🚀 FEATURES

• Configurable Element Toggles: Added new toggle options inside config.yml to completely control the visibility and loading of standard colors, gradients, and patterns.
• Dynamic Content Loading: Rewrote the color engine to conditionally load elements depending on your active config settings, reducing unnecessary memory allocation.

🐛 FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS

• Automatic Config Self-Healing: Implemented a failsafe mechanism that automatically re-adds any missing keys or sections to config.yml without overriding your existing settings.
• Enhanced Performance: Optimizing configuration checks ensures smoother server startup times when parsing active formatting modules.

🚀 FEATURES

• EssentialsC Compatibility: Full formatting integration added for servers running EssentialsC.
• Event-Priority Controls: Added a new event-priority option to the configuration file, allowing you to fine-tune how ChatColors interacts with other chat-altering plugins.
• Late-Bind Config Option: Introduced a late-bind toggle to delay plugin initialization, ensuring perfect compatibility with late-loading chat management suites.
• Beta: Emojis from Nexo should work.

🐛 FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS

• Enhanced Debugging: The plugin now explicitly logs the active listener priority on startup, making it much easier to isolate chat conflicts.
• Updated FastStats for better reporting on errors.
• Documentation Overhaul: The official wiki has been fully updated! Check out the improved command details, permission tables, and config setup at https://busybeedev.net/docs/chatcolor/introduction

🚀 Features & Enhancements

• Smart Chat & Event Priority Handling:
  • Updated config.yml to recommend the MONITOR event priority, significantly improving out-of-the-box compatibility with EssentialsX.
  • Implemented automatic priority adjustment logic to seamlessly handle EssentialsChat compatibility without breaking formatting.

🛠️ Fixes & Improvements

• Internal refactoring: Introduced a new internal helper method (isFastInv) to streamline how the plugin detects custom menus.
• Enhanced Stability: Improved safety checks to prevent rare null-pointer exceptions when players interact with non-plugin inventories.
• Code Clean-up: Optimized inventory type handling, making future menu updates faster and easier to implement.

📝 Note for Server Admins

If you are upgrading from an older version, your old gui.yml and players.yml have automatically been migrated to the new /configs/ folder. You can safely delete any orphaned colors.yml or patterns.yml files in the root plugin directory!

🌟 New Features & Enhancements

• Next-Gen Server Support: Full compatibility added for Folia (multi-threaded servers) and Canvas. Expect seamless, lag-free color formatting no matter what engine your server runs on.
• Overhauled Color Systems: We’ve introduced a new custom asset system. Managing your Gradients and Patterns is now entirely separated, meaning more unique and stable chat colors are coming your way soon.

🛠️ Menu & GUI Refurbishing

• Snappier Menus: The entire Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been rewritten from scratch. Color menus will load instantly with zero click delay.
• Unified Localizations: Menus now adapt much cleaner to server-wide chat styles and translations. No more broken color tags or raw text bleeding into menu titles.

📂 Behind-the-Scenes & Cleanup

• Streamlined Storage: We packed up and moved your player data and menu layouts into a brand new, organized configs/ directory.
• Resource Cleanup: Stripped out ancient, leftover configuration files (colors.yml, patterns.yml layouts) and cleaned up unused language files to give the plugin a lighter disk footprint and faster boot times.

📊 Performance Monitoring & Analytics

• Dedicated Metrics Managers: Added BStatsManager and FastStatsManager to handle extended data tracking, giving you more robust, real-time insights into server performance and health.
• Framework Integration: Fully integrated the BStats and FastStats metrics frameworks for enhanced backend monitoring.

🌟 What's New?

• MiniMessage Tag Support: Added full support for modern MiniMessage formatting tags!
  • Note: Players will need the new chatcolor.minimessage permission node to use these tags in chat.
• Console Cleanup Feature: Added a new clean-console option in your config.yml. When enabled, it dynamically strips legacy color codes from logger outputs, keeping your server console crisp and readable.
• Smart Integration Detector: Added an IntegrationChecker that automatically scans for active DiscordSRV and LPC plugins on startup, printing helpful setup and configuration guidance straight to your console.

🛠️ Enhancements & Fixes

• Refactored Color Utilities: Built a much sturdier backend handler to bridge legacy color codes and modern MiniMessage components. Includes under-the-hood automatic conversion utilities (translateLegacyToMiniMessage) and stricter text safety checks.
• Streamlined PlaceholderAPI Integration: Completely reworked our placeholders for better stability and formatting logic.
  • Reorganized the placeholder structures for better clarity.
  • Added a dedicated %color_legacy% placeholder.
  • Improved stability when handling null or empty message inputs.
• Paper Server Optimization: Modified the ChatListener to bypass redundant last-message tracking on Paper-based servers, saving processing overhead.
• Compatibility Recommendation: Added a configuration comment recommending that server owners set their event-priority to HIGHEST for seamless operation alongside LPC or DiscordSRV.
• Stability Fix: Fixed a critical initialization bug caused by a missing structural brace in the main initialization logic, ensuring smooth reloads and clean server starts.

