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!!

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.

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.

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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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.

The following shots – taken from an iPhone 4 – show just a small handful of the different views supported by Simple:Press that have been re-engineered to display more comfortably on a mobile device. Starting over on the right with the ‘front’ forum page – the Group View. By default, we have cut things down to minimum information, removed unnecessary icons and images – and added some features we hope will aid the mobile user – like the dedicated new and unread post list that can be opened up right inside the forum row as shown.

Next up – the Forum View – or the listing of all the topics in a specific forum.

The same principles have been adopted here by trimming down the display to the real important information and removing some of the ‘fluff’!

One piece of good news here is that this particular theme – being displayed in just one of what will eventually be a larger gallery of colour overlays – can also be used on desktop and tablet devices where it will continue to display much like our current ‘default’ theme. This is achieved in part by using, for some display tasks,  more responsive CSS – but also by careful use of arguments being passed into our template functions. And where the functions are lacking flexible enough display options – they are being extended as needed.

See the image right at the bottom for screen shots of my desktop, my iPad and an iPhone all using the same theme.

Finally – of the main three forum specific views – the Topic View.

Here I have shown a very simple post with just an image and simple line of text. Once again you will notice that the area has been minimised compared to the full desktop view. But that does not mean the mobile display will be limited to just these components. Just like the desktop this is fully theme driven so customisation is just as easy and available as today.

Another item of note worth mentioning – and often requested – is the use and availability of the tinyMCE editor.

Now we have moved to using the built-in, WordPress provided instance of TinyMCE, we are also making use of the decision that WP makes on whether it should be available on a mobile. And here – at least on an iPhone – WP thinks it should be! It also thinks it should be available on my Android phone as well and in the next update on this subject I will include some screen shots taken using my Samsung Galaxy.

And finally for this first preview post – what we do not want to do is lose any of the core functionality that Simple:Press offers it’s users. So instead of buttons and icons – we are making use of the standard mobile list mechanism where it makes sense to do so.

So – where are we up to with all of this and what still needs to be done before we can make this first mobile theme available?

Essentially – all of the main views are engineered with the exception, of course, of honing the styles where necessary and tinkering with the font sizes etc. The real big tasks that still lay ahead are converting those plugins that need extra mobile support – in particular the more major plugins like Private Messaging and Tags.

So these are next in the list to be tackled.

We hope – of course – that you may like what you see here and feel free to drop a comment in the forums if you have any to make. And at some stage in the hopefully not to distant future some of you may like to help us beta test the theme – bit more on that nearer the time.

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Featured Topics and Posts

The Featured Topics and Posts plugin allows you or any other SP Admin on your site to designate a list of topics or posts as featured or highlight topics and posts. There is a template tag for featured topics and one for featured posts so you can actually feature a list of topics and a list of posts. The template tags will display the featured topics and posts in a manner similar to the Recent Forum Post template tag. The template tag can be used in page content, sidebars, footers or other widget locations.

As an SP Admin, you can add topics and posts to the featured lists in the admin (list of topic/post ids) or via the front end Forum Tools (designate the specific topic or post you are viewing).

Share This

The Share This plugin has probably been our most requested type of plugin. It allows you to do social sharing of forum, topics and posts with Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or other social networks. The plugin adds where you want a list of icons for social sharing of the forums, topics and posts. It allows users of your forum to share these items on their social network accounts. Our Codex has long detailed ways to add these sharing icons to you forum, but it was a mostly manual process. This plugin takes the manual work out of it and automates it for you.

For this social network sharing plugin, we have chose to build it off of the Share This service. This is a free service for users and we do recommend that you sign up and get a free publisher ID so you can see data and stats on your social sharing. In developing this plugin, we researched multiple services (like Share This, Add This, and others) as well as creating our own API. It seemed non productive and time consuming to reinvent the wheel and do our own API. In the evaluation, we found Share This to offer the most options and ease of use.

The Share This plugin features an extensive SP admin panel set of options for customizing how you want the plugin to display and interact on your forum. You can pick the icons you want to show and the appearance (buttons, icons, banner, etc). Our admin panel fully automates the insertion of the most common social network icons. The plugin API also allows for easy customization if you want to add a different social network icon not directly supported in the admin panels.

The plugin features 4 different template functions. One for displaying within the forum topic loop (ie per post basis), one for within the forum loop (ie per topic basis), one for within the group loop (ie per forum basis) and a general sharing template tag. The latter can be used on any wp page or post (but not within the forum loop) to allow sharing of non-forum data.

The Share This plugin is a start. Over the coming year, we hope to add more features to it.

We hope these two new plugins help you ring in the new year. Happy New Years and Best Wishes for 2013 from the Simple Press Team!

Amongst other updates, those that had problems with the combined and compressed CSS/JS files due to server limitations should now find that fixed up and we thank those that tested the fix for us. And for that small number of users who found the upgrade hanging, we believe we have at last got an understanding of the issues and 5.2.1 has a temporary fix we hope will work for you – something we will rework in the future.

If you found and reported an issue then hopefully the resolution will be in 5.2.1 and you can check that as always in the Change Log (from the Admin Toolbox).

