KBucket: Your Curated Content in WordPress

Steps to activate the plugin.

• Activate the Plugin from your WordPress Dashboard, KBucket Plugin page (You will see KBucket in the sidebar)
• Register the Plugin by going to our registration page
• Get your API key from your new profile page
• Enter your API key under the settings tab in your WordPress KBucket page
• If you are using a Page Builder product, you need to use short codes to display the content
• Go the the “Settings Tab” and choose “use short code” option
• Go to the KBucket page (this page is labeled under your pages list) and create a row with two columns and copy the short codes into each section
• Add the Kbucket page to your desired menu and change the name and url of the page as you wish
• If you are not using short codes, go to the Appearance Widgets menu and add the KBucket tags to the "KBucket Sidebar"
• Download Kurator from the Kurator product page
• Visit our Docs if you have any questions Docs.
• To learn how to create and export your curated research visit our website and ask KChat: How can I create a gallery file for KBucket Optimal Access
• To upload your curated page go to the 'upload KBucket' tab in your plugin and upload the file.

2.3.8 First official public release = 2.3.9 =\ Fixed minor theme related bugs = 2.3.10 =\ Fixed minor theme related bugs 2.3.11 Fixed issues with "Set Social" on the backend 2.3.13 Added Twitter handle for sharing 2.3.16 Added Twitter handle for sharing Fixed upload bugs 2.3.19 Fixed category tag issues 2.3.20 Fixed memory upload issues 2.3.21 Fixed issues with social image share 2.3.23 Fixed issues with Style formatting 2.3.24 Fixed issues with Java Script - conflicts with newer versions 2.4.7 Made KBucket page micro tags visible to the search engine Added short code capabilities to make it compatible for more themes Changed how images are uploaded. Once an image is loaded from the server, it will stay, till changed by the server. 2.4.8 Solved issues with mobile display 2.6.1 Changed the URL structure to SEO friendly URLs. 2.6.3 Added a new template with the channels appearing in the side-bar 2.6.6 Added CSS tab for modifying look and feel of the KBucket page 2.6.7 Fixed issues with image upload 2.6.16 Updated Mobile display of posts. Now you see the whole description while in Mobile viewing. This helps with our Botcopy integration. 2.6.22 Updated the version to work with the new Wordpress database, enhanced the RSS feeds and added more fields for our Chatbot CMS solution and changed how the cards display content. 2.7 Updated the tag and image edit features. Also made the plugin compatible with PHP 8.0 2.7.4 Added a new theme for the KBucket page. Added the ability to edit and replace images directly on the page Updated the payment gateway 2.7.6 Ability to add description for each channel 2.7.7 Fixed issue with camera icon 2.8.0 Fixed minor issues and crated a link back to our website 2.9.0 Added a sync feature to sync Kurator files with KBucket 2.10.0.1 Fixed bugs with the sync feature 2.11.7 Fixed issues with Sync, improved the uploading process to only update what has changed. Much faster sync process. 2.11.9 Fixed an issue with a log file that needed to be deactivated. It was slowing down access to plugin on the back end. 2.12.1 Added styles option for customizing the look & feel of the content tags and post items. Updates to image upload and sync feature. 2.12.2 Fixed a compatibility bug with Wordpress version 6.1.1 2.13.9 Added widgets to embed content from KBucket via short code anywhere on your website. 2.13.11 Added a Slider widget via short code 2.13.18 Updated the look & feel of the embed widgets and added the readme button to the posts 2.14.3 Updated php to support 8.0, and added capability to play YouTube videos directly on the page. 2.14.5 Updated PHP to support 8.3, fixed issues with theme display, changed captions for videos, added Facebook share button 3.1.3 Fixed incompatibility with Astra themes, introduced new widget theme 3.1.6 Fixed compatibility issues with JS and minor bug fixes 3.1.9 Added new option to display popups (Left, Center, Right) 4.1.1 Fixed issues with popup text formatting and image alignment 4.1.5 Fixed security issue with $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’] 4.1.6 Fixed Security issue with YouTube API 4.2.4 Applied prepare condition with sql query 4.2.5 Fixed a widgets broken issue. 4.2.6 Fixed a formatting of the posts on share popup. 5.0 Changed the yearly license to a free license and fixed the upload workflow 5.2 Improved structured data implementation by setting the correct schema @type for content items. 