What's new
Every change you can notice, with the date it happened — including the quiet failures that took a while to find.
Toombler is built and maintained by one person, in the open. This page lists what changed and when — every change a user can notice, in plain terms. It is not a list of every commit; it is the ones that matter to someone using the thing.
Most entries are fixes rather than features, and that is on purpose. A flipbook viewer is the kind of software where the interesting failures are quiet ones: a book that renders but cuts off a page, a button that exists but never fires, a setting that saves but is ignored. Nothing errors, nobody reports it, and it can sit there for months. Several entries below are exactly that.
Found something behaving oddly? Tell us — a report of a quiet failure is worth more than a feature request.
- The site’s fixed pages are now built ahead of time and served as plain files, so they load straight from Cloudflare’s cache without any code running. A flipbook opens with one request to us instead of three. Reading depth (how far readers get) is no longer measured; the view count per flipbook stays.
- The Portuguese version of the site, the dashboard, the PDF tools and the manual is now in Brazilian Portuguese.
- The homepage, dashboard, manual, guides and legal pages now name Google Docs and Google Slides wherever they list the sources, in all 13 languages.
- PDF rendering updated to pdf.js 6.4.299: better protection against malformed PDFs that try to make the browser hang (text fields, character maps, fonts), and sharper text selection.
- Read-aloud in Chrome or Edge on a Mac: those browsers sometimes ignore the chosen voice and speak with the Mac’s system voice. The reader now says so once, with two ways out: Safari, or a system voice in the book’s language.
- PDF tools now has its own button in the top bar, and the four tools are available in all 13 languages of the site — the text, the buttons and every message, with the same promise everywhere: your file never leaves your computer.
- Free PDF tools that run entirely in your browser — your file never leaves your computer: compress, merge, split (with rotate and delete) and add bookmarks. Find them under Tools.
- A bookshelf: put several flipbooks in one embed. Pick them in the dashboard and copy one iframe; visitors open each book without leaving your site.
- Google Docs and Google Slides work as a source. Paste the link of a document shared with “anyone with the link” and the flipbook follows every edit — no exporting to PDF any more.
- A publication date: set it in the dashboard and nobody sees the content before that day; the reader shows when it will appear.
- A button of your own on the back page — “Book a table”, “Order the catalogue” — with your own link, under the flipbook’s last page.
- In the reader: copy a link to the exact page you are on, a table of contents built from the headings when the PDF has no bookmarks, and an optional read-aloud button that uses your device’s own voices.
- A print-ready QR card in the dashboard: an A6 table card or an A4 sheet of eight stickers, drawn as vectors so it stays sharp at any size.
- Settings in the dashboard now save themselves the moment you change them.
- A security review of the whole codebase, with every finding fixed and a test that fails if it comes back. The most important: a wildcard in the lookup of share links let an outsider list unlisted flipbooks; a PIN-protected flipbook that was also in the gallery showed its text version and cover to everyone; and the counters behind the statistics could be driven from a script. All three are closed.
- A flipbook that has expired, been deleted or whose sharing was switched off is now gone from the edge cache at once, instead of staying readable for up to a day.
- The automatic clean-up of expired and unused flipbooks, which the privacy policy has promised since September, now actually runs every night. Failed PIN attempts are kept under a hashed key instead of the visitor’s address, and are cleared after fifteen minutes.
- The oEmbed endpoint — what WordPress and Ghost use when you paste a flipbook link — had been failing since 20 September because of a one-letter typo. Fixed, and the nightly check now reports what went wrong instead of only that it did.
- In the dashboard, a new button under the gallery toggle clears the saved cover image and text version of a flipbook, so you are never stuck with what the first reader’s browser stored.
- No page loads a script from a third-party CDN any more: Chart.js and the QR-code generator are served from toombler.com itself. The QR code is now drawn in your browser, so the link to your flipbook no longer goes to an outside service.
- The inside cover of every flipbook now carries a short “Made with Toombler” page instead of an advertisement. In nineteen days the ad network earned less than a cent, and it was the only outside script inside the flipbook; the flipbook now loads nothing from anyone else.
- Toombler is now paid for by Google AdSense on its own guide pages — never inside a flipbook, an embed or the public flipbook page. The privacy policy and the terms say so (both now v4), as do the manual, the comparison pages and the FAQ.
- Flipbooks made by other people are no longer handed to search engines. A public flipbook page became indexable as soon as enough text could be read out of the PDF, which meant this site was asking Google to index a document we did not write and cannot vouch for, at our address. Public still means public: the page works, it can be shared, and it shows up in the gallery. We simply do not submit it any more.
