It’s been a hard decision but I have decided that with the exception of Simple:Press Forum, I am ceasing to further develop all my other plugins as of today. I just no longer have the time to devote to the coding and upkeep - especially with the way WordPress changes so many of the rules with each release.

For those using any of these plugins - my apologies. As far as I am aware they all work with WP2.6.

If anyone would like to take on development of any of these items then please contact me - I will do my best to explain what is what. It would be great to find them all a good home!

Meanwhile I will support existing users as best I can through the support forum - but there will be no further updates I am afraid.

We have released version 3.1.3 of Simple:Press Forum. This has many bug fixes and minor enhancements but is mainly a security and optimisation release. The project to optimise which began with 3.1 and queries has now been extended to the code files. Sadly this has resulted in a complete restructuring of the folders and files and makes upgrading a little more tedious - but the net result should be worth it with better memory and CPU usage and, hopefully, better performance overall.

We are also opening up our Simple:Press Forum TRAC system where bugs are logged, milestones can be viewed along with development notes for future enhancements, features and changes. The really brave can also download latest builds if they wish to.

We are hoping that this will be the last 3.1.x update. If more important bugs or security issues come along then we will address them at the time with an interim update. Other than that we can now begin the more interesting work of looking at new features and requests for 3.2. Feel free to follow progress!

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Once again it’s a bit quick but a reported security problem and some much needed bug fixes have made the release of another update necessary. This is a recommended upgrade for all users of any version 3 forum plugin.

Regarding the security scare - we believe we have covered this but research will continue. If we find a little more work is needed then we will release a small upgrade (files only) in due course.

Several of the more annoying bugs have been fixed, notably the error log filling with errors resulting from RSS feeds and the ‘fatal error’ when someone got the math wrong on a new registration!

And for all those users out there of the ‘All In One SEO Pack’ you will be pleased to know that we now support it’s ‘page title’ setting for the browser title bar.

Hopefully this version will prove stable and we can now move on to some exciting new development for a future 3.2!

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I am obviously saddened by the fact that several people had some problems with the initial 3.1 install. It’s one of those cases where, not having an army of testers to call upon coupled with the sheer scope of the plugin, it is too easy to miss some little combination here or sequence of events there….!

So apologies to those effected but hopefully those issues should now be resolved in 3.1.1.

There is an upgrade pack available containing just the changed files which, hopefully, makes the upgrade a little easier.

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As I said in the last post, Version 3.1 of Simple:Press Forum is largely about optimisation and bug fixes but new features are much more fun to work on and the list of user requests never gets shorter! Here are just a few of the more important or interesting features coming in 3.1 (in no particular order):

• Move a Post to a new Topic: often requested and finally coded up. Both this and the Move Topic to Different Forum tool now use Ajax calls to speed the process.
• New Template Tag to notify users of new Private Messages: which includes a link to their Inbox.
• ‘nofollow’ and ‘target’ filter options on links in posts: added as optional post filters.
• View Admins New Post Queue: using an Ajax call, the admins post queue of unread or posts needing approval is now available from any view. You can approve, mark as read, delete and, new for 3.1, both approve and go to to post in one action
• ‘Add New Topic’ button: now available on the posts (topic) view alongside the ‘Reply to Post’.
• Edit Forum and Topic ’slugs’: for those occasions where you may want to change them.
• Post Admin Tool Icons: have been moved to the left hand side for those annoying times when someone posts something with reams of formatting or a long url with no spaces and the tools disappear off of the right hand side!
• Admin Options panels now use jQuery: less new javascript required for loading.
• The Admins New Post Queue now Optional: an important one for those users who do not use it - you can now officially turn it off.
• Right-to-left language support in the TinyMCE editor: now turned on.
• New Template Tags to return members Avatar: enables using the forum avatars outside of the forum itself.
• Improved Security: as always, anywhere where security from attack can be improved will be and more work has taken place in this forthcoming update

Is that the full list? Maybe not but these are the main items.

While I would much prefer to leave it a little longer before releasing yet another update to Simple:Press Forum, 3.1 is going to be one I have to recommend all users upgrading to when it is released. While there are a few new features (mainly requested items) and quite a number of bug fixes as would be expected, the real goal we set ourselves for 3.1 was optimisation. And on that score it has been a very satisfying development.

It may look more or less the same on the surface but under the hood a lot has changed. The first target were database queries as the forum consumes a large number. The good news is that these have been reduced considerably - in some key areas by as much as 85%. But no page displays have been left out. Major cuts in the database calls have been made everywhere and existing queries re-crafted and consolidated.

The second major goal was to take a long hard look at user data handling. The integration with WP user registrations is essential but some aspects of core WP user handling is not ideal and 3.1 sees the introduction of a new table for user forum specific data which has again enabled us to reduce queries and overhead.

The final goal was to build on the permissions structures introduced in 3.0 and to increase overall performance in what is a tricky data area to manipulate. This too has benefited from an increase in performance and query usage and much more key data is now being cached during page load.

As to new features? More on those later when we have a definitive list.