New Release: PeepSo & Gecko 3.1.3.0

Auto-accept to closed groups, WooCommerce 4.9 compatibility, Gecko background image setting. Boom! Released!

What’s new?

Auto-accept members to Closed Groups

One of relatively popular requests was the ability to hide the open groups content from non-members. Unfortunately, the PeepSo philosophy is “show user everything he has the right to see“. The only alternative in this scenario was to use closed groups, but that generates a new hurdle, as owner approval is required for any user who wants to join.

As middle ground kind of solution, any closed group can now be set to automatically accept members. This way we achieve a group type halfway between open and closed – one that is free to join without wait (like Open) but does not show any posts to members who did not join (like Closed).

To follow up on this change and to make group naming less confusing, we will rename closed groups to private groups in PeepSo 3.2.0.0.

Early Access

Name Based Avatars now properly restore the default non-gendered avatar when user deletes their picture. The New Search was extended with Awesome Support Documentation, mostly for use on our own website.

Other changes

We improved the appearance and functionality of photo lightboxes (especially comment creation) in scenarios where photo captions were unusually long. We also followed up the switch of login and registration forms on mobile with the same switch on desktop browsers (login goes first).

Gecko Customizer now includes the background image setting.

We also ensured WooCommerce 4.9 compatibility (no code changes were needed here). As usual, you can refer to the full changelog to learn about every change.

This is the last release to support PHP 7.0 and 7.1

The next major release (3.2) will require PHP 7.2 or newer.

WordPress 5.7 is expected in March, and we already started testing PeepSo against it, to ensure full compatibility on release. The major March PeepSo version released before WordPress 5.7 will require PHP 7.3 or newer.

In February PeepSo will drop support for PHP 7.0 and 7.1 and will require at least PHP 7.2

In March we will further drop PHP 7.2 and require at least PHP 7.3

The current recommended PHP version is 7.4, as WordPress is still only “beta compatible” with PHP 8.

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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 2022 I launched [EmeraldWP](https://EmeraldWP.com) which acts as an umbrella for my other projects such as ListoWP, Widget Shortcode Pro, and MomentsWP.