widgets

The plugin now includes 18 shortcodes (6 more added in this version), and 11 widgets (2 more added in this version). Support for Shortcodes Shortcake UI is improved, and all shortcodes are fully supported. Some of the widgets are renamed, and they support new content types too.

And even more

There are many more new features and improvements throughout the plugin, including performance improvements, code optimisation, built-in light font with icons (using selected FontAwesome icons), improvements to various tools, functions, new filters and actions, deprecated functions and more. As for the bugs, more than 10 bugs are now fixed, including problems with theme compatibility, bbPress integration, metaboxes, widgets and shortcodes issues…

GD Knowledge Base Pro 3.0 is a massive step forward, and it includes a lot of new features to improve the knowledge base and documentation websites. More features are planned for the future, and you can expect at least one more new, major version to be released until the end of this year. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. And, if you find any issues or bugs, please, report them in the support forum.