Since the release of 5.5.2, we have been working, as usual, on the next incremental version - 5.5.3 - and it is time, we thought, to bring things up to date on where we are with that and what might be coming down the line.

As has happened in the past, one of the main focal points on 5.5.3 development and the controlling factor on when it is released, is the forthcoming WordPress Version 4.1 which includes core changes we have to support and be ready for. The good news on these is that to date we are ready for them and are now testing on our live site on pre-beta WP4.1 code - the best test ground we have available.

The secondary main focal point has been bug fixing. A large number of these have come up due to issues working alongside other plugins and themes and some, of course, are just bugs! Either way - we hope that when it is finally released any problems you may have reported in 5.5.2 will be fixed for you.

On the new feature or enhancement list - most of what will come in 5.5.3 is fairly minor or - at least transparent. 5.5.3 has encompassed vacation season so development has been, perhaps, a little slower than usual! But what we will be releasing is worth having. One of the major and most time-consuming - but totally transparent - developments has been the complete restructuring of our Subscriptions plugin. This has seen it's data management sub-system ripped out and rewritten to be more efficient, faster, easier to deal with and easier to extend into the future. We did this with the Watch plugin a few updates back but Subscriptions is far more complex. We have had that on our support site running now for a couple of weeks and so far have received no negative feedback or noticeable errors.

Another problem that has plagued us a little has been an issue with tooltips, Windows and Internet Explorer. In 5.5.3 we have moved our tooltip code to use a different script library and hope this change will resolve the issue so many Win/IE users had. Perhaps some of those could try out our support forums to see if the issue they had has been rectified.

Other, minor changes include a new look at the way Private Messages are sorted which has been an issue we have been lobbied on by a few users; some extended administration popup online help which we hope will be an aid to setting up plugins and an optimisation of some slow queries - especially those around the administration users display.

But perhaps one of the items we are looking forward to most and want to make use of ourselves - will be in the form of a new plugin - coming soon - that will create and send out HTML Emails - for all the emails that Simple:Press handles. No release date yet but expect it soon.