KnowForge 2026.0.5 is now available.

Following the transition from InfoSphere to KnowForge and the introduction of the Feature Plugin architecture in 2026.0.4, this release continues to strengthen several key areas:

user growth, achievements, localization, book versions, content collection, reading experience, and plugin modularity.

If 2026.0.4 marked an important architectural transition for KnowForge, 2026.0.5 is where many of those foundations begin to turn into a more complete product experience.

Daily Check-in Is Here

The Growth system now supports:

Daily Check-in.

Users can check in every day to earn XP.

Check-in activity is also available as an achievement metric, allowing administrators to build achievement rules around daily participation.

Growth-related rule switches now take effect immediately as well.

Growth is no longer just a background experience engine — it is becoming part of the daily KnowForge experience.

Public Leaderboards

The Growth system now includes:

Public Leaderboards.

Administrators can configure leaderboard settings and control whether the leaderboard appears in navigation.

Together with public level badges, users now have a clearer way to see their progress across the community.

Level-up notifications are localized as well.

The Growth experience is starting to form a complete loop:

Activity → XP → Levels → Achievements → Leaderboards

A More Complete XP Ledger

As the number of XP sources grows, a single XP total is no longer enough.

2026.0.5 introduces an:

XP Trigger Catalog

along with an administrative:

XP Ledger.

Administrators can inspect where XP comes from and how balances change over time.

A user picker has also been added for manual XP adjustments.

XP lifecycle handling is now more consistent:

Achievement XP is granted at most once per user and achievement
XP can be reclaimed when an achievement is revoked
XP associated with deleted content can be removed

This keeps user progression aligned with the underlying activity that produced it.

Preset Achievements

The achievement system now supports:

Preset Achievements.

Administrators no longer need to build every achievement from scratch.

Preset definitions can provide a starting point and can then be adapted to the needs of a particular community or knowledge base.

This release also fixes achievement reward XP persistence and ensures the same achievement reward is not granted repeatedly to the same user.

Sign-up Language Becomes the User's Preferred Locale

Localization continues to become more deeply integrated into KnowForge.

The language selected during sign-up is now remembered as the user's:

Preferred Locale.

For example, a user who signs up through the Chinese interface can continue to receive localized experiences in Chinese.

This provides an important foundation for a truly multilingual user lifecycle.

Localized System Emails

System emails are now localized.

This includes:

Email verification
Password reset

The system can use the user's preferred locale when generating these messages.

Localized Notifications and Notification Emails

Localization now extends beyond the interface itself.

Both:

in-app notifications

and:

notification emails

can be localized.

KnowForge's internationalization is therefore moving beyond translated pages toward an end-to-end localized experience covering registration, product usage, notifications, and email.

Better Book Version Grouping

Book version handling receives another major improvement in 2026.0.5.

Version grouping can now be performed:

server-side.

Different versions of the same book can be grouped by the backend instead of relying entirely on frontend behavior.

A new:

Versions Dialog

also provides a clearer overview of all available editions and their latest-version markers.

Merge Editions in Explore

The Explore page now supports:

Merge Editions.

When a book has multiple versions, they can be presented as editions of the same book rather than as completely separate entries.

Instead of seeing:

v1
v2
v3

as three unrelated cards, readers can browse them as one grouped book.

This is particularly useful for technical documentation with long version histories.

Edition Grouping on Public Profiles

Merge Editions is also available on public profile book lists.

Authors who maintain many versions of the same documentation can keep their public profiles cleaner while still making historical versions accessible.

Better Version Sorting

Versions can now be sorted by:

version number.

Reader version ordering is also configurable through a dedicated popup setting.

This gives administrators more control over how historical and current versions are presented.

Improved Mobile Reading

The mobile reader receives an important usability update.

The following controls now use a dedicated mobile drawer:

Chapter table of contents
Version selector
Language selector

Instead of compressing desktop controls into a small viewport, KnowForge now provides a mobile-specific interaction model.

This significantly improves navigation for large, multilingual, and multi-version books.

Searchable Version and Language Selectors

The reusable Select component now supports:

searchable options.

Version and language selectors already use this capability.

The difference may be small for a book with only two versions, but it becomes much more useful when documentation contains many releases or multiple languages.

Move Chapters Between Books

Chapter management now includes:

Move to Book.

A chapter can be moved directly into another book using a dropdown action and searchable book picker.

This makes it much easier to reorganize knowledge structures as documentation evolves.

Select All for Chapter Operations

The chapter selection toolbar now supports:

Select All.

Combined with existing operations such as:

Bulk status updates
Bulk deletion
Copy to another book
Move to another book

this makes large-scale chapter management significantly more efficient.

Reusable Book Search Selector

2026.0.5 introduces a reusable:

BookSearchSelect

component.

It is already used in workflows such as:

Copying content to another book
Chapter link configuration
Book selection

Administrators no longer need to search through long, static dropdown menus when many books exist.

