There's this other irritating myth about b2evo that says we are "carelessly" integrating hacks.


Would you please "care" to look at the code before relaying that?


As a matter of fact, as of today, b2evo has integrated as many as 0 (yes, that reads ZERO!) hacks on top of b2 version 0.6.1.


All new features have been developed specifically for b2evo. We are actually considering including some hacks, but we haven't done it yet since we are talking with the authors about merging them in a clean way into the b2evo codebase. That means the author joining the dev team and integrating the hacks in a manner that is everything but "careless".

b2evolution is actually an evolution of the b2 blog software. Thus, a significant part of the codebase is b2 legacy. As of today, b2 legacy is a little less than 50% of the whole b2evolution code.


Every now & then I read these quite irritating remarks about some other b2 forks supposedly being so much better because their authors are planning to rewrite it from ground up someday. :crazy: Duh!


Beyond the intrinsic irony of this statement, I'd like to explain my position about this: I do not believe the usage value of software lies in its codebase!


Actually, I have experimented the rewriting path myself about 12 years ago. I had developed a piece of software working very well with lots of happy users. However, I decided that having written this software in GfA Basic wasn't good enough and rewrote it from ground up in C!


This was an unvaluable move for me to learn the C language (and a couple of other things I wanted to experiment with, like the GEM environment), but regarding the software, the new version - while significantly nicer - never reached the usage value of the previous one.


The product and the users would have benefited much more from me spending all this time adding new features to the existing codebase instead of reimplementing the same ones differently. However, as a developer, I personnaly benefited more from reimplementation.


See how precisely this translates to b2 and its forks?


Now, please give me a break with this rewriting crap! Anyone talking to you about rewriting doesn't actually care about the community but about himself. :lalala: I don't blame that - we work for free - I just don't want it turned into ridiculous "marketing" arguments.


Also, please don't get me wrong: I am not saying the legacy b2 codebase was all clean. The b2evo dev team has actually rewritten more than 50% of it in order to achieve better maintainance. But we don't advertise that. We take far more pride in providing new features on a regular basis.

Version 0.8.5.5 is now available for download.


This release is believed to be stable and will not be changed significantly until release of 0.8.6 (final).


Now is a good time for all translators to update their language files and send them in.

b2evolution 0.8.5.3-beta is available. You can download it here.

Here are some highlights for this release:

• Complete b2evo bookmarklet and sidebar;
• You can now switch to another blog in the middle of a post and preserve all your current edits (uses javascript);
• Comment spam prevention (vig-rx syndrome): blocks comments and posts containing blacklisted URLs (if you have had vig-rx posting on your blog, you know why you need this ) This also applies to referrer spam.
• New post statuses: protected, private and deprecated
• New login/registering system. You can login directly on whichever function page you want. b2edit.php, b2browse.php, b2stats.php, etc... pick the backoffice homepage you prefer.
• New template functions: user_login_link(), user_register_link(), user_logout_link(), user_admin_link(), user_profile_link()
• Passwords are now stored encrypted in the database (by Swirlee)
• Security pacthes (by Sakichan)
• Smilies are now displayed in their correct chosen order. They are not displayed when they are deactivated.
• $allow_cross_posting = 0 will disable cross posting among multiple categories.
• Stats summary.
• Fully configurable directory structure. Spread b2evo all across your site!

At b2evolution's, one of our main concerns is security. While we constantly keep securing the legacy b2 codebase while developing new versions, we felt it was appropriate to release a security upgrade for our latest stable release (0.8.2).


We are pleased to announce availablility of version 0.8.2.2.


b2evolution 0.8.2.2 is a maintainance release intended to fix security issues discovered after release of version 0.8.2.


This release includes some fixes against XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities.


All b2 users up to 0.8.2 are encouraged to upgrade their installation. These vulnerabilities most likely also affect other b2 forks but we have not checked them yet.


Vulnerabilities were also fixed in user-customizable skins, so users will need to reflect the changes to their own skins. Contributed skins on evoSkins.org may have the same vulnerabilities, but we have not investigated them yet.


Acknowledgements:

• Some XSS vulnerabilities were found and reported by office
• This release was compiled and brought to you by Sakichan.

b2evolution 0.8.3-beta1 is available. You can download it here.

Here are some highlights for this release:

• Full localization support even without gettext on PHP! (more on this below);
• XML-RPC Blogger API now supports draft publishing;
• Better UTF-8 support (by Sakichan);
• Wordcount support (by Swirlee);
• Checking PHP version on install;
• Better XHTML compliance (moving towards Strict);
• A lot of fixes for PHP notices, a few bug fixes and a lot of code refactoring;
• New front page for 'my blogs' explaining a little more what's going on there and some more changes in an attempt to remove confusion that some first time b2evo users have reported.

Okay, regarding i18n/l10n, this new release now supports localization without any hassle of setting up and enabling gettext on your PHP installation, much unlike previous release (alpha1). You can now translate b2evo seemlessly with a simple GUI tool (poedit) and enable it in b2evo as easily as you would activate any other option! Read all about it on the l10n how-to.

A few locales are already available in this release, and of course, anyone is welcome to contribute for his own language!

Does anyone know a good PHP/mySQL bug/requests-for-enhancements tracking system?


I originaly wanted to install BugZilla but this one requires Perl and its latest modules... thus it won't run on any of my hosts, which are shared hosts, including b2evolution.net


All of the PHP trackers I saw don't seem to be much more advanced than the basic SourceForge utilities...


Hum... I guess this is another one of my "I want more" fantasies... Well, you know how this is going to end up again?

You have asked for it, here it is!


By popular demand, a complete localization toolkit for b2evolution has been alpha released.


French and Japanese are already available. Dutch and Sweedish have partial translations. Brazