New Release: PeepSo 1.9.9

Party like it’s 1.9.9(9)! New release is here and with this one I have some bigger news as well. We’re removing 3 plugins. Introducing professional translations, new User Bar Widget makes its debut and more. Ready? Got your drink of choice? Good. Let’s get to it! But first, as usual, save us all some time and read the upgrade instructions.

Upgrades

For a quick and hassle-free upgrade:

1. Go to the backend of your site > Dashboard > Updates (go here, instead of > Dashboard > Plugins, trust me)
2. Select all PeepSo plugins that need to be updated
3. Click ‘Update Plugins’ (note: this will deactivate all of the add-on plugins), don’t worry, they’ll come right back on during Step 6 promise!
4. Update PeepSo Core
5. Go to the backend > Plugins
6. 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. ALSO IMPORTANT. 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!

Alternatively, if you feel you can’t take the wait, you can go to your account, download the latest versions and do the following: Backup everything. Deactivate all PeepSo plugins from your site. Install the new versions from the zip files, just like on the first installation.

UserBar Widget

Ah yes. Haven’t we been asked for this enough already. The widget has the options to:

• Show avatar
• Show name
• Show notifications
• Show logout icon
• Show VIP icons
• Show Badges

Apart from that there are also layout settings and how to behave for guests. You can place the widget in any widget position that you’d like.

Now for the more advanced users, you can add PeepSo UserBar widget anywhere in your template files too. We will use WordPress function called the_widget as you can see on the example below:

<?php the_widget( 'PeepSoWidgetUserBar', "show_avatar=1&show_notifications=1&content_position=right" ); ?>

This specific code above will render the widget with Avatar and Notifications, aligned to the right side.

Available options for this widget are:

• guest_behavior= (hide / login) – Show/hide widget login link for guests
• content_position= (left / right / center / space) – Align widget content
• show_avatar=1 – Show user avatar
• show_name=1 – Show user name
• show_notifications=1 – Show notifications
• show_logout=1 – Show logout icon next to the notifications
• show_vip=1 – Show VIP icons
• show_badges=1 – Show Badges from BadgeOS integration

Every option has to be separated with “&”.

Here is the example with more options enabled:
<?php the_widget( 'PeepSoWidgetUserBar', "guest_behavior=hide&show_avatar=1&show_notifications=1&show_name=1&content_position=left&logout=1" ); ?>

Of course, before messing about with the code make sure to have all necessary file backups in place just in case.

Merged Tags, Moods and Location Plugins

After a few years of development and keeping some plugins separately, like the Tags, Moods and Location, we’ve come to a conclusion that it’d be best to just incorporate them into PeepSo itself. As of this version you no longer need those 3 plugins. If you want, you can upgrade them to 1.9.9, sure. It’s possible, but right after the upgrade they will deactivate and show you the notice that they’re not needed. You can simply delete them. Rest assured, there’s no functionality lost. All has been merged with PeepSo.

By doing this we’re also laying grounds for more improvements in the future. Merges are not something out of the ordinary. We have done it before with Messages and Chat plugins. We’re also planning on merging Photos and Videos plugins in the future so that you can have albums with mixed content. But I’m going too much into the future. Lemme get back to this release.

Professional Translations

I announced it last week on our community, but I’ll write it here too. We’re going away from volunteer translations as they are just not working out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really grateful to all of the translators who have done their translations properly and on time. Most have not really been doing it, though. We were always a version or a few of them behind on translations. Volunteer translations stopped making sense long time ago.

Alongside that, we’ve created a system for implementing translations that just works. It’s simple and awesome. I mean, really simple. Since translations are a part of the plugins packages all you need to do is to just go to the backend of your site: Settings > General and change ‘Site Language’. If the translation files are there, PeepSo will just follow.

For example, you want a site in German?

1. Go to backend of your site > Settings > General
2. Change ‘Site Language’ to Deutsch
3. Save changes.
4. Done, your site and PeepSo is all in German now.

Wanna hear the best thing? If your site is already in German, you don’t need to do anything. Same of course applies to all of the above mentioned languages. With every few releases or so we are going to not only maintain the professional translations already available but also try to cover more and more languages as we go. You won’t have to download files and upload them via FTP anymore.

Oh, one more thing. Even though the cost of professional translations is not little it’s something that we will NOT charge for. More languages will come soon too. Currently available professional translations are:

• German
• Spanish
• French

The volunteer-finished translations that were also included in this release:

• Persian (Iran)
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Bulgarian

Default Post Privacy

Admins can now decide the default privacy setting for all new users posts in the postbox. If you feel that Your Community should start with Only Me privacy setting, go right ahead. That setting defines the default starting privacy level for new posts. Users can change it, and the postbox will always remember their last choice.

Improvements & Fixes Worth Mentioning

With this release it’s not only about the merges and new stuff, 1.9.9 also offers a bunch of improvements like the Ultimate Bundle key auto-applies to newly activated plugins now. We improved the default email template styling. Disabling email notification for expired users (expired memberships). On top of that users registered via other plugins are now also accounted for when using AutoFriends plugin.

As far as fixes go users showing in widget when “Hide my profile from all user listings” is enabled was fixed. So was escaping special characters issue with T&C. General styling improvements to containers / overflow. Fixes in notifications for handling shortcodes etc. You can see the full changelog here.

Brought to you by Eric Tracz

I'm a Digital Nomad currently living in Manila, The Philippines. Co-Founder and CEO of PeepSo.com. First time WordCamp Speaker at WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2017, WordCamp Singapore 2019 and hoping to speak more soon. I started my journey with open source nearly a decade ago as a simple support guy. Joomla! was my first encounter with the world of Open Source. After that period of my life got phased out I fell in love with WordPress and never left. I have been both lucky and at the same time I worked my ass off to get to where I am right now. Free time, if I have any, is usually spent with my wife and / or travel around South-East Asia. Even when I'm supposed to be on a little vacation, not a day goes by when I don't check up on PeepSo. So far visited or lived in: Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hungary, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, China, Japan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Norway, Germany, Scotland, England and more... Whenever possible, I jump on my Ducati Monster and just ride.