It’s been quite some time since any updates have occurred on gPress, and almost just as long since I last checked the BuddyPress forums, but that’s not to say that work on gPress has ended – far from it. I am presently working on gPress 0.2.5, which is a MAJOR re-write in many ways, for amongst some of the cool new features such as full HTML content for places, front-end place submission and new All Places widgets, there are also 2 MAJOR bugs that are being fixed, which involves completely re-writing the gPress options and removing Foursquare functionality.
In present and prior versions of gPress, it was using the TPPO Framework, a framework for rapid options development. However, this had several major drawbacks, one of which was that it stored all of the options in a single array, which made processing them very slow, not to mention corrupt options causing problems for all options and array length limitations on memory and so forth. On top of that, it relied on modified versions of jQuery and jQuery UI, which was a disaster and in-turn caused many problems. I have already reconstructed all of the options into standard WordPress options with standard WordPress styling, but am now in the process of going through the code and replacing all references to previous options. There are well over a 1,000 things to change so its going to be a lengthy process…
In regards to Foursquare, the reason for removing this from core was two-fold – in one sense, every time Foursquare was down, I found myself bombarded by support requests, from people claiming gPress did not work when in fact, it was just Foursquare that was having the problems. In some strange cases, I even found Foursquare being out of action caused problems to those not even using the Foursquare functionality, so I knew it had to go at some point. From another perspective, I also knew that what I really wanted to do was use Foursquare as an excuse to build a gPress specific plugin, which would also mean needing to fine-tune the actions and filters available, so decided to start work on this during the 0.2.5 update cycle.
gPress 0.2.5 is going to be a whole new kettle of fish, and as such, with as little spare time as I presently have available – supporting pre 0.2.5 versions seems like a ridiculous waste of time – I hope those using and (or) following this extremely ALPHA solution understand why I have locked myself away in my cave (in those brief moments I have available for hiding), but promise everyone that it will be well worth the wait – and once 0.2.5 is out the wild, so too will I – answering any and all support questions.
Once 0.2.5 is released, I will also be able to finish off the alpha version of GeoPress and get that packaged and ready for a public release.
Truth be known, we may even have to work right-on through to 0.3 until officially releasing / supporting the new version, but it will ultimately depend upon how much work can be done whilst being sponsored by 