Second release of November is an enormous milestone for PeepSo. We’re taking PeepSo and its plugins up a notch. It’s a huge leap as the version bump to the loud and proud 2.0.0 does come with a lot. What and how much? Got your coffee? Tea, perhaps? Great. Let’s dive in.
Upgrades – for the last time…
If your PeepSo is older than version 1.11.0, contact us and we will handle your update ourselves.
IMPORTANT NOTE. We release all plugins at the same time. Sometimes, it can take some time for all available updates to show in the backend of your site. If some plugins’ updates don’t show, wait. Just Wait. Don’t upgrade just some of them. Drink some coffee and wait. Your site needs to catch up to show them all. If you feel like it’s taking too long, contact us. We’re here to help!
For a quick and hassle-free update:
- Make sure your site is backed up. Preferably test updates on a staging site.
- Go to the backend of your site > Dashboard > Updates
- Select all PeepSo plugins that need to be updated
- Click ‘Update Plugins’ (note: this will temporarily deactivate all of the add-on plugins)
- Update PeepSo Core
- Go to the backend > Plugins
- Reactivate all PeepSo plugins
The whole operation doesn’t take more than 3 minutes. Should you have any issues or questions, please do contact us.
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT NOTE: This is the last time ever you need to follow these instructions. Updates engine has undergone a complete overhaul. But I’ll get to that below.
Audio Uploads Made Better
Audio uploads are separated from video uploads. You can disable video uploads and still use audio uploads. The configuration was separated, check out the backend > PeepSo > Configuration > Audio & Video and see the updated settings to reflect that. That’s just for starters.
We’ve also added an integration with Last.fm that allows to pull gorgeous album artwork and display it in a hover card. For the hover card to show you do need to have the song, artist fields filled in when sharing it with the community for the artwork to be found.
Getting the Last.fm API key is FREE and takes less than a minute. You can get it here.
At the same time we rebranded the Videos plugin to be called: Audio & Video from now on. It’s more suitable, isn’t it? Who knows, perhaps we’ll add file uploads and rebrand it again to Media? Does have a nice ring to it. Perhaps next year.
New Updates & Licensing Engine
Starting with this version we’re getting rid of 3 years or legacy. This is the last time you need to follow specific update steps so that plugins don’t disable or can’t use automatic updates. With this new engine it’s now possible for the plugins to activate, check licenses and update – even if the PeepSo Foundation has a different version number or required third party plugins are not there (like WooCommerce for the PeepSo – WooCommerce Integration).
With all this in place beginning with the 2.0.1 version (planned for the beginning of December 2018) you can update plugins in whatever order you want and it’ll just work. Some of you that have been with us from the beginning still remember that we didn’t always have automatic updates. Doesn’t sound fun, does it?
Chat
We have two new additions to Chat plugin. First one is adding user avatars to Chat sidebar. The sidebar that shows when you have a lot of chat windows open. Second addition is to the shortcode itself. Depending on how you want to handle some content for guests like messages in this case you have 2 options
- guest_behavior=”silent” – render nothing for guest
- guest_behavior=”login” – render login screen guest
Clearly, no specific messages can be shown to a guest, as the system has no idea what messages to show. But right now you have the control over how guest views of the page are handled.
Security Fixes
We received reports from independent security specialists about possible security issues with previous versions of PeepSo:
- SQL injection when combined with WP User Manager
- XSS in search-popover-input.php
- XSS in “blocked” tab
The problems were affecting PeepSo 1.11.2. All three problems were fixed in this release. Please update your plugins to the latest version to make sure your community is safe and sound. Added bonus, all the new awesome features. It’s a win-win.
Other Improvements and Fixes
New field type: Country added to Extended Profiles plugin. You can ask users to fill in a country of birth, country they live in now. It comes with a configuration allowing admins to reorder the country list, remove countries from the list. The world is your oyster.
Integration with USP PRO full compatibility with the Pro version of the popular free plugin: User Submitted Posts. myCRED integration plugin underwent a full rewrite in order for it to be extensible in the future and to adapt the new updates and licensing engine. See full Changelog.
PeepSo Theme: Gecko?
Future
Thanks to the feedback from you, our community, we’ve decided to focus the upcoming months less on ‘sparkly new features’ but more on architecture and getting PeepSo into tip-top shape for what’s coming. A whole new notifications engine that’s platform-agnostic and easily extensible so that push notifications can be implemented with ease for mobile apps. A new Search Engine that will search everything. Activity Stream redone so that it’s pure REST API.
Chat moved to a new technology that’ll unload servers. That’s just off the top of my head. Months of really intense and hard work are ahead of us to lay awesome foundation for future development. It’s not an easy task, especially with limited resources but when have we ever shied away from hard work?
You can see our Future page for more information on what’s coming in the upcoming releases.
