With the recent delay in WP 3.6 (for all the right reasons, btw), we have had some extra time on our hands. We have our 5.3 release for compatibility with WP 3.6 essentially ready to go. So we decided to add some new, requested functionality via plugins. We thought we would give you a short preview here of the plugins we have been working on. Same may be release very soon, some with 5.3 and the rest shortly after the 5.3 release.

So, on to the list…

Blog Search – Now search your entire site, both forum posts and wp blog posts, from within the forum. This new plugin will show you results for your search terms in both the forum and the wp blog posts separated in search results tabs for easy viewing.

BuddyPress – Finally, the long awaited improved integration with the WP BuddyPress plugin. With this plugin you will be able to show forum activity in the BP activity stream, show forum links in the BP menus, integrate the BP and SP profiles into the BP profile and even share an avatar between BP and SP.

Maintenance Mode – Have you ever wanted to put the forum into maintenance mode to do some work or tweak your setup, but not wanted to take down your whole site? Now, with this plugin, you can temporarily put you forum in maintenance mode while you work on it and display custom message to your users.

Announcements – With this plugin, you can now display a custom announcement or new message to uses of your forum. The message location is completely customizable as is the message to your users.

Post Multiple – With this plugin, now you can create a new topic and have it posted in multiple forums at the same time. Of course, this ability is controlled by a new permission.

Topic Expire – Have you ever wanted to post a new topic and only have it ‘live’ for a specific period of time? The Topic Expire plugin lets you set an expiration date for a topic when you create it. You can also choose to either delete the topic at expiration or move it to another forum (ie an archive forum). You can also use the forum tools to set topic expiration on existing topics.

Membership Subscribe – With this plugin, you auto subscribe all users of user group to a forum when you assign the user group and a permission set to a forum.

In addition to these new plugins, you will see a slew of updates to existing plugins when SP 5.3 releases. This includes changes for performance and some bug fixes.

And of course, after 5.3 and these plugin updates, the next big thing is a mobile theme. It really is getting close and we are super excited about it. Just imagine how your forum would look when properly formatted on a mobile device!!

For some time now, we have been wanting to more tightly integrate Simple:Press with BuddyPress, the community or social networking plugin for WordPress. Finally, that time is near. We now have available a beta version of a BuddyPress integration plugin for Simple:Press.

With this integration plugin, you can have Simple:Press forum activity show in the BP activity stream, share avatars between the two WP plugins, manage your Simple:Press forum profile from the BuddyPress profile, get forum notifications in the BP notifcations, manage your watches and subscriptions from the BP profile and more.

This is just the beginning, but we need your help. Before formally releasing the plugin, we would like to get some feedback and testing. Since we are not full BuddyPress users, we need some folks who are to run it through the grinder and tell us what we missed. We would also like to know what other integration features you would like.

You can get the current beta of the BuddyPress integration plugin in our support forum BuddyPress topic. Sorry, but you will need to have a support forum membership in order to access the beta topic.

If all goes well, we should release the initial version of this plugin this month.

By the time this is published there will be an update to Simple:Press core (5.2.6) available for download. This is a recommended update to all of our users as it plugs a small security hole worth plugging. We have also taken the opportunity to throw in a small change which will reduce the number of database queries on all page loads.

We would very much like to thank user Mike Woodhead – here in the UK I believe – for finding the security issue and for quietly and privately informing us of it’s existence and what it could mean. It is always best to be able to deal with these issues quietly rather than have it splashed all over a public forum as has happened once before. So – thanks to Mike, we have a fix available quietly, quickly and safely.

Please do go for the update and keep your site safe.

For some time now, we have had a custom theme service that many of our community has taken advantage of in order to create a unique Simple:Press experience on their sites.

Today, in keeping with helping you give your users the best user experience possible, we are happy to announce the addition of our Custom Plugin Service.

If you are looking for a special custom feature to add to your website and forum, we can help by creating a Simple:Press plugin that gives you the features you need. We can create a custom Simple:Press plugin that is based on your requirements and can develop solutions that improve the overall effectiveness of your website. Regardless of your needs and level of complexity, we have the expertise and technology to deliver the best and high performance Simple:Press plugin development solutions.

Read all the details about our custom plugin service on the special Custom Plugin page we have set up. If interested in the service, please use the contact form at the bottom of that page.

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Unbelievably it has been a year (and a couple of days) since we first released Simple:Press 5.0 and today – as a completely coincidental form of celebration – we are pleased to release our latest update – version 5.2.3.

This update mainly represents a clearing of the decks of as many bugs and issues as we know about at this time as we need to turn our attention to changes coming along in WordPress (3.6) that are going to need, we believe, a large number of tweaks, changes and testing. And that, we need to get on with as soon as possible.

We do recommend ALL of our users update to this version as besides bug fixes – it also contains some security tightening (and thanks to the user who discovered this and privately made us aware of it) plus support for a couple of plugins that also contain security updates.

There are also quite a few new features like allowing use of the tinyMCE editor in Signatures; letting the admin select the order of pinned topics; SEO keywords at forum level; auto-subscription to only topics started (subscriptions plugin); option to create list boxes in custom profile fields (CPF plugin) – to name just a few. As always – please see the change log (Toolbox) for more information.

As always – for those with custom themes the change document is now available in the Codex describing theme and template changes that have been made.

Next up – preparing for WordPress 3.6 and back to our Mobile Theme. Meanwhile – we would like to thank all of those that have supported us over our first year and have helped make Version ’5′ a great success.