Excellent fork of a very good plugin

No, it is not a stolen plugin… it is a plugin fork which is made plainly clear by the credits given to the original author. You can learn more about a forking a plugin by reading this post by one of the wp.org plugin directory maintainers here:

Forks and Copies

This fork would not have been permitted in the plugin directory if it were merely a copy…

Additionally, the original plugin author is very aware of this fork as I let him know about it so he could take and use any of the many changes I’ve made:

https://github.com/zedzedzed/table-of-contents-plus/issues/110

What is different about this plugin… to start with the similarities are only skin deep…

• The entire code based has been refactored for better code separation of concern to allow better maintainability and extendability.
• The shortcodes features has been ripped out in favor of using post meta boxes and post meta for individual post settings making it easier to use since there is an interface with instructions.
• The sitemap and category shortcodes have also been ripped out to refocus the plugin feature set to be only for creating a table of contents.
• The widget has been completely redone with new features. The widget can be affixed/pinned to the page. The widget highlights the currently visible sections to provide the user with visual feedback of where they are on the page. The widget is also now multi instance compatible too.
• Widget will now generate table of contents using output from third party shortcodes.
• Much better use of the WordPress Settings API.
• Minified CSS and JS files are used by default instead of unminified version being served.
• Multiple counter styles to choose from; decimal, numeric, roman and none.
• The visibility toggle completely redone to be an HiDPI compatible (Retina) font-icon rather than text strings.
• Bug fixes in regards to partial string matching for excluded headers so using brackets and periods in the header name will not break
• Bug fixes in displaying the headers in the table of contents which might contain HTML tags.
• Update all third party libraries.
• Use wpColorPicker instead of farbtastic for better visual consistency with the core WP admin.
• Add substantial amounts of phpDoc for developers.
• Add many hooks to permit third party integrations.

This is just what I can think of off the top of my head. So, as you see, the only similarities are on the surface.

Further differentiation will come when I implement fragment caching to vastly improved page load performance. And add support for the <!--nextpage--> tag. But as it stands now, the plugins are very, very different architecturally.