A major update for GD Knowledge Base Pro, version 6.0, has been released, including new blocks, new settings, new rewrite rules, WooCommerce integration, Full Site Editing themes support, updated blocks build packages, and several bug fixes.
Version 6.0 is a huge update, and the biggest one since 5.0 was released in 2021 and continues the trend of having major number point updates roughly every two years, and the plugin celebrates its eighth birthday too! This version marks the end of the addons system built into GD Knowledge Base Pro. The only addon currently available for WooCommerce Integration is part of the main plugin, which will work with WooCommerce 6.0 or newer.
This new plugin version has new system requirements: WordPress 5.7 or newer. But using the latest WordPress version is highly recommended, especially if you use the blocks and the block editor. Each updated plugin version will always have the block packages updated against the latest version of the block development environment!
Version 6.0 brings new blocks for code documenting (functions, methods, shortcodes, and hooks), key/value lists documenting, and a brand new block for hierarchical navigation of the content. The plugin includes improvements and fixes for Note block, improved build process, and more.
Source Code block (seen below) lets you control what is documented and show and hide various elements from the sidebar inspector. Everything in the block can be changed (so the titles for various elements are editable). The other related block documents a list of values (key/value) with a documentation line for each value. The plugin also has a tool that can automatically generate the Source Code block from the PHPDoc format using direct input or the Reflection of the live code. This will be expanded upon in the future to make code documentation easier and faster.
Other new features include: Setup Wizard (to get started with the plugin configuration), new settings for Table of Contents (position and styling), additional rewrite rules to handle the content filtering by category/topic and tag at the same time (as it is used in the Navigation block), tweak for the Astra theme (fixes Astra issue with the archives). Plugin styling, code organization, admin side metaboxes, and more are updated and improved. Various bugs in blocks, metaboxes, links, and some widgets issues are now fixed.
Finally, the plugin has experimental support for the Full Site Editing (FSE) Themes. As it stands now, this version works, more or less, with every available FSE theme. At this point, FSE support is based on theme compatibility implementation, but the plan for the future is to support more freedom in making FSE templates directly. There is no guarantee that it will work with every theme and that everything will work, but let’s be honest. At this stage, FSE themes regarding more complex use cases are quite limited. The ultimate goal is to support the building of each knowledge base template via FSE, but right now, there is no timeline for that, but it will be explored and worked on this and next year.
WooCommerce integration is the same as when it was an addon based. There are some updates and fixes, but the principles are the same, and integration is the same. Styling is improved, and it has been tested with WooCommerce 6.0 and newer.
That’s it for now; the new version brings a lot of interesting features that will be expanded upon in the future, so let me know what you think about the new release and what updates you want to see in the next releases.
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.
