FICTBASE

2.8.0

• New: comments on chapters. Readers reply under the chapter they just read,
  using WordPress’s own comment system — so moderation, threading, spam
  filtering and the notification emails you already know all work unchanged,
  and Akismet works too.
• New: comments are off until you turn them on. FICTBASE → Settings has the
  site-wide switch, and each story’s edit screen can override it — always on,
  always off, or follow the site.
• New: a chapter that is members-only or paid keeps its discussion private too.
  Only readers who can read the chapter see the thread; it stays out of your
  comment feed, the REST API and anywhere else comments are listed.
• Note: turning comments off on a story does not delete anything. The
  conversation stays on the page; it just stops taking new replies.
• Note: existing chapters are linked up in the background the first time you
  load the site after upgrading. Nothing to run, and nothing to click.
• Fix: the bar above a chapter ran the story title straight into the chapter
  label — “The Lighthouse at Vessel BayChapter 1” — with no space between them.
  It now spaces them properly, shortens a very long story title instead of
  pushing the buttons off the row, and drops the buttons onto their own line on
  a narrow screen.
• Fix: the bookmark button now switches off as well as on. Clicking it a second
  time removes the bookmark instead of doing nothing, it says which way it just
  went, and it shows a marker while a place is saved. Signed-in readers see the
  right state on a chapter they bookmarked from another device.

2.7.0

• New: tags. Give a story as many tags as fit it — “slow burn”, “found family”,
  “enemies to lovers” — from a field in the story editor. Tags you have already
  used are offered as chips, so you click rather than retype them.
• New: every tag gets its own page at /stories/tag/slow-burn/ listing the
  stories that carry it, and those pages are in your sitemap. Readers looking
  for what you write can now land on you directly.
• New: a story page shows its tags under the blurb, so a reader who liked one
  story has somewhere to go next.
• New: a Tags screen under FICTBASE for renaming a tag everywhere it is used,
  or removing one. Renaming changes the label only — the web address of the tag
  page stays put, so nothing that already links to it breaks.
• Note: different spellings of the same tag are one tag. “Slow Burn”, “slow
  burn” and “Slow-Burn” all land on the same page rather than splitting your
  stories across three near-identical archives.
• Fix: removed two taxonomy registrations, fb_genre and fb_tag, that could
  never hold anything. They were attached to a post type this plugin does not
  create, so both were empty on every install; nothing read from them and
  nothing is lost.

2.6.0

• New: search. Readers can search your stories and chapters at
  /stories/search/, and a search box now sits at the top of the story archive.
  Chapters are searched by their full text, not just their titles, so a reader
  who remembers a line can find the chapter it is in.
• New: results show the sentence the term was found in, with the term
  highlighted, so a reader can tell which hit is the one they meant.
• New: if your theme’s own search box finds nothing, the reader is sent to the
  FICTBASE results instead of to an empty page. WordPress search only looks at
  posts and pages, and your chapters are not posts.
• Security: members-only and paid chapters are found by their title and never
  by their text, and results never quote a locked chapter. This does not change
  based on who is searching, so a results page cached for one reader is safe to
  serve to the next.
• Note: search uses a MySQL full-text index when the server supports one and
  falls back to a slower plain match when it does not. The index is built once,
  on upgrade, and nothing is required from you either way.

2.5.0

• New: RSS feeds. Every story now has a feed at /story/your-story/feed/, and
  your latest chapters across every story are at /stories/feed/. Readers follow
  you in any reader app, browsers and apps find the feed on their own, and both
  URLs are shown on every FICTBASE admin screen.
• New: content ratings. Every story carries a rating — General audiences, Teen
  and up, Mature, or Explicit — shown to readers above the blurb and again at
  the top of every chapter. Existing stories are rated General audiences, so
  nothing changes on your site until you change it.
• New: content warnings. Tick the ones that apply from a starting list, or type
  your own. They appear next to the rating for readers who want to know what
  they are walking into.
• Note: a rating is a label, not a lock. It tells readers what is in the story;
  it does not hide anything from anyone. Enforcing an age check on top of the
  label is a Pro feature.
• Security: feeds resolve access as a logged-out visitor, always, whoever
  fetched them. A members-only or paid chapter is a teaser and a link in the
  feed even when the author is signed in — which matters because feeds are
  cached and re-served to strangers.
• Fix: upgrading the plugin no longer leaves story and chapter URLs 404ing
  until Settings > Permalinks is re-saved by hand. The rewrite rules were being
  flushed before they were registered.

2.4.0

• New: reading access levels. Every story and chapter now carries an access
  level — Public, Members only, or Paid — set from a single dropdown in the
  editor. A chapter can inherit its story’s level, so a whole story is opened
  or closed in one place. Existing content is migrated to Public, so nothing
  changes on your site until you choose to change it.
• New: members-only chapters. A chapter set to Members only shows a teaser and
  a sign-in prompt to logged-out readers, and the full text to anyone with an
  account. This works with no add-on and no payment provider.
• New: reader entitlements. What a reader has unlocked is recorded on your own
  site rather than only at the payment provider, so access survives a refund
  window, a provider outage, or a move between providers.
• New: order records. Every purchase attempt is written to your database, so an
  abandoned checkout can be told apart from a failed payment.
• Note: charging for a chapter requires the FICTBASE Pro add-on on the Author
  plan. Without it the Paid level is not offered, and Public and Members only
  work exactly as described above.
• Security: the access level is validated on save against what the site is
  actually entitled to offer. A submission that asks for a level the site
  cannot grant leaves the stored level untouched instead of falling back to
  Public, so a members-only story cannot be forced open by editing the form.
• Security: the REST API and the chapter templates now share one access check,
  closing a path where a restricted chapter could be read through the API.

2.3.6

• Fix: draft stories are no longer readable by the public. A story still marked
  as a draft could be reached through the REST API, through its own URL, through
  the [fictbase_story] and [fictbase_chapters] shortcodes, and it was listed
  on the stories archive. Drafts are now visible only to users who can edit
  content, and a draft answers 404 exactly as an unknown address does. Chapters
  are checked against their parent story too, so a published chapter of a draft
  story is no longer served.
• Fix: deleting the plugin now removes everything it created. The Genres table
  and several licence-related settings, including your stored Pro licence key,
  were being left behind in the database, and a scheduled task kept running with
  nothing to run.
• Fix: the licence-key helper the Pro add-on reads always returned an empty
  string, so a licensed site could look unlicensed to the code that asked.
• Fix: the REST stories list only ever returned ongoing stories, so a completed
  or paused story was missing from it. It now returns every publicly visible
  story, and the sitemap uses the same rule, so a paused story is no longer
  silently left out of both.
• Fix: a helper function declared by the stories archive template used a short
  fb_ prefix; renamed to fictbase_.
• Fix: a chapter with a custom label (“Prologue”, “Chapter One”) broke the
  chapter list. The label was drawn into the small round badge sized for a
  chapter number, so the text spilled out over the row. A labelled chapter now
  gets a pill that grows to fit its label.
• Compatibility: tested against WordPress 7.1. The plugin no longer calls
  load_plugin_textdomain() — WordPress has loaded a plugin’s own translations
  automatically since 4.6, and the call ran early enough to trip the 6.7
  “translation loading triggered too early” notice.
• Housekeeping: development files (test suite, build script, Composer metadata)
  are excluded from the release package.

Note: 2.3.4 and 2.3.5 were never published here; their applicable fixes are
folded into this release.