I announced the bSuite 4 public beta not long ago, now I’ve just posted a new version to SVN that addresses some of the bugs and fleshes out some of the features. I have yet to update the bSuite page, but here’s a preview of what’s new or changed:

• Additional stats reports
• WP2.5-style tag input tools on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style category selector on the Page edit screen*
• WP2.5-style excerpt input on the Page edit screen*
• For multi-author sites: ability to grant edit permissions by role for each page (with a configurable default)
• An “include” shortcode that makes it easy to show content from one post or page on another.

About the new shortcode, use it like this:
[include post_id=“1234” url=“a url to a post or page in your blog” field=“post_excerpt”]

One of post_id or url is required; field is optional and defaults to post_excerpt first, then to post_content if there is no excerpt.

*Why would you want to input tags, set categories, or add an excerpt to a Page? They help readers find and explore our content. What’s so wrong with that?

I’ve had a lot of features on the table for bSuite for a while, but this recently discovered comment from John Pratt (whose Smorgasboard.net is a lot of fun), kicked me into gear to actually get working on it again. The result is bSuite 4, which is probably what bSuite 3 should have been all along.

The big news is that I’ve finally revamped stats tracking to work with caching mechanisms like WP Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish, or whatever else. I’ve also got the search word highlighting working again, and that’s cache-friendly too. Yay for javascript, I say.

And in addition to making the stats cache-friendly, I’ve made them a little smarter, faster, and more useful. bSuite now tracks sessions, and reports both the number of page loads and the number of visitors to your site. To improve performance, stats are first recorded to a small table for incoming hits, then periodically processed (“migrated”) into the tables used to report stats. This reduces contention and improves write speeds for incoming stats hits.

The stats report now gets graphs for both the previous 24 hours and 30 days of activity. And because unlike external stats solutions, bSuite is integrated into your site, it can also report on your most popular tags and categories based on traffic.

I’ve also implemented a large number of improvements, bug fixes from the previous versions. Big thanks go to Matthew Batchelder (who helped with the javascript code), Jon Link (who both pointed out a lot of bugs in bSuite 3 and helped answer questions in the forums), Zach Tirrell (who helped develop migration strategy ages ago), and to everybody who’s posted a comment or review related to bSuite.

This is beta software, and some things definitely don’t work. The stats are working solidly, the other features appear free of catastrophic bugs, and I’ve had it running (in various stages of development) here at MaisonBisson for a month now. Still, read the warranty (there is none) and don’t blame me if Boba Fett jumps out of your server after installing it.

Get the details at the bSuite page, download bSuite 4beta1 here.