GD Knowledge Base Pro 4.0 is a huge new release focusing on the feedback, search, plugin and templates loading, content types registration and control, core updates and bug fixing.
Initially, this was planned as a smaller release (it was supposed to be version 3.6), but the work quickly escallated, and some of the changes were considered as breaking (changes in several templates), so, the version 4.0 seamed more appropriate and with 50+ items on the changelog, it is quite huge.
Core Changes
One of the features that were missing since version 3.0 was released, is the ability to disable content types you don’t need. Now, the plugin has options to disabled: FAQ, User Guides and References. Articles can’t be disabled. Products can be disabled also. And, the search has been updated to allow control over the search (content type to search through) and search checkboxes that appear in the plugin’s search form. All post types and taxonomies registration is updated and the generated labels are now fully up to date with WordPress specs.
All the content types now support date-based archives and include new archive header template too. So, now, if you want to see articles published in May of 2019, your URL would be like this:
https://www.example.com/kb/articles/2019/05/
This is quite similar to WordPress default date-based archives but applied here on each content type individually.
Feedbacks
The feedback that users can leave when voting Helpful/Unhelpful has been massively updated, and the new feedback form can ask users for consent for future contact in regards to the feedback. This can improve conversation with the website users and get more information about the content of the knowledge base.
And, once you get the feedbacks with the consent to contact, the Feedbacks panel on the admin side will show the additional information and will include the contact form where you can use some extra tags to write the subject and content of the email, and send that email to the user that wrote the feedback.
More changes
This is not even close to everything added in this version, and you can check out the full changelog here. Other notable changes include improved admin columns for all content types, various shortcodes improvements, reorganized plugin settings panel, new hooks and functions for developers, accessibility improvements, some compatibility updates for WordPress 5.x, POT file updates and other translation-related changes.
And, this version fixes several bugs reported in the past few months (mostly small things), and few bugs found during this development process.
Few more things
WooCommerce Integration Addon has been updated also, and it must be updated also to work with the new plugin version. Some other Dev4Press other plugins have been updated to support GD Knowledge Base Pro and the new features it brings. GD Crumbs Navigator Pro and GD SEO Toolbox Pro have been updated, and both support date-based archives and also include some additional tweaks.
If you find any issues or bugs, please, report them in the support forum. If you have any suggestions for future versions, let me know.
