After some short delay, the major 6.5 version is now available, and it includes many major new changes and features, mostly rewritten Attachments feature, many improvements, changes, and fixes for several bugs.
GD bbPress Toolbox Pro, version 6.5 focuses on 3 major things: rewriting Attachments as a ‘Feature,’ implementing two new features (Post Anonymously and Journal Topics), and core updates and fixes for all the bugs reported in the past few months (some bugs were tough to fix, and required some additional core changes).
Attachments are the oldest core feature in the plugin, and it has grown a lot in the past 9 years, and it has gone through few phases. But, the number of options it has, the old code base required additional work to improve it and fix some underlying problems. Now, all the Attachments settings are on the same panel, now moved into ‘Features’. Some of the settings have been removed, some settings have been replaced, and almost everything used to render attachments on the frontend rewritten and replaced.
And, attachments now have a new feature, it has been requested quite a few times in the past year or so, and now it was an excellent chance to add it. You can show all the attachments belonging to the topic thread on top (or bottom) of the topic page. This will show all the attachments belonging to the topic and all topic replies in one place, powered by AJAX with pagination.
The plugin now has two new features; both were requested multiple times. The first one is ‘Journal Topic’ – allowing you to create a topic where only the topic author can reply and write a sort of a public journal thread, and other users can read without the right to reply. The second new feature is more elaborate, ‘Post Anonymously’ – allowing logged-in users to post replies or new topics anonymously, without logging out. This feature is handy when your users need to say something anonymously while still logged in. And, the plugin can give a unique randomized name to these anonymous posts. The plugin also can keep the connection between real and anonymous accounts.
Many different features have been updated and improved, including Private Topics & Replies, New Posts Widget, Statistics. There are many updates to the plugin core aiming to improve the plugin behavior under special use cases (bbPress content shortcodes). Check out the changelog for a more detailed list of changes and tweaks.
Finally, this release fixes many bugs, mostly reported recently, but there are few bugs that we more problematic to fix and required some core changes, especially when dealing with bbPress shortcodes used to embed forums or topics.
The next version 6.6 will be a smaller scope release planned for early August (focused on the database layer code, CSS and JS files loading, and few more minor things). And version 6.7 is currently planned for the end of this year (November or December), and it will focus on further features conversion. As always, all suggestions are welcome.
To see the list of all the changes in this version, please check out the changelog. If you find any issues with the new version, please, report them in the support forums.