- The manual has a flipbook edition, and that page now says something. It used to be a reader with a paragraph of boilerplate around it — 150 words, most of them the same on every flipbook page. It now explains what you are looking at, what to try in the reader, and what is deliberately not happening while you read.
- The Product Hunt and Open-Launch badges are gone from the footer. The Open-Launch one was an image fetched from their server on every page view — including on the privacy page itself — with a unique project id in the address, so your visit to this site was countable by someone else. That is the same thing we just removed twice over, so it goes too.
- Google Analytics and the Ahrefs measurement script have been removed from every page. Both counted visits that our hosting already counts — without cookies, and without a request to anyone else — so the only thing they added was a third party watching along. Nothing replaced them: what remains is that cookieless count, plus our own counters for how often a flipbook is opened and how far readers get.
- The privacy policy now describes what actually happens on two points where it promised more than the code does: there is no account to keep or close, and nobody has to be contacted to have something removed. What exists is a row per flipbook, which you delete yourself — and which deletes itself after twelve months unopened.
- The public flipbook page no longer loads a typeface from Google. It used the same font as everything else in practice, so the only thing that request added was your IP address arriving at Google on every visit. Nothing about how the page looks has changed.
- A flipbook now needs a title. The field said “Title (optional)” and quietly filled in “Untitled Flipbook” when it was left empty, which is exactly what ended up in the gallery, in browser tabs and in every shared link. Existing flipbooks keep whatever they are called.
- To save you typing it, the name of the PDF is offered as a suggestion once the link checks out — without the .pdf. It only fills an empty field, and you can type straight over it. Names like “document” or “download (3)” are skipped, because those are no better than no title at all.
- The plugin page now documents what the plugin actually does: the collapsible text version, how long it caches, what it adds to your site and what it leaves behind when you remove it.
- Tapping the side of a page turns it. On a touch screen only swiping worked before — a short tap did nothing at all, on any device, since the reader was first built.
- Guides for making a flipbook in German and Dutch, written for those readers rather than translated from the English one.
- The gallery explains what it is: why the list is short, what happens when you open an entry, and how to get your own flipbook listed.
- Search engines are now told when a page changed. They were not, which is why updated guides kept sitting in search results in their old form.
- The download button names the file after your flipbook instead of a random identifier.
- Links from a flipbook back to the site are tagged, so we can see which shared books actually bring readers.
- Search inside a document, as a setting you switch on per flipbook.
- The page text is now a real text layer over each page: selectable, copyable, and readable by a screen reader.
- The page-turn buttons sit against the book instead of floating, and move aside when the page counter is off.
- PDF rendering updated to pdf.js 6.3.289, which closes a security issue (CVE-2026-16633).
- A PIN is now checked on the server. Before, the check happened in the browser, which is the wrong place for a lock.
- The advertisement on the inside cover is marked as one and no longer sits beside a closed cover.
- The language switcher works for people who had already chosen a language once.
- Six more interface languages: Italian, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, Japanese and Chinese — thirteen in total.
- The user manual is available in all thirteen.
- Statistics keep daily totals indefinitely, split by sign-in method and source, with a period selector.
- If your storage provider refuses a request, the viewer falls back to a copy kept for a week instead of failing.
- WordPress plugin 1.2.1, tested up to WordPress 7.1. Every plugin release is listed separately further down this page.
- Every use-case page now carries a live demo flipbook instead of a screenshot.
- PDF rendering moved to a local copy of pdf.js, so the reader no longer depends on an outside CDN being up.
- Ten long-form guides, and a Guides hub to find them.
- A flipbook shared on social media shows its own cover as the preview image.
- Pasting a bare file ID or a whole share message works; the link no longer has to be exactly right.
- Pinch to zoom, drag to pan and double-tap to zoom in the reader and in embeds.
- Borderless embeds, and a live preview of the embed in the settings panel.
WordPress plugin releases
The WordPress plugin is the one part of Toombler that lives on your own site, so it is the one part you update yourself. These are its releases, newest first, exactly as they appear in the plugin's own readme. They carry no dates: the plugin was kept outside this repository until September 2026, and a date we cannot verify is worse than none.
Version 1.4.0
- New: a read-aloud button for the reader (`speak="1"`, or the toggle in the block). It uses the voices already on the reader's device; no text leaves the browser.