5.2.1 Fixed sync-by-URL failing with "File empty" on larger XML exports. The staging step now writes the downloaded file to disk under /uploads/ instead of an AES-encrypted blob in wp_options, which silently truncates on MySQL servers whose max_allowed_packet is below the encrypted file size (~33% larger than the raw XML due to base64). Removes a fixed-key/no-IV "encryption" pass that provided no real security. Backward-compatible read fallback for any sync that was mid-flight when the patch was applied. 5.2.2 Tested with WordPress 7.0. Pinned the Stable tag to an actual version (previously "trunk") so the WP.org plugin page serves a known-good build rather than whatever happens to be in trunk. 5.2.3 Fixes "YouTube video is broken or unavailable." appearing in place of videos that are perfectly fine. The share modal was refusing to output the embed unless a YouTube Data API lookup succeeded first, and installs that have not set their own API key share one bundled key whose daily quota is regularly exhausted - so a 403 from Google read to visitors as a broken video. The embed is now rendered from the video id alone and never depends on that lookup; the API is used only for the optional views/likes/channel panel. That lookup is also now made once per view instead of twice, cached for 12 hours (failures cached for 15 minutes), given a 5 second timeout, and issued through wp_remote_get so it works on hosts with allow_url_fopen disabled. The settings screen now explains how to add your own key. Also hardens the id parser against ?t=/&list=/# suffixes and tolerates videos with likes or view counts hidden. 5.2.4 Fixes the scheduled upload not running at the interval you selected. The scheduler runs on every front-end page load, and it was clearing and re-creating the cron event each time, discarding WordPress's record of when the event was next due. A site set to "Every 1 hour" would instead sync at unpredictable intervals, often 14 to 21 hours apart. The event is now created once and only rebuilt when the interval actually changes, so hourly means hourly. Also clears the schedule when auto upload is switched off or set to Manual, instead of leaving an orphaned event behind. 5.3.0 KBucket now inherits your theme instead of imposing its own look. PLEASE READ - THIS CHANGES HOW YOUR GALLERIES LOOK. Until now the plugin hard-coded its own palette and typography (Raleway, coral headings, white panels) into every page it rendered, and set much of it with !important, so the only way to restyle KBucket was to fight it with more !important. That is also why KBucket looked out of place on dark themes, and why its popup stayed white no matter what your theme did. Colours, fonts and backgrounds are now CSS custom properties. On the front end they are left undefined on purpose, so KBucket's headings, body text and panels take the font, text colour and background of whatever theme you are running. On most sites this simply makes the galleries and the article popup look like the rest of the site. On sites that were built around KBucket's old colours, the galleries will change appearance after updating. To pin the previous look, or any palette you like, set the tokens in your theme. No !important required: .kb-wrapper, #kb-wrapper, #facebox .content { --kb-font: Raleway, sans-serif; --kb-bg: #ffffff; --kb-bg-alt: #f6f6f6; --kb-fg: #333333; --kb-fg-muted: #828282; --kb-accent: #e64d47; --kb-accent-hover: #e76c67; --kb-border: #dddddd; } 48 presentational !important declarations were removed so your theme can win the cascade normally. The wp-admin screens are unaffected - the old palette is still applied there. Note that if you previously restyled KBucket with !important overrides, those still win; a rule written for the old markup may now be redundant, and an overly broad one (for example setting overflow on the popup body) can still cause problems. 5.3.1 Fix: meta descriptions and canonical links are no longer removed from non-KBucket pages. KBucket's workarounds for Yoast SEO on its own hub pages were being applied to every page of the site. Yoast's meta description and canonical link were suppressed site-wide, and WordPress's own canonical link was removed from every front-end page, which also affected sites running no SEO plugin at all. All three now apply only on KBucket pages. 5.3.2 Fixes the SEO tags KBucket writes into on its own item pages. Yoast and WordPress's canonical are deliberately removed on these pages, so KBucket's own tags are the only signals search engines and social scrapers get.

