We are very happy to announce the formal, Gold release of Simple:Press Forum V4.0.0! After several months of serious coding and testing, we feel our baby is ready for release. You can get the new version on our downloads page. We really think you will like what has been added since V3.x!

Simple:Press is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It fully integrates into your WP based site utilizing the same user records and database and displaying on a single WP page. It is fully customizable and comes with a number of skins and sets of icons to get your started. Current users have shown it to be fully scalable whether your site membership numbers the tens or the thousands.

Through it’s powerful and flexible permissions system it is suitable for those who wish to run private, specialist forums with invited members but is equally able to accommodate open, public forums that allow guest posting.

Also included is a Private Messaging sub-system, the ability to link blog posts with forum topics, the capability to extend the forum display with custom code, a number of template tags for use outside of the forums, extensive online help that explains every option and full language support.

Features:

• Fully integrated with WordPress user registrations and logins
• Creates ‘pretty/SEO friendly’ permalinks
• Underpinned by a powerful user and permission system
• Can create private forums
• Forums can be ‘Members Only’ or can allow for Guests
• Private Messaging system
• Admins can allow for post moderation (approval)
• Built in Search tool
• Fully customizable skins and icons
• Most rendering functions are ‘pluggable’
• Choice of Editors (RTE, HTML, bbCODE)
• Options Signatures, Signature Image, Avatars, and Rankings
• A variety of Template Tags – recent posts etc
• Programmable Hooks for user extension
• Optional Spam Prevention tools
• Optional Cookies to track Guests and Members
• Fully Localized for language support
• Optional and various RSS feeds and email subscription to topics
• Various display options to suit your needs and theme
• An Admin toolset to perform many tasks from within the forum itself
• Blog Posts and Forum Topics can be linked
• Support for the Democracy Polls plugin
• Support for the Gravatars 2 plugin
• Forum Statistics – including who is online
• Complete uninstall/removal option
• Support for the All In One SEO Pack Plugin (Browser title bar)
• View Admins New Post Queue from ALL views with ‘Quick Reply’
• Right-to-left language support in the TinyMCE editor
• Topic Status Tracking
• Custom Smileys
• RTE Toolbar Customization
• Pre-registration Policy display option
• Post Ratings
• Add Custom Profile data items
• ‘Watched’ topics
• Multiple forum Admins
• Members List
• And more….

A full blown demo of the plugin can be seen in our support forum. You can get the new version on our downloads page. If you have any issues with the plugin or have a feature request, please visit the support forum.

Enjoy!!!!

Mr Papa (Steve Klasen) and Yellowswordfish (Andy Staines)

While not a tool that all forum administrators will choose to make use of for those that do the Admin Bar has undergone quite a transformation in Version 4. If you need to read every new post (as we do on our support forum) or use moderation, the Admin Bar is the most useful tool.

If you are not familiar with it’s use a brief explanation is in order.

All new posts are stored in what we call the Admin ‘Queue’. This is an option that can be turned on or off. As new posts arrive the post count in the admin bar (again optionally displayed) increase – red for new, ordinary posts and blue for those requiring approval. In Simple:Press Forum version 3 we introduced the retrieval of the post content by clicking on the ‘New Posts’ button. This opened up a drop down section from where you could then click on through to the topic.

In version 4 we have extended this. You can now display each new post and simple mark them read/approved; opt to load the topic itself; delete the post or reply to it there and then with our new ‘Quick Reply’ feature. And because all of this is handled with AJAX there are no extra page loads and the forum administrators can quickly see, read and deal with all the new posts waiting in the queue.

One word of warning. If you, as the forum administrator, do not wish to use the Admins Queue then make sure to turn the option off (in Manage Admins) otherwise the queue will continue to grow which can have performance repercussions. On the other hand if you choose to make use of this feature – ensure you check out all of the options available to set it all up as you want to use it.

We are about to put Beta 3 of Simple:Press Forum Version 4.0 up for download. This mainly – as expected – fixes up the bugs and problems encountered and reported to date. If you found an error it would be appreciated if you could take Beta 3 for a spin and determine if your problem is now resolved.

There are also one or two new and late additions which include:

• New option to turn off the email settings within the forum
• Avatar template tags can now include an optional size parameter
• Restrictions on the length of forum/topic names and descriptions removed
• New pre-post display program hook
• New option to use the WP Avatar settings
• Automatic support for selecting the forum as your WP ‘front’ page

It goes without saying that introducing new features so late in the beta cycle can be tricky so any testing anyone can manage would be very much appreciated. We want to make V4 the most stable version we have released to date.

Today sees the release of Beta 2. This includes many bug fixes and problem resolutions that have been raised on the V4 Beta support forum. If you raised a problem and wish to know if Beta 2 contains the fix – visit the thread on the forum and look at the topic status. It will say ‘Closed’ if it made it into this beta.

We are not there yet. There is still some unfinished business and a few minor developments to get in place or to improve – especially to meet our goal of being fully WordPress MU functional. but we are getting there slowly!

We hope, if you try this beta release, you encounter no problems but as always – remember it IS beta software and make a full database backup before installing.

A feature we had requested many times will now be included in Simple:Press Forum V4.  That feature is multiple admins.  Existing SPF allowed any WP admin access to the backend, but the front end was limited to a single admin.

Now, in V4, multiple admins can be defined.  In addition, those admins do not have to be WP admins.  SPF V4 defines new capabilities that allow you to assign SPF admin access to any WP user.  Additionally, you can selectively define which admin pages that user can access.  This allows you to control individually the access rights on the backend for SPF admins.  All SPF admins will have complete front end access.

Each Admin also has a list of options that they can use to customize to their admin front end display.  SPF V4 still includes the same moderator structure as previous versions, but now they too can use the same list of options to customize their front end display.

We hope you enjoy this new feature.