GD Topic Prefix Pro 3.0 is now available, bringing support for multiple prefixes by allowing each forum to have multiple prefix groups. The new version brings tons of new features, many improvements, and fixes.
Version 3.0 brings one of the most requested features for this plugin (let’s be honest, this is the ONLY feature requested for this plugin): allow for multiple prefixes for each topic. The most important issue to solve here is how to assign prefixes. The simplest way is to have multi-select control to pick prefixes from the list, but that poses various usability and user experience issues, and I decided against doing that.
Instead, I expanded one of the basic concepts – prefixes group – and allowed each forum to have more than one group assigned. Now, you can group your prefixes into groups by using some arbitrary logic, and when the group is presented for a single topic, you can select only one prefix from each group. If you have 3 prefix groups assigned to a forum, when you make a new topic in that forum, you can select one prefix for each group.
The image included above shows the case where we have a forum with 3 prefix groups. One group is ‘Priority’ – allowing you to set topic priority (low, normal, high, critical…), the second group is for ‘Status’ – allowing you to set the current status for that topic content (confirmed, fixed, in progress…) and final group is ‘Type’ – allowing you to set the type of topic (bug, feature, task…). As you can see, it makes sense to have it grouped this way because it looks logical to end-user, and (in most cases) it is enough to select only one prefix for each group. The topic can be Normal or Critical or High priority, it can’t be Critical and High at the same time.
New plugin version has less global settings then before, and most of the settings are group level settings allowing you more control over each prefixes group – colors for prefixes, location to display prefixes selection in the form or in the topics list and much more. Many new options are added also to make group setup better and offer more choice when it comes to display of prefixes.
Now, the main issue remains with the list of topics – if you need to show more than 2 prefixes, the topic title line will break and will take more space, but there is no way to solve that, there is limited space and we want to put more information there, it is bound to take more space. If you have suggestions on how to make that better, let me know.
Check out the video introduction for the new version here, and the playlist with more plugin-related videos.
The new version includes many more changes and new features, including a new widget to filter topics by one or more prefixes (it is group-based), old widget is improved, and shortcodes are added and expanded with new options. And, you can generate shortcodes through the widgets interface (so, no need to learn every shortcode attribute).
There are many improvements with plugin styling, more options to control various things, and also, there are many bug fixes in this release. You can check out the full changelog on the plugin home page.
The plugin was tested a lot over the past 3 weeks, with 3 Beta releases, and it is used on Dev4Press website for the past week. The stable release available now, contains few more minor changes after the Beta #3. If you are upgrading from previous 2.x versions, there should be no issues, the plugin will continue to work as before.
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.