• Adds pointing at the item's clean URL, built from the site's configured home URL, with no query string and the site's own trailing slash convention.
• og:url now uses that same canonical URL. It previously used the raw request URL, hard-coded to http:// and carrying any query string, so a shared link could report a different URL than the page it came from.
• Descriptions are cleaned up: leading transcript timestamps such as "(00:04)" or "[0:05]" are stripped, whitespace is collapsed, and the text is truncated on a word boundary at about 155 characters instead of mid-word at 107.
• Each og: tag is output once. The duplicate block using prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#" has been removed.
• og:image:width and og:image:height are output only when the real dimensions are known, instead of always reporting 0, and og:image:type is derived from the file extension instead of always claiming image/png.
• twitter:card is now summary_large_image instead of photo.
• Removes the Cache-Control, Pragma and Expires meta http-equiv tags.

5.3.3 Removes AddThis. Oracle shut the service down on 31 May 2023, so every AddThis button in KBucket has been inert since then and the plugin was still loading a script from s7.addthis.com on the front end.

• The addthis_widget.js enqueue is gone, along with the bundled copy of the script, the refreshAddthis() helpers in four JavaScript files, the AddThis event handlers and the addthis_share passthrough blocks.
• The share panel's Email button is now a plain mailto: link carrying the item's title and URL, with the same icon. It previously did nothing.
• The StumbleUpon button has been removed. StumbleUpon closed in 2018. The copy-citation button now reads the item URL from its own data-url attribute rather than from the StumbleUpon badge.
• Facebook, X, LinkedIn and Pinterest are unchanged. They are ordinary links and were never AddThis-powered.

CSS class names such as addthis_toolbox_custom are retained because the share panel's layout still hangs off them. 5.3.4 Housekeeping. Deletes templates/backupds/, an old backup copy of two templates that no code loaded. It still carried the AddThis and StumbleUpon markup removed in 5.3.3, so it shipped dead third-party code to every site. No functional change. 5.3.5 Security and front-end performance fix. Please update. Security: the AJAX endpoints that set an item's thumbnail checked neither a nonce nor a capability. Because they are wp_ajax_ actions, any logged-in user — including a subscriber who self-registered — could change any item's thumbnail to any URL, and could write post meta onto any post ID by passing it as the attachment. Both endpoints now verify a nonce, require the upload_files capability, validate the item id and reject any image URL that is not http or https or that does not belong to a real attachment. The camera control is now shown only to users who hold that capability; it was previously rendered for every logged-in user. Performance: every front-end page loaded the whole WordPress media editor — Backbone, the media views, the uploader and the media players — for every visitor, including logged-out ones, so that an administrator could change a thumbnail. Those scripts are now loaded only for users who can use the control, and only on pages that actually render it. Anonymous visitors load none of it. 5.3.6 Security fix. Please update. Four leftover debug entry points ran on the init hook and answered any request, from anyone, on any URL of the site. No login was required. Three of them had no caller anywhere in the plugin and have been removed outright: two that triggered the content sync and image staging by hand, and an image-parser tester. The image tester was the serious one. It checked the file extension of the URL it was given but only printed a warning and carried on, so it would fetch a remote file and write it into the uploads directory under an attacker-chosen extension. It also made the site fetch any URL it was handed, including addresses on the host's own network. The fourth prints the auto-upload log and is reached from the Full Log link on the KBucket admin Upload tab. It now requires an administrator and a valid nonce, and returns 403 otherwise. Previously anyone could read the log by appending the parameter to any URL. The scheduled sync and the normal image import are unaffected: they run through kb_activate_auto_upload_kbucket(), which already applies the extension whitelist correctly and is unchanged. 5.4.0 Front-end performance. KBucket now loads only the assets a page actually needs, and loads them later.

• Masonry and imagesLoaded were enqueued in the head of every page on the site, whether or not it showed any KBucket content. They are now pulled in only by layouts that use them, so a carousel page no longer downloads masonry at all.
• jQuery UI (core, mouse, draggable, droppable) is no longer enqueued on the front end. Nothing there used it.
• The Font Awesome 4.7 stylesheet from maxcdn is no longer loaded. The slider arrows now use current Font Awesome class names. Sites that have no Font Awesome of their own can restore it with: add_filter( 'kbucket_load_font_awesome', '__return_true' );
• KBucket's scripts now load deferred from the footer on WordPress 6.3 and above, instead of blocking the parser.
• Pages with several widgets printed the kbObj data, an inline script and an inline stylesheet once per widget. Each is now emitted once.
• Item images carry real width and height, lazy loading below the fold, and async decoding, so they no longer shift the layout as they arrive. The ImageObject microdata reports the measured size instead of a fixed 500x500.
• Minified builds of the widget script, facebox and the stylesheet ship with the plugin and are used unless SCRIPT_DEBUG is on.

5.4.1 Fixes two faults in the widget JavaScript that stopped carousels from starting and left YouTube videos playing after the popup was closed. The widget script patched Masonry's prototype at the top of its startup routine, before deciding which layout to build. From 5.4.0 masonry is no longer loaded for carousel and slider layouts that never use it, so that line threw and everything after it was abandoned: slick never initialised, and the carousel rendered as a plain grid. Those patches now run only when Masonry is actually present. The same routine also used Underscore's _.debounce for its resize handler. Underscore was never declared as a dependency - it happened to be on the page because the plugin loaded the WordPress media editor everywhere, which 5.3.5 stopped doing. It is replaced with a small local debounce, so the code after it now runs: that includes loading the YouTube IFrame API, without which the player object was never created and closing the popup could not stop the video. 5.4.2 Hardening, no visible change. The remaining places where the widget and hub scripts assumed Masonry or imagesLoaded were on the page now check first. These libraries are only loaded for layouts that use them, so a missing one is normal rather than exceptional. An unguarded reference throws and abandons the rest of the enclosing function, which is how the carousel broke in 5.4.0. The checks mean a layout that cannot run simply does not run, instead of taking unrelated features down with it. Where imagesLoaded alone is missing, the grid now lays out immediately rather than not at all. 5.5.0 Crawl and indexing control for the URLs KBucket generates. NOT YET VERIFIED ON A RUNNING SITE - test on staging before updating a live install.

