GD bbPress Toolbox 3.0 Pro

New and almost fully rewritten GD bbPress Toolbox Pro plugin is now ready and available on Dev4Press website. Plugin has brand new modern and responsive interface, many new features, many improvements and fixes and it is lighter and much faster than before.

GD bbPress Toolbox Pro 3.0 no longer supports bbPress 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2. So, to use it, you need bbPress 2.3 or newer. Plugin is also tested with BuddyPress 1.9 and upcoming 2.0. Old gdr2 shared code library is removed from the plugin, and new library called ‘Dev4Press Library’ added.

New Administration Interface

With all the changes in WordPress over the past few versions, I felt it was right time to create new UI for Dev4Press plugins, and the plugin that was chosen as the first one for such overhaul was GD bbPress Toolbox Pro. New plugin requires WordPress 3.5 or newer and it is fully tested with WordPress 3.9. So, the new layout is now fully responsive and tested with various small screen devices. To improve how the plugin administration looks like, plugin uses font icons from FontAwesome. In case you are using WordPress 3.8 or newer, plugin also uses DashIcons font for some WordPress shared visual elements.

Plugin no longer depends on the jQueryUI, and it uses much simpler interface. Attachments and errors lists are using WordPress List Table object to fit more into WordPress standard interface and ensure that plugin is future proof and will follow WordPress visual development more closely.

To help with the navigation, plugin adds own drop down menus on top of every panel.

New features

Plugin has plenty of new features directly related to bbPress. There are some new panels too. Plugin now has Tools panel and there you can find tools to export plugin settings into file, and tool to import settings from file. Finally, there is a tool that can be sued to remove plugin settings, including custom forum and user saved meta settings related to this plugin.

As for the BBCodes support, there are no new BBCodes, but many of them are improved. And, since many of you asked for it, plugin has new editor toolbar for BBCodes. It is fairly simple, it can insert code, envelop content in code and replace it. It has no special editing capabilities but it is very useful when you need to quickly insert codes, and you don’t want to remember their format.

And for the rest of the features:

• Show user stats and registration date with each topic and reply
• Improvements to signatures settings and allows mixing HTML and BBCodes
• Use FontAwesome icons for the attachments lists
• Disable more of the bbPress default widgets if you use widgets from this plugin
• Option to disable bbPress breadcrumbs

Improvements and Bugs fixed

There are a lot of improvements in the plugin loading method, most of the functions, object and hooks are re-factored and renamed for consistency. All reported bugs (and some discovered while developing) are fixed: BuddyPress signature editing problem, problems with some of the widgets, some layout issues with attachments and signatures HTML and several BBCodes problems.