This is a quick update on the status of the development/releases.

A few unexpected events have delayed the release of the 3.x stable version but we are currently working on finalizing it.

We expect to release 3.x stable in the next couple of weeks.

If you are running 3.2-beta, the upgrade procedure will be very light.

Follow b2evolution on twitter for real time updates.

Also, if you have a translation/localization ready for 3.x, please let me know

We have two new releases today:

2.4.7-stable “Tilman”

This release contains several bug fixes tracked down and applied mostly by Tilman (Tblue) with the help of Walter (waltercruz). Also we missed Tilman’s birthday but I believe we’re still close ;)

If you’re already running 2.4.6, there is a quick upgrade available. (For previous b2evolution versions, use the regular upgrade procedure.)

Download here »

Quick list of fixes:

• Bugfix: Old chapter URL titles containing underscores work again (fplanque)
• CSS bugfixes (yabs)
• Bugfix: Set post type to “Post” when creating a post using the “Simple” form (tblue)
• Bugfix: Don’t display the user’s full name if it isn’t set when deleting users (tblue)
• Fixed “Duplicate entry” SQL error after renaming plugin events (sam2kb)
• Display submit button on category widget when requested (tblue)
• Validate w and m URL params (tblue)
• tempskin param: Do not allow the use of not installed skins (tblue)
• Fix bug in Photoblog skin (media index) (tblue)
• Completed German translation (tblue)
• Localization system fixes (tblue)
• Bugfix: The plugin info screen now shows correct info for installed plugins (tblue)
• Additional bug fixes (walter)

3.2.0-beta “Woodland Hills”

In this release, we added many new features over 3.1.0 so we called it a “beta” again… but it’s getting pretty close to our goals for version 3… (planning for this dates back to when I was living in Woodland Hills ;)

We are running several blogs on 3.2 in production already – including b2evolution.net.

Download here »

Read more »

This is just a quick update to let you know that the next release will be version 3.2.0-beta

It will include bug fixes and improvements on version 3.1 but also some new features. We expect to release 3.2 before the end of the month.

Many people have asked when a stable version of 3.x would come out. At this time, the target is still "before the summer" (that is, June 21 st).

In other news, we noticed the W3C was now running 17 blogs on b2evolution. Nice!

b2evolution 3.1.0-beta has just been released. (I just called it “Tilqi” because it’s his birthday today – if you don’t know him, tilqicom is very active & helpful in the forums)

Download here »

This is a pretty exciting release as it includes many visual features among which:

• A much anticipated integrated WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE);
• An enhanced menu bar;
• A cleaned up drag’n'drop interface for moving widgets around;
• A much nicer datepicker.

Special thanks to Tilman, Daniel, Walter & Alex for all the debugging they did on top of the previous alpha release. Thank you to everyone who has tested and reported bugs in the forums.

Note: b2evolution 2.x skins should work in 3.x without modification. However in order to use all new 3.x features you may need to add some code.

Here is a quick rundown of new features in 3.1.0 (be sure to also check out the features of 3.0.0 if you haven’t done so yet)

b2evolution 3.1.0-beta “Tilqi”

• UI:
  
  • Integrated WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) (blueyed,fplanque)
  • New evobar menu: extended, extensible by plugins and a little animation too (fplanque)
  • Integrated jQuery UI datepicker (Afwas)
• Blog features:
  
  • Intro posts: added typecolumn in browse screen and made more silent regarding noindex, sitemaps & notifications.
  • The default category for new posts can now be chosen explicitely for each blog.
  • Categories can now be reordered manually (instead of alphabetical display). This is a system wide general setting.
  • Automatic generation of excepts (fplanque)
  • Basic version history of post edits (click on the little clock icon in the post lists) (fplanque)
• Widgets:
  
  
  • Cleaned up AJAX drag & drop interface (fplanque)
  • Universal Item List widget now combines the functionality of Post List, Page List, Link List, Link Blog… + combinations. Pretty powerful (fplanque)
  • Related posts widget (fplanque)
  • Extended widget possibilities (fplanque,yabba,tblue)
  • Widgets can be enabled/disabled. (Tblue)
  • Sidebar Links item type + widget now allow to display a linkroll without using a separate blog. (walter,fplanque
• Other:
  