🎨 Group-Based Default Colors

Server admins can now define specific default chat colors based on player ranks or groups!

• Automatic Assignment: When joining or resetting your color, you'll start with the color assigned to your group.
• Priority Logic: If you belong to multiple groups, the system intelligently selects the highest priority color for you.

🖋️ Enhanced Chat Formatting (MiniMessage)

We’ve refined advanced formatting to keep the chat clean and secure:

• Smart Escaping: Players without MiniMessage permissions will no longer accidentally trigger formatting tags.
• Permission-Based Styling: High-tier formatting is now strictly tied to the chatcolor.minimessage permission.

🖥️ UI & Menu Upgrades

The Color Selection GUI has been refreshed for better navigation:

• Current Selection Highlighting: Your active color now glows and displays a "Selected" status in the menu.
• Improved Permissions: Accessing menus is smoother with updated default permission nodes.

🛠️ Internal Improvements

• Reliability: Added automated tests for consistent color and formatting application.
• Performance: Optimized configuration handling for faster in-game response times.

Version 2026.5.0

📦 Major UI Overhaul

We’ve completely stripped out the legacy GUI system and replaced it with FastInv. This transition makes all in-game menus snappier and significantly reduces the plugin's resource footprint.

• Performance Boost: Removed GUIManager and GUIListener in favor of a more streamlined event handling system.
• Menu Updates: MainMenu and ColorSelector have been fully migrated to the new framework.
• Native Compatibility: Switched to native Bukkit materials for menu items, ensuring better long-term stability.

🌈 Enhanced Formatting & MiniMessage

Advanced text styling is now easier than ever with full MiniMessage integration.

• MiniMessage Support: New serialization logic allows for modern gradients and hex styling.
• PAPI Expansion: Two new parameters added to PlaceholderAPI hooks:
  • message_mm
  • mm_
• Flexible Styling: Improved handling for complex message scenarios, giving you more control over how text looks in-game.

⚙️ Technical Refinement

• Core Update: The plugin now targets Minecraft API 1.21.
• Lightweight Build: Removed the XSeries dependency to keep the .jar size small and efficient.
• Documentation: Configuration and PlaceholderAPI guides on the website have been updated to cover these new features.

Note: This update includes internal refactoring. If you are a developer hooking into our previous GUI classes, please refer to the updated documentation regarding FastInv.

Changelog

🎨 Visuals & Color Handling

• Default Color Logic: The system now automatically applies default colors via ConfigManager to messages and display names if no custom color is selected.
• Color Engine Overhaul: Centralized all color tag application within ColorUtil for better consistency and performance.
• Legacy Cleanup: Replaced outdated serialization methods with a unified legacy serializer and added stripLegacy support to keep chat clean.
• Refined Patterns: Improved the PatternApplier to handle complex string formatting more efficiently.

⚙️ Performance & Stability

• Thread Safety: Migrated PlayerDataManager to use ConcurrentHashMap, ensuring player data remains stable and safe during multi-threaded operations.
• Message Optimization: Refactored the core message coloring logic to ensure faster processing and more consistent application.
• Advanced Placeholders: Enhanced MessageManager to support advanced placeholders, allowing for more dynamic server communication.

Changelog

• Fixes where non-legacy colors were ending with
• Updated Wiki

ChatColor Rework

• I redid the whole plugin to be more modern with current-day MC servers
• New GUI Layout
• More colors
• Wiki Website
  • Click here for website

If there are any issues, please report them. I can't fix anything if I don't know about it.

This major release brings support for Minecraft 1.21+, significant updates to the underlying architecture (Java 17), and full integration with ChatControl.

Important Notes

• 1.21+ Support: This version is fully updated for modern Minecraft versions (1.21+).
• Java 17 Required: We have upgraded to Java 17. Please ensure your server runtime is up to date.

Integrations & Features

• ChatControl Support: Added full integration with ChatControl.
  • Adjusted ChannelPostChatEvent priority to HIGHEST.
  • Refined message formatting with multi-step fallback logic.
• Shading: Configured proper dependency shading and exclusions.

Technical Improvements

• Precision: Changed rating from int to double in SpigotResource.
• Cleanup: Removed redundant comments and simplified formatting logic.
• Build: Reorganized repositories in pom.xml.

Dependencies & Ops

• PlaceholderAPI: Updated to 2.11.5.
• XSeries: Updated to 13.6.0.
• Authlib: Adjusted scope to provided.
• Documentation: Expanded README with commands, permissions, and config.
• License: Added LICENSE file.