GD bbPress Toolbox Pro, plugin for WordPress and bbPress, version 1.0 was released on May 27, 2012, and it shares it’s birthday with WordPress, and today celebrates it’s 9 birthday.
In 2001, bbPress 2.0 was released, transitioning from a standalone platform to a WordPress plugin, and maintaining the lightweight approach of including only the basic forum features and providing a wide range of actions, filters, and templates to allow for the third-party plugin to add new features.
GD bbPress Toolbox Pro was created as a multipurpose plugin adding many additional tools and features to expand bbPress forums. It started with support for attachments, BBCodes, more topics views, some extra widgets and few tweaks.
First few years, the plugin was growing slowly, in both features and user base. But, the fact that the plugin was easy to use, had plenty of features in one plugin, had a positive effects, and increased feedback has led to the version 3.0 in 2014 that was the turning point for the plugin, introduction to the new interface, and many new features. Since 2014, GD bbPress Toolbox Pro is by far the most popular Dev4Press plugin, and with the ever expanding user base, the development of the plugin is mostly driven by users’ requested features.
Version 6.0 begins the process of the full plugin rewriting process. Due to the size of the plugin, I decided to do that in stages, while at the same time plugin is gaining new features with every new release.
Plugin celebrates its 9th birthday today, and soon it will get a new major update with the 6.5 version (beta phase in progress now). Over the next year, the plan is to have 2 or 3 major updates, culminating with version 7.0 in time for the plugins’ tenth birthday.
Let me know what you think about GD bbPress Toolbox Pro, how useful it is for your bbPress forums, and what I can do to improve the plugin. As always, new features can also be suggested through the support forum.