There have also been some minor theme updates and, as usual, there is a Codex entry documenting these changes.

For translators there have been some minor changes to both the core Simple:Press and Simple:Press Admin plus some changes to the Private Messaging and TinyMCE Editor plugins.

We will be back in the new year with an update on a couple of exciting, new and often requested plugins plus the latest news on the mobile theme development. But for now…

We wish all of our users and those just stopping by for a read, a very happy and successful new year.

We have pleasure in releasing our latest version – 5.2.0 -  and hope that there is something here for everyone. I covered most of the hot topics in the last post but several more small fixes and enhancements made it into the cut including one of my own favourites – the Integrated Editor Toolbar.

We were beginning to see growing ‘clutter’ beneath the editing window and the submit button for a forum post seemed to be getting further and further away what with plugins adding new components all the time. So we would like to introduce the new Toolbar that tidies it all up and get’s it all back to a clean look. You can turn it on and try it out in the Global Display Settings options admin panel.

And as detailed in the last blog post – the real big item for 5.2 is the aggregation of CSS and JavaScript files. And you can turn that on in the Global Settings options admin panel. And we thoroughly recommend that you do.

Added all together 5.2.0 amounts to over 80 changes – some big and some small. While it is not strictly needed for the latest WordPress 3.5 it is a good idea to upgrade both together.

The full change log can be viewed as always in the forum admin Toolbox.

For those that have customised their themes there are, as always, some inevitable style additions, new template display functions and some changes – especially to support the new Editor Toolbar. As always you can see a full description of these changes on our Codex – Theme Changes section.

For our translators it has also been a busy few months and there are changes to both the core Simple:Press and the Admin – all of the four Themes and the following plugins: Pluload – File Uploader, Polls, Post Preview, Post Rating, Subscriptions, Syntax Highlighting and Tags. And when, shortly, the new TinyMCE editor plugin is released – there are a few changes needed for that as well.

New and recent plugins now available for translation also include Ban Users,and Post As.

And let me finish with news of three new plugins about to be released that will bring our plugin library up to a grand total of 40 offerings. The first one is AutoLink which will allow you to set up hyperlinks to key words that will automatically form links when they show up in forum posts. The second is Answers Topic – which allows your users to mark the forum post that best answered their question although this can be adapted easily for many alternate uses. And then, of course, the much discussed Post by Email plugin will get released shortly after 5.2.0.

Oh yes – and if you found and reported a bug – then we hope we have included the fix for you in this release.

So – we seem to have settled on our version number now and the next release will be 5.2 and, if all goes to plan, will be released around the same time as WordPress release their version 3.5. So far we have seen no real dependency issues around WordPress 3.5 but changes to their admin CSS have played games with the Simple:Press admin panels which 5.2 will address.

Version 5.2 is still largely full of minor enhancements and numerous bug fixes but there is one big ticket item we want to get out there which we hope will benefit all of our users. Technically savvy users will have noticed that with the activation of more Simple:Press plugins their site starts to load extra stylesheets and JavaScript files. In fact – if you had all of the Simple:Press plugins active then there is a strong chance that old war horse and still non-standard-compliant browser Internet Explorer, would fail to load them all. It is the only major browser to place a limitation on how many you can use at one time! This clearly needed to be addressed.

The next version will now offer the feature option to aggregate all of the Simple:Press stylesheets and JavaScript code into single, compressed files – automatically built and served. And the really good news on that, of course, is faster loading speed. This alone probably warrants the 5.2 version tag!

There is some exciting news on the Simple:Press plugin front. We recently released a much-requested ‘Ban User‘ plugin that allows you to ban users from your forum by IP address, an IP address range, host name or user agent. You can also ban a member of your site by user-name and set a time limit on the ban.

The ‘Post By Email‘ plugin is still available as a beta release for anyone who wants to try it out but all being well should be finally released immediately after Simple:Press 5.2. This is a complex plugin and the gestation period has been slow and difficult but it is good to know it is almost ready.

There has been some concentrated work this week on utilising the WordPress ‘TinyMCE Editor‘ as a drop-in replacement for our supplied version. This has great advantages for us in particular as we will no longer have to keep updating the core scripts and checking for compatibility but more importantly means that our users can leverage all of the enhancements that the WordPress developers have spent so much time and effort on. No release target is available for this yet but we seem to be getting very close.

On the theme side of things, the other big development still going on – but gathering pace – is the creation of our first more responsive mobile Simple:Press theme. No – this will not be ready for our main 5.2 release and we still are unable to put an ETA on it as there is much, much more work to be done but we getting the hang of things now in this new area and solving the more difficult questions we have faced. Hopefully we will be able to release some screenshots in the not too distant future so you can all see the direction we hope to go with this.

Which just leaves me to tell those that do not know that the image above is Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom from Want‘ which appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1943. Without doubt, Rockwell was one of the greatest illustrators of his generation and on a personal note, I spent a fantastic day at the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts back in October and strongly recommend it to anyone passing that way. Oh – and while in Stockbrdge I also had lunch at ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ which may mean something to any ageing, ex-hippie like me who may be reading this!