Well, we are getting close and coming down to the wire on 5.1. The amount of changes has drastically slowed down and we are mainly committing minor fixes and cleaning up a few of the remaining tickets. I think we are down to 3 or 4 tickets remaining and none of those are issues that have to get into 5.1. If all goes according to plan, we have designated May 31 as the release date for 5.1. So, its right around the corner!
One of the major accomplishments we (err, Andy) did this past week was implement topic splitting and merging. This is probably one of the most requested features that we have had. Basically, it will allow you to move a singular post from an topic to either a new topic (can already do this today) or to an existing topic (new). You can also move multiple posts to a new or existing topic. You will be able to select a post and then choose to move all posts before or after it in the topic to a new or existing topic. And finally, you will be able to manually a series of posts (can be in any order) in a topic that you want to move to a new or existing topic. Yup, its in 5.1. The coding is done and we are just testing away and cleaning up the UI.
We are also going to be giving a bit of mobile love to some of the SP features. Mobiles (phones and tablets) have always had an issue with clicking and dragging objects since using your finger on the screen doesn’t really replicate a mouse down and drag on a desktop. There is a cool jQuery plugin out there called jQuery Touch Punch that handles this very nicely. The core devs over at WordPress have seen fit to include the Touch Punch plugin in the 3.4 core now and we have used it to for our stuff. If you are not on WP 3.4 (in beta as of this writing), no worries, it will continue to work as it does today. But, when you get WP 3.4 and SP 5.1, some drag and drop functionality that did not work previously on mobiles will magically start working. And as a bit of teaser, we plan some major work in 5.2 for the Simple Press mobile browsing experience.
On the Simple Press plugin side of things, we wrote another plugin for some folks who had been requesting it. Some of you wanted the ability to add a topic description for new topic. With this new Topic Description plugin, you will be able to do that. The plugin will release shortly after the 5.1 release. We want to get a beta version to a few of you to test it out for us but it needs SP 5.1 first. So just to recap plugins, that means after 5.1 drops, we will have new plugins available for Post by Email, Post Preview, Topic Description and File Uploads Viewer. And that does not include the major updates to the Subscriptions (forum subscriptions and daily/weekly digests) and File Uploader plugins. Oh, and another little secret, the Polls plugin (will let you add polls to a forum post) is well into development and coming along nicely. Don’t be surprised to see it debut on our support forum a bit after 5.1 to get some additional live testing.
Another new feature we finished up this week was a new panel in the Permissions Admin for adding a new auth. An auth is a singular permission for something. A group of auths (view_forum, reply_topics, etc) makes up a permission set. Permission sets are applied to a forum with a usergroup to control access to that forum. So now you can add your own auths. Now, by default, core or plugins wont know about or use this auth except for adding it to permission sets. But, you can use this new auth in your SP theme or in a plugin or to control access to a profile tab or menu. This ability to add an auth has existed in the API, but the admin panel now makes it easier and handles the API for you.
As usual, we had a few bug fixes make their way into 5.1 this past week (or was it two weeks?) including correcting an issue in loading js in footer if that option was selected, correcting an issue with users not able to update their display name in the profile and a few others. As always, feel free to check our 5.1 Bug Tracker page to keep abreast of all the changes.
Okay, guess I had better get back to the testing of 5.1 so we can meet our date! See ya next time!