🚀 Flatboard 5.2.0 — Release Notes
Release date: March 7, 2026
✨ Highlights
🔍 FlatSEO — Full SEO Suite, Now in Flatboard Pro
Flatboard 5.2.0 ships FlatSEO, a professional-grade SEO plugin that covers every aspect of search engine optimisation without requiring any third-party service or external dependency.
What FlatSEO brings to your forum:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| 🏷️ Per-page meta overrides | Customise title, description, canonical URL, robots directives and Open Graph image for every discussion, directly from the admin panel. |
| 📣 Open Graph & Twitter Cards | Rich social previews generated server-side for all public pages. |
| 🧩 JSON-LD structured data | DiscussionForumPosting, QAPage, BreadcrumbList, Organization and ProfilePage schemas injected automatically — no JavaScript required. |
| 🗺️ XML sitemap | Auto-generated with per-type priority, changefreq and image sitemap support. Invalidated in real time on discussion create/update. |
| 🤖 robots.txt editor | Edit and publish your robots.txt directly from the admin panel. |
| 🔀 Redirect manager | Create 301 and 302 redirections without touching your server config. |
| 📊 SEO audit | Per-discussion scoring on title length, description presence and keyword density. Cached and refreshed automatically on override saves. |
| 📈 Analytics & verification | Configure GA4, Google Tag Manager and webmaster verification tags (Google, Bing, Yandex, Pinterest) from one screen. |
🚫 noindex controls | Individually prevent indexing of search results, tag pages and profile pages. |
| 🌐 Fully translated | All labels and breadcrumbs localised in all 5 bundled languages (fr, en, de, pt, zh). |
🔑 FlatSEO is available exclusively in the Flatboard Pro package.
⚡ Significantly Faster Page Loads
5.2.0 consolidates the performance work started in 5.1.5 and 5.1.6 into the most responsive Flatboard release to date. The improvements span both the SQLite and JSON storage backends and target the root causes of slow pages rather than applying surface-level caches.
🗄️ SQLite backend
| Improvement | Impact |
|---|---|
| Schema migrations run once, not on every request | Overhead drops from 20–50 ms to under 2 ms on a warm filesystem |
StorageFactory returns a shared singleton | Connection and migration cost paid once per request, not per component |
| N+1 discussion-number queries eliminated | Query count drops by 30 on a page listing 30 discussions |
| Profile tab pagination pushed to SQL | Memory for a user with 10,000 posts drops from ~80 MB to under 2 MB per page |
| Attachment subqueries replaced by a denormalised flag | 30 fewer subqueries per list page |
getPermissions() reduced to a single JOIN | One GROUP_CONCAT query replaces one query per permission row |
| Username lookup full-table scan eliminated | New username_normalized column + dedicated index |
| Email ban lookup full-table scan eliminated | Predicates pushed into SQL; covered by two new indexes |
PRAGMA auto_vacuum = INCREMENTAL enabled | Progressive page reclamation reduces the need for blocking VACUUM runs |
📁 JSON storage backend
| Improvement | Impact |
|---|---|
| Per-request in-memory caches for discussions and posts | One bulk scan per request instead of dozens of individual file reads |
| Count methods use the shared cache | countUserDiscussions(), countUserPosts() etc. no longer re-scan the filesystem |
🔧 Other Notable Changes
📊 Analytics Dashboard
A dedicated analytics page is now available in the admin panel (Flatboard Pro). It provides:
- Visit and unique-visitor KPIs for 7 d and 30 d
- A 30-day visit chart
- Top pages ranking
- Traffic sources table with favicons and share bars
- Engagement ratios and member/content health indicators
All data is collected locally — no third-party tracking service is involved. Referrer domains are stored with 90-day retention; no full URLs or IP addresses are ever saved.
🔐 Login Redirect Improvements
After authentication, users are now returned to the page they were trying to reach instead of always being sent to the home page. The "Log in to reply" button passes the discussion URL with #reply-form so the reply editor opens automatically after login. Open redirect attacks are prevented by validating that the target is a relative URL.
Reported by arpinux
🐛 Bug Fixes
- 📧 Email notifications — the "Manage preferences" link is no longer empty (template variable mismatch fixed).
- 💬 Reply editor — opens and scrolls into view automatically when the URL contains
#reply-formon page load.
Reported by arpinux
📦 Upgrade Notes
✅ No breaking changes. Drop in the new files over an existing 5.x installation.
| Note | |
|---|---|
| 🗄️ SQLite | Migration runs automatically on first boot. Adds indexes idx_bans_email, idx_bans_expires_at, idx_discussions_created_at_id and columns has_attachments (discussions), username_normalized (users). No manual steps required. |
| 🔑 FlatSEO | Requires a Flatboard Pro |
📋 Full Changelog — For complete details on all fixes, changes, and improvements, see the full changelog.