- New: your own button on the flipbook's back page, such as "Book a table" with your link (`bbtext` and `bburl`, or the "Back page button" panel in the block). Only https, mailto and tel links are accepted.
- Google Docs and Google Slides now work as a source on the Toombler side; the plugin needs nothing for that, but the readme says so.
- The block editor no longer calls the inside-cover page an advertisement.
Version 1.3.2
- Fixed: the plugin said "Google Drive" in four places while Toombler has supported Dropbox and OneDrive for months. The block editor labelled the field "Google Drive File ID", so anyone using another cloud had every reason to think this plugin was not for them. Nothing about how it works has changed — only what it says about itself.
Version 1.3.1
- Fixed: the `brand` and `rtl` attributes were generated by the Toombler dashboard but not accepted by the plugin, so WordPress silently dropped them. A right-to-left book (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian) turned pages the wrong way, and a disabled "Powered by Toombler" badge reappeared. Both now work, and both are available as toggles in the block editor.
Version 1.3.0
- New: optional search box inside the flipbook. Enable it with the `search="1"` shortcode attribute or the "Search box" toggle in the block, and readers get a search field that finds text anywhere in the document and jumps to the page, with the match highlighted.
- Flipbook pages now carry an invisible text layer, so the text can be selected, copied and read by screen readers instead of being just an image.
- Both features run entirely in the reader's browser — no text is uploaded or stored.
- Scanned documents without a text layer are unaffected: the search box will simply find nothing.
Version 1.2.1
- Tested and confirmed compatible with WordPress 7.1.
- Readme and documentation housekeeping. No functional changes.
Version 1.2.0
- New: optional accessible text version. Enable it with the `text="1"` shortcode attribute or the "Show accessible text version" toggle in the block, and the plugin renders your flipbook's text as a collapsible block below the viewer — improving screen-reader access and search-engine indexing of your content on your own site.
- The text is fetched once from the Toombler API and cached locally (transient) for performance.
Version 1.1.1
- Removed the "Powered by Toombler" badge toggle from the plugin to comply with the WordPress.org plugin guidelines (no attribution links in plugin output).
Version 1.1.0
- Tested and confirmed compatible with WordPress 7.0.
- Flipbooks now load faster and show an instant cover preview while the document loads (delivered automatically through the Toombler viewer).
- Housekeeping and readme updates.
Version 1.0.3
- Full settings parity with the Toombler embed: every viewer option is now available via shortcode and the Gutenberg block.
- New: choose between two page-flip sounds (`flipsound`), and toggle the hard cover (`hardcover`).
- Added shortcode parameters: counter, flipsound, autoplay, autospeed, start, bookmark, zoom, drag, thumbs, duration, spine, borderless, adreplace, closed, hardcover, corners, mscroll.
- Block editor sidebar now exposes all viewer settings.
Version 1.0.2
- Updated block icon to the Toombler page-stack mark.
Version 1.0.1
- New Toombler brand icon (open book with fanned pages) for the Gutenberg block.
- Refreshed editor placeholder styling to match Toombler's branding.
Version 1.0.0
- Initial release — shortcode and Gutenberg block.
How updates reach you
There is nothing to install and nothing to update. The reader runs from our servers, so the next time anyone opens one of your flipbooks they get the current version, including the fixes above. Your embed code does not change and your links keep working.
The one exception is the WordPress plugin, which lives on your own site and updates like any other plugin, through the WordPress plugin screen.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to update anything?
No. The reader runs from our servers, so the next time someone opens one of your flipbooks they get the current version. Your embed code and your links stay exactly as they are. The only thing you update yourself is the WordPress plugin, through the usual WordPress plugin screen.
Will an update break an existing flipbook?
It should not, and that is enforced rather than hoped for: the test suite keeps embed codes and file identifiers from earlier versions working, including the older identifier format from before 2026. If something does break, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
Is every change listed here?
No — only the ones you can notice. Internal work, refactoring and test coverage are left out, otherwise this page would be a commit log rather than something you can read. If a change affects a button, a limit, a setting or a result, it belongs here.
Why are most entries fixes rather than features?
Because a flipbook viewer is the kind of software where the interesting failures are silent ones: a page that renders but is cut off, a tap that does nothing, a setting that saves but is ignored. Nothing errors and nobody reports it, so finding them is most of the work.
How do I report something that looks wrong?
Through the contact page. A description of what you did, what you expected and what happened instead is enough; a link to the flipbook helps a lot.