Configurable Default Status for Top-level Chapters

Books can now define the:

default status for new top-level chapters.

The Writer follows the same setting.

Collected content also respects the book's default chapter status.

This supports workflows ranging from:

draft first, review before publishing

to:

publish collected content immediately.

Content Collection Continues to Improve

Content Collect receives another set of improvements in this release, particularly for documentation sites.

Better Docusaurus Extraction

KnowForge now handles:

Docusaurus

documentation more accurately.

Improvements include:

Better page content extraction
Preserving code blocks
Removing additional permalink anchors
Cleaner document conversion

This makes documentation migration and collection more reliable for developer-focused sites.

Rewrite External Links to Internal Reader Links

One particularly useful improvement is automatic link rewriting.

When Page A links to Page B and both pages have been collected into KnowForge, the original external link can now be rewritten as an:

internal KnowForge reader link.

Collected books therefore retain more of the relationships between the original documents instead of becoming disconnected copies of individual pages.

More Complete Crawl History

Previously, crawl history primarily focused on larger crawl jobs.

Now:

single-page web collection

is recorded in crawl history as well.

Administrators can therefore review both:

Single-page collection
Whole-site crawling

from the same history system.

Several crawl-history status and slug deduplication issues have also been fixed.

Improved Slug Deduplication

When pages with identical names appear under different sections, slug conflicts now prefer:

ancestor slug prefixes

instead of simple numeric suffixes.

Rather than ending up with paths such as:

install-2

KnowForge can produce URLs that better reflect the original document hierarchy.

Reader Improvements

The reader receives several smaller but useful improvements:

Book titles are clickable
Watermarks support tiled rendering
Disabled comments are fully hidden
Previous/next navigation supports external-link chapters
Mobile TOC, versions, and languages use a drawer

Together, these changes improve the experience of reading more complex books.

More Flexible OAuth Providers

OAuth providers can now use:

custom icons.

Administrators can also choose how authentication options are displayed:

Button
Icon

OAuth callback errors now show the actual provider name as well, making failures easier for users and administrators to understand.

Configurable Rate Limits

KnowForge now includes:

configurable rate limits.

Administrators can manage rate-limiting behavior from the admin interface.

This provides additional flexibility for public deployments, community instances, and API-heavy environments.

Better Tag Suggestions

When tagging a book, KnowForge can now suggest existing tags from the backend.

This helps reduce duplicate variations such as:

Java

java

and:

JAVA.

At the architectural level, book-tag integration is also moving into the Tags plugin through core extension points, further reducing coupling between tags and the core application.

Plugin Architecture Continues to Expand

A major part of 2026.0.5 is not necessarily visible in the UI.

More functionality has been moved out of the core application and into dedicated plugins.

This includes:

PDF Export
Growth
Achievements
Content Collect

Their engines, endpoints, workers, models, jobs, routes, and tests are increasingly owned by the respective plugin packages.

This means KnowForge plugins are becoming more than simple feature toggles.

They are increasingly isolated at the:

code, business logic, data model, and runtime levels.

English README by Default

Project documentation has also been reorganized.

README.md

is now English by default.

Chinese documentation is available in:

README_zh.md.

This makes the project more accessible internationally while preserving complete Chinese documentation.

Stronger SEO Privacy Boundaries

robots.txt now explicitly disallows all private pages.

Public content remains discoverable.

Private content stays private.

Admin UI Improvements

Admin settings layouts have been adjusted to reduce large empty areas on wide displays.

The Growth administration interface is also now separated into:

Levels
Rules

tabs.

As KnowForge continues to gain configuration options, the admin experience will keep moving toward clearer, more focused sections.

From Adding Features to Building a System

At first glance, 2026.0.5 includes many independent features:

daily check-ins, leaderboards, XP ledgers, preset achievements, localized email, edition grouping, mobile drawers, rate limits, and more.

But several broader directions are becoming clear.

A More Complete Growth System

Check-ins, XP, levels, achievements, and leaderboards are becoming one connected progression model.

End-to-End Localization

Localization now extends beyond UI strings into registration preferences, notifications, and system emails.

Better Knowledge Organization

Edition grouping, chapter movement, default chapter status, internal links, and version sorting make complex knowledge bases easier to maintain.

Deeper Plugin Modularity

More capabilities are being removed from the core and moved into truly independent Feature Plugins.

Better Support for Large Documentation Sets

Whole-site collection, Docusaurus support, internal-link rewriting, mobile navigation, and edition grouping all improve KnowForge for large documentation projects.

KnowForge 2026.0.5

From InfoSphere to KnowForge, our goal has never been to build just another documentation system.

KnowForge is gradually becoming a platform for the complete lifecycle of knowledge:

collecting, creating, organizing, publishing, reading, and preserving it.

2026.0.5 is another step in that direction.