Completely re-written from the bottom up, V5 is faster, lighter and features a fully-fledged theme and plugin API.
We are looking for a few serious users to help put the plugin and theme API through a good workout. Help us find what works and what doesn’t and what needs tweaking. This will be a private alpha period because the code is not ready for production sites yet – there is still much work to do before the formal release.
Primarily, we are looking for some folks to work on creating themes and plugins. That’s not to say we don’t want people to take it for a test run and help work out the kinks, but we still have lots to do with V5 and bug hunting is not a primary purpose of the alpha at this time. Any issues noted will of course be documented in our bug tracker to get fixed before release. But, with V5, there are endless possibilities for layouts and features using the new API’s so we would really like users to get imaginative and see what they can come up with. Does our new API support those ideas? If not, how can we make tweaks so it does? What haven’t we thought of?
To participate in this alpha, you will need:
- to have a good understanding and knowledge of php and css.
- to be able to read the code – we have not yet updated any of our documentation or wiki at this early stage.
- to be able to grab the code from our svn repository – there will be no zip files at this stage.
- to have access to a test server. This is not production site ready code.
- to have a current V4.4.4 test system you can upgrade (or be prepared to start with an empty system).
We will, of course, help out as much as possible to introduce and get participants familiar with the API’s and general architecture.
We are shooting to start the alpha in the next two or three weeks. If this exciting time interests you, please let us know in the blog linked topic in the forum. If you want more info on participating in the alpha, let us know. We will contact you and discuss your ability to participate.
The countdown to Simple:Press 5.0 begins now! Watch for more posts discussing V5 features in the near future!
We believe that Simple:Press is already the best WP forum plugin out there and we would like you to help us take it to a whole new level.