Decent Comments revamped

After a couple of years in development hibernation, I’ve tackled the task of reviewing the Decent Comments plugin and prepare a new release.

It actually took two releases in a row, 1.11.0 yesterday and then 1.12.0 today, the latter of which fixes fatal errors caused by changes introduced in the former. Thanks to a user who had observed and reported the issues via Error after plugin update, I saw that it was imperative to get the fixed release out immediately.

Highlights of the new version:

• The minimum WordPress requirement has been increased to 5.6.
• The plugin has been tested for compatibility which WordPress 6.1.
• It used a way of caching the content of its widget that was rather stupid IMHO. This has been changed to be more appropriate and should give better results. While the contents of the Decent Comments widget (of which you can have one or more instances) will be cached, those of the plugin’s shortcode won’t. This could be a point of further improvement later on. Caching also takes into account whether the viewer is a plain visitor or a user who is logged in. For the latter, it takes roles and group memberships (via Groups) into account to present cached results that are appropriate based on those.
• Several incorrect translations have been fixed.
• Some widget settings would not be cleared when previously set and then removed, this would be a cause of confusion as the widget would apply previous settings when it was not expected to do so.
• A detailed list of changes can be seen in the changelog.txt of the GitHub repository we maintain for this plugin.

I think that one further area of improvement could be the way the plugin renders the comments.

This plugin has been around for a good while, it was first released in September 2011, over a decade ago! It currently has over 3,000 active installations.

6+ hours