With the 5.0.5 release behind us, we are now in full swing on development of 5.1. This is the first post 5.0 release that will include a bunch of new features. We want to try to keep you up to date with our 5.1 status.
With support for updates from within the WordPress Admin, we want to try to do more focused, shorter release cycles in the future. Our plan would be for a 2 or 3 month development cycle on these releases. We will also give development status updates on twitter, so be sure to follow us or track the development on our 5.1 development and bug tracker page.
Now, on to the 5.1 status…
One focus in 5.1 is some long needed and requested updates to some of our plugins. Subscriptions, Watches, Blog Linking, Topic Status and Admin Bar will all be getting our attention. The Subscriptions plugin has been one focus early on here. Here are some of the key and major changes:
- Now (along with Watches) features a subscription management page in each user’s profile
- Subscription notification emails will now include the post content
- Users can now subscribe to a forum provided the forum admin enables this feature
- New posts from the admin bar now fire subscription emails
- Subscription digest reports (daily or weekly)
All of those features are now in testing except for the digest reports which are in early stages of planning and design – exciting times for Subscriptions!
Another key feature that has already been added to 5.1 is upload panels for Simple:Press plugins and themes. So in the future, if you want to add a new Simple:Press plugin or theme, you can do it right from within the Simple:Press admin menus. Also already complete is a WordPress Role to Simple:Press User Group mapping tool. For quite some time, we have supported mapping WordPress Roles to Simple:Press User Groups but it only took effect on new users or WordPress Role changes. If you already had an established user database with Roles, you had to manually move those users into the proper Simple:Press User Group. With this new tool, it can be done for existing users too.
Recently, we had a user suggest a delete button on topic view just like an edit button. Doh! We had never thought of it nor had it been suggest before, but now its in 5.1!
And I will leave you with this last tidbit. Currently in development and testing is a new plugin that will allow you to post by email. It is primarily, at least initially, designed for replying to admin or subscription notification emails. I will save the details for another blog post here shortly, but this new plugin will be ready by the 5.1 release.