  
  • Optimized speed/reduced # of queries (blueyed)
  • Cleaner URLs when browsing through multiple pages. (fplanque)
  • Fixed locale selection during install.
  • Do not display locale selector on edit screen if only one locale is available.
• Bugfixes. Many! (Tblue,blueyed,walter)

You probably already know that you can get more frequent updates on the development of new versions by following b2evolution on twitter... (If you don't know about twitter yet, it's a social network that let's you follow updates about your friends and other stuff you care about... like b2evolution.)

b2evolution is now also on Facebook. Please show your support and become a Fan of the new b2evolution page on Facebook. Fans will receive exclusive sneak peeks to upcoming features. (A neat side benefit of joining us on Facebook, is that you will actually see the true faces of many of the members on the forums! )

And last but not least, Scott from the b2evolution team has applied for the "Best Job in the World" where Tourism Queensland is looking to hire someone to be "caretaker" of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. There are many applicants, but only one successful candidate will get to live on Hamilton Island for six-months and spend his time exploring the other Great Barrier Reef Islands. The catch: he will report back on his adventures (via weekly blog updates, photo diaries and video snippets).

And it gets better, Scott actually stands a good chance of making it into the final stages of selection and we all hope to see him blogging from the islands soon... using b2evolution of course!

So, please go vote for Scott and give him 5 stars now! (did you know you can actually vote once a day?)

Just in case you wonder what's going on behind the scene, we packaged a quick 3.0.0-alpha sneak peek release

Download here »

We do not recommend to run this on production (although some of us do). This is ALPHA software, which means nothing you see is final and a lot of features are untested (not to mention, there a known bugs...)

If you are interested, it's a nice package to install locally in order to get an idea of some of the new features we've been implementing.

This is nowhere near final (there are already new features added to CVS since this release) but here's an quick rundown of what's changed so far:

3.0.0-alpha

• General features
  
  • User avatar support
  • User fields support: MSN/Live IM, Yahoo IM, AOL AIM, ICQ ID, Skype, Main phone, Cell phone, Office phone' Home phone, Office FAX, Home FAX, Website, Blog, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, Role, Organization, Division, VAT ID, Main address, Home address... (what else?
  • Featured posts let you have the latest featured post on top of others with special formatting. (requires a skin that implements get_featured_Item() )
  • Intro posts let you content specific have intros on top of your category and tag pages. Same for the home page. (requires a skin that implements get_featured_Item() )
• Photoblogging
  
  • It is now possible to select multiple images in the file manager and either
    
    • create multiple posts (1 per image)
    • or create 1 post with all images attached
  • Photo posts will be in draft status by default, allowing you to add titles and comments before publishing.
  • Photo index widget to show your latest photos in a blog sidebar.
  • Support of "cropped" thumbnails (the image will always fill the whole thumbnail area)
  • Thumbnail sizes can be configured in /conf/_advanced.php
• Enhanced stats
  & analytics
  
  • Complete hit log view
  • Faster queries
  • Goal tracking (TODO finish)
  • Keyphrase analytics
• Performance
  
  • Page level caching. Can be enabled for each blog indivually (Advanced blog settings
• Admin interface
  
  • Yabbarriffic drag & drop widget reordering (you can even move a widget from one container to another)
  • File manager now supports a shared directory (/media/shared/global/)
  • Enhanced dashboard.
  • Added usability shortcuts.
  • Improved iPhone compatibility.
• Post editing
  
  • Added "Save & edit" button
  • Added 1 click "Publish NOW !" button
  • Enhanced handling of attached images & files.
  • Posts can be explicitely ordered by the use of the order field. This can be set on each post in expert edit mode (in the right column).
  • Post can now have custom fields. Custom fields can be defined for each blog under "Blog Settings > Features".
  • The issue date can now be set to an explicit date or just to "now" in which case it will be updated without the need to explicitely type in the current date/time.
  • Urltitles (slugs) can now be up to 200 chars long.
  • You can now specify a different title to be displayed in the <title> tag than the regular title of your post
• Logging and stats
  
