New Release: PeepSo 2.5.0 and Gecko 2.5.0.0

PeepSo 2.5.x is the first family of public PeepSo releases to receive the “future” technology improvements written for PeepSo 3.

Trickle Down Development explained

What’s the big “3” anyway?

Many people are anxious to get their hands on PeepSo 3, which is a general umbrella term for the future improved headless version of the current software, which will also open the door for features that are otherwise hindered or outright impossible to implement now.

The truth is, PeepSo 3 has been already creeping into your lives, and most of you haven’t noticed it. Since announcing our plans to develop PeepSo 3 we have been introducing “future” technology to the PeepSo 2.x branch.

The most obvious one is Client Side Rendering for Markdown, Mentions (previously Tags) and URL linking. Getting as much as possible CSR in PeepSo 2 means better and cleaner separation of the server-side logic from the presentation and takes us closer to the ultimate goal of fully headless PeepSo 3. In our case, headless PeepSo means being fully REST API driven, with “how things work” completely decoupled from “how things look”.

The big picture

Our ambition is the ability to completely replace the web-based WordPress interface with any other application, be it web, desktop, or mobile. It’s the general direction WordPress is heading as well.

This kind of paradigm shift is the biggest challenge our company has ever faced, and a biggest challenge any of us ever tacked before. This is why we are being very cautious with any promises, and move slowly but surely towards the goal, trying not to rush and do everything right this time.

Backporting – the hybrid approach

We allow new technology to “trickle down” from the big not-yet-shaped future product to the existing one for a many reasons.

First, we obviously want to improve the existing product as much as possible, without forcing everyone to wait, but also without diverting our attention away from the aforementioned big picture.

Second of all, we prefer to slowly roll out the big change in small chunks to give us the time to properly test everything and gather feedback from the clients. It’s much better to spread potentially breaking changes over dozens of releases rather than dropping a massive new product on top of everyone all at once. This way we can also learn about the potential pitfalls of such architecture, especially since some of the actual computing is shifted to the client devices.

Copying selected existing concepts, approaches and actual future code (first time in 2.5.0) to PeepSo 2.x allows us to achieve these primary two goals. The idea here is to bring as much new technology to PeepSo 2.x as possible until we reach the point where everything in the application that could be converted to CSR / REST is already done and nothing else can be improved without introducing breaking changes which would definitely require us to bump the version number to 3.

What changes in 2.5.0

This version of PeepSo is the first one to actually receive the future code instead of just future concepts. The difference seems academic, but this time we actually copied the PeepSo 3 REST architecture along with some supporting PHP classes over to PeepSo 2.x branch, encapsulated it in its own little world and prepared for rollout. It actually doesn’t do anything yet – in fact, it is disabled by default. In the future releases we will start converting existing AJAX architecture to REST one little feature at a time, most likely starting with Reactions which are a perfect candidate.

Other things worth mentioning in PeepSo 2.5.0

Of course we constantly work on new improvements and bugfixes along with the snail-paced revolution happening in the background. PeepSo 2.5.0 allows ReCaptcha to be used in countries blocking Google domains (like China). We also fixed some issues with Instagram embeds, filtering users by custom profile fields, fixed Mentions handling in Digest e-mails. We also made sure videos that are pending conversion don’t show in user profiles and that the pending member count updates live when users are accepted / declined group memberships.

Gecko Theme 2.5.0.0

Gecko Theme was an instant hit and it’s all thanks to you and your support. We are feeling quite confident with the support of PeepSo itself. We introduced support for other great plugins as well. Today we’re extending that support.

WooCommerce is widely used and loved. We do have a PeepSo WooCommerce integration plugin that’s great and is one of the most plugins that we have in our offer. With this release of Gecko theme we do add a Header Cart widget position. It also comes with full support for default WooCommerce cart widget on the Header Cart position.

We improved the design of the WooCommerce products page and single product page. All that in pursuit of the ultimate experience for your online business.

Brought to you by Matt Jaworski

I am a professional nerd with **over fifteen years of experience** in the field of Open Source web development. Before [PeepSo](https://PeepSo.com) I was a contractor and have helped build successful businesses around the world, including USA, UK, Germany, Indonesia, and Malaysia. A couple of years leading up to founding PeepSo, I was involved with JomSocial – a social networking extension for Joomla. Stepping up from the role of a contractor to a business owner, I became [PeepSo](https://PeepSo.com) founder and Chief Technology Officer. I strive to build beautiful, fast, and functional software that **empowers users to build their own digital tribes with full autonomy and freedom** often not available on mainstream social networking media. In 2023 we spun off a new company to launch [Awedesk](https://awedesk.com) – a complete ticket-based client support solution for WordPress. I also created [ListoWP](https://LIstoWP.com), a modern to-do plugin for WordPress which is now evolving into a project management tool.