I have tonight upgraded the forum plugin on this site to an alpha build of 2.1 - mainly to start to test out the new stuff but also to ensure that the bug fixes that have surfaced are locked down. But it’s the new features that I am quite excited about two in particular.

The first is a new sidebar template tag that lists the most recent posts. It’s different to the current one because the text that gets displayed is configurable by the user. But also it gives the option to use AJAX (well it’s AHAH really) to refresh itself so anything new coming in can be quickly noticed.

The other main new feature is the cross linking of blog posts to a forum topic. This works both ways allowing a blog post to create a new topic in the forums or the other way around. This is something I’ve been wanting to make a start on since the beginning of the project and at last it is starting to materialise.

And a few other ‘goodies’? I have optionally added the ‘math spam’ to user registrations. Since I did this on my site here, rogue/spam registrations have dropped from about 120 a week to about 2 so I am delighted by this. There is also a new option to not use the math spam when an admin or moderator is posting which sort of made sense. MSN Messenger IS is a new option in the user profile as well as the ability to view all topics to which any member has posted.

The rest are bug fixes - many of the them embarrassingly stupid and some very important so the small feature set is now fixed for 2.1 so that the bugs can be tested out so as to get this into the field as soon as possible. Thanks to all the people using this for their suggestions, requests and for catching the problems and letting me know - usually in a most understanding way.

Database Errors on Install/Upgrade:

A few people have had problems installing or upgrading Simple Forum version 2 and have seen it fail to create and alter tables. I shall explain!

As from WordPress 2.2, the WP team decided that in future, the WP database would be created with a default ‘charset’ of utf-8. if you don’t know what that is no matter - but consider it a good thing! In keeping with this new standard, I set the new tables required for Simple Forum to also be utf-8. However, it appears that some older version of MySQL, still out there on hosts unwilling to upgrade, do not like this instruction and fail to create the tables. My apologies for this - I had no idea this was the case.

To remedy this, I have added to the plugin page a separate download of the install and upgrade scripts. if you see this problem then please download the zip and overwrite the two files in your simple-forum plugin folder with these replacements. All should then be well.

Other Bugs and Problems:

As errors come to light that are important enough to warrant a fix, I will do two things. I will update the main zip download with the fix so that anyone taking the plugin after discovery will not be effected. I will also add to the error patch that is available for download so that existing users can also take the patch and error fix. I will also add a topic to the Simple Forum V2 announcement thread detailing the nature of the found error.

Hopefully that will keep users up to date.

I am finally releasing the version 2.0 update to Simple Forum. Please note that there are some notes that are important to be read before installing that are distributed with the download package.

Main feature list of this update are:

• New ‘All Forums’ search capability
• New forum ‘QuickLinks’ dropdown
• Added Members Search (all topics they have posted to)
• Admin can pin and lock topics/pin posts at creation time
• RSS Feed for ‘All’ public Forums
• Avatars folder has been moved - (see important notes with download)
• New template tag: sf_forum_dropdown()
• Added optional forum statistics strip
• New option to not display Login/Logout and Register icons
• Add your own filters (add_filter) to post save/display
• New option to show new post list above groups/forums (front page)
• Updated TinyMCE to Version 2.1.1.1
• Extra validation and data integrity checks
• Major revision to all skin CSS files
• Improvement to Error and Success Notification system
• URL construction - revert to home-grown routine (for valid XHTML)
• New Post links now go to correct post on correct page
• Page links in Recent Post List corrected
• Corrected search topic paging inaccuracies
• Corrected user Profile View avatar display
• Corrected User Edit failing when not on first page of posts
• Corrected localisation of Last Visited/Posted Date display
• All buttons should now work in IE7
• Re-coded Admin Options to use much less code

But actually changes, clean-ups, optimisations etc., are far too numerous to mention.

For full details: Simple Forum plugin page.