  • Session and Hit logging as well as debug info display are now done systematically at PHP shutdown. Therefore calls to $Hit->log() and debug_info() are no longer needed within skins. (It doesn't hurt to let them there either.)
  • Keyphrase logging
• More SEO settings:
  
  • Customizable 404 pages
  • Customizable 404 responses (200, 301, 302, 303, 404 and 410 !)
  • Description and keywords META tags are inserted into the main page only to avoid duplicate content
• Enhanced blog by email (tilman)
• Reworked demo blog created at install
• Blog properties
  
  • Longer blog name (up to 255 chars)
  • Autogeneration of category/chapter slugs(url names)
• Comments
  
  • Whoever has permission to *edit* comments will now have extended permissions on *new* comments too, including posting <a> tags.
• Bug fixes

b2evolution 2.4.6 "New year" has been released by popular demand!! (yes you twitter peeps got me down to it )

Download Here »

This release is more a collection of small fixes and improvements that could easily be backported from the 3.0 branch (alpha coming soon) without requiring a database upgrade.

Therefore, if you are already running 2.4.5, this will be a 30 second "replace a couple of files" upgrade. See Quick upgrade patches »

Update: as always, HostMonster & BlueHost have been extremely reactive and they already offer automated install & upgrade of b2evo 2.4.6 through their simplescripts installer.

2.4.6-stable

• Additional antispam measures
• External Feeds/Feedburner support (walter, fplanque)
• Fixed trackback (tblue)
• Fixed multiple category parent/child recursion issues. It should no longer be possible to "lose" categories by creating loops. (fplanque)
• Extended DTD for <embed> tag
• Additional bug fixes (yabs, blueyed, tblue, walter, fplanque...)

If you still haven't upgraded to b2evolution 2.4.5, you can now do it with even less clicks than before if you have installed b2evolution with Fantastico Deluxe.

Fantastico now ships b2evolution 2.4.5 as part of their installer.

Thank you to the sharp folks at SuperGreen Hosting for pointing this out to us.

If your webhost doesn't have the latest Fantastico, feel free to ask them to upgrade. It should be very easy for them.

So I guess now that Fantastico has upgraded we can release version 2.4.6? Just kidding! We are working on version 3.0. Stay tuned!

Listen to it here: François Planque of b2evolution - Interview by Des Walsh on the Social Media Show.

This was recorded via Skype a couple days ago, with Des being in Australia and me being in California. The sound quality turned out to be pretty good... but that doesn't help that I still hate listening to myself... (Is that my real voice??)

OK, it's already almost a week since I've been to Blog World Expo... and I thought I should post a quick recap...

First off, Blog World is a fun place to hang out at! I didn't take any pictures of the conference, the expo halls and the crowds but you can still check out this tweetup dinner video to get an idea of what some of us looked like on the last evening.

I have to say I'm very impressed by how twitter allows people to meet up at random places. That's how that after hours dinner took place after the end of the conference.

By the way, if you are on twitter, you might want to follow http://twitter.com/b2evolution

That said, the most interesting part for me was meeting with bloggers and getting feedback on the software!

Even if I wish I had met more b2evolution bloggers, I got a lot of feedback and interesting ideas! There is nothing like real people explaining what they really want to do with their blogs! Believe it or not, a live discussion makes your point way better than a cryptic forum post!

One feature I've worked on since I came back is page level caching. This is a direct result from talking with Nelson Guirado about performance issues on his host. While we cannot control the server load and speed of the hosting companies, one thing we can do is try to make b2evolution use less server resources per page, thus operate faster.

Page level caching goes a long way in that direction. Basically it caches your blog pages so that subsequent results will be served much faster and with significantly less queries to the database. This also drastically cuts down on the load time for your visitors. (You need to not be logged in to experience the cache effect).

Page caching is already available in CVS. It's also activated on b2evlution.net, including this blog you are reading right now. If you see anything odd, by all means, let me know.

For more 3.0 features, stay tuned, either here or on twitter!