For those few users who had issues with permalinks, gravatars, myCred, or translations then there is a fix waiting for you in 5.7.2. Thanks for bearing with us if you were waiting for any of these. And if you have had issues with the forum entry in your site menu before now we hope we have again improved this problem area.
And then there are some new features which we hope will be welcomed:
JavaScript Re-Engineering – This work continues into the Admin side of the equation improving both stability and performance.
New Post Notifications – The model for the user notification of new and unread posts has been completely revised and has been live on our support forum for a couple of weeks. Clicking/tapping on the new, red post flags will now take you to the first new post in a topic with posts themselves clearly marked.
User Registration, Login and Logout – For those who make use of a membership plugin or want alternate url’s to the standard WordPress pathways, you can now define these in the forum admin instead of needing to edit templates – as well as turning of the use of our complimentary registration, login and logout buttons.
Plugins have not been ignored either, the more significant changes being:
Private Messaging – Private Messaging has undergone some major changes which include:
- Paging of both threads and messages
- A re-design and clean up of the PM Compose form
- A new option to disallow use of PMs until X forum posts have been made
- More clearly showing new PMs using the new PM flag
- Various user interface changes and tidies
We hope you like these great enhancements to one of our most popular plugins.
Gravatar Cache – Our Gravatar Cache plugin – which already gives a major performance boost to users who allow Gravatars, has now been improved and should display user avatars even quicker – whether Gravatars or not.
We have also been working hard on three or four new plugins – a couple of which have been much requested in the past and we hope to announce and release these in the very near future.
And finally – an announcement for all of our current users. We have taken the sad but necessary decision to deprecate the iForum Simple:Press theme following the main 5.7.2 release. It was always a little experimental and never really quite finished and updating it has become a little harder as time has gone by. We will be considering the question of whether it would be possible to take the positive nature of the theme and repackage with more up to date options and styling but any such potential offering would be well into the future. Meanwhile, as stated, this will be the last time that the theme is updated by us and it will be removed from the store. Any users of the theme who wish to continue using it are of course welcome to do so for as long as they choose.