• Tag, related-tag, author and publisher listings, pages after the first, and sort/order/format/share/mtag variants now return 'noindex, follow'. They stay crawlable so search engines still reach item pages through them. Item pages and the first page of each category and collection are unchanged.
• A category and collection that both exist but do not belong together now return 404. They previously rendered, because only each half was checked, and were then 301'd to the KBucket home - which kept them indexed.
• Mixed-case KBucket URLs redirect once to the lowercase https form.
• The legacy /kc/{id}/ and /kb/{id} URLs resolve to the item's current address, or return 410 when the item no longer exists. They previously rendered a collection listing under an item URL.
• The category menu query is cached per request instead of running about a dozen times per page.

5.5.1 The 5.5.0 crawl and indexing rules now ship switched OFF. Installing this version changes nothing for visitors or search engines until you opt in with define( 'KB_SEO_ENFORCE', true ); in wp-config.php. A second constant, KB_SEO_DEBUG_TOKEN, makes the plugin report what the rules WOULD do for any URL - as a response header, with no change to the page - so the decisions can be checked against real URLs before anything takes effect. 5.6.0 Item pages now render server-side. Every KBucket item already had its own URL, /kbucket/{category}/{collection}/{slug}/, but that URL served the whole collection listing and relied on JavaScript to open the item in the modal, so search engines and AI crawlers never saw the item's full description. The URL now renders the item itself - title, author, publisher, date, the embedded video, the full description or transcript with timestamped section headings, tags, a link to the source and a short "More in this collection" list - plus VideoObject (or Article) JSON-LD including the transcript. The modal no longer auto-opens on these pages; on listings it behaves exactly as before. KBucket pages had no tag at all whenever Yoast SEO was active. They now get one, and item pages are titled after the item. Carousel and grid widget cards link to the item page instead of to YouTube, and image cards show the title and a "Read the transcript" link under the thumbnail. Clicking the thumbnail still opens the same modal. New KBucket XML sitemap: /kbucket-sitemap.xml under Yoast SEO, or /wp-sitemap-kbucket-1.xml with WordPress core sitemaps. 5.6.1 Sync by URL fixes. The downloaded file is now staged in wp-content/uploads/kbucket/ instead of inside the plugin folder, so updating or replacing the plugin mid-sync no longer deletes it. A missing staged file no longer aborts an image import that is already under way ("File empty" followed by missing images). Failed downloads now log the reason (curl error or HTTP status), use timeouts, and wait a minute before retrying instead of retrying on every page view. Only one sync runs at a time. 5.6.2 Carousel and grid image cards: the title under the thumbnail now opens the same modal as the thumbnail, and the separate "Read the transcript" link is gone. The title still links to the item page, so search engines and AI crawlers keep reaching the full description. Caption and item-page sizes are set in px, so themes that set a small root font size no longer shrink them. 5.6.3 Scheduled sync safety net. The hourly, 3-hourly and daily syncs only run when WordPress cron runs. On hosts that disable WP-Cron and drive it from a server cron job, a broken server job silently stopped every sync. Now, when the scheduled sync is more than an hour overdue, the next front-end page view runs it - after the page has been sent to the visitor on PHP-FPM and LiteSpeed - and moves the schedule forward so only one visitor triggers it. The sync log notes when this happens. 5.6.4 Performance: KBucket no longer regenerates WordPress's rewrite rules on every page load, which also wrote the rewrite_rules option to the database on every request. The rules are now regenerated once - on activation, after a plugin update, or when the KBucket page's slug changes. 5.6.5 Images and accessibility. Removed a hidden placeholder publisher logo on every card (src="/", no alt text) that also made browsers fetch the page itself as an image. The pop-up's loading image and close button, the pop-up image for non-video items, the citation button and the thumbnail-change button now have descriptive alt text or accessible names. 5.6.6 WordPress.org release of the 5.6 series. The sync download now uses the WordPress HTTP API instead of raw cURL, with the same timeouts, redirects and logged error reasons. Tightened output escaping in the item and card templates, and tested with WordPress 7.1. 5.6.7 Redirects for removed content. When a collection or item is deleted in Kurator, its KBucket URLs now 301 instead of returning a 404: an item that moved goes to its current page, a deleted item goes to its collection, and anything under a removed category or collection (items, tag pages, pagination) goes to the KBucket home collection. Disable with the kb_redirect_removed_urls filter. Widgets with nothing to show now render nothing instead of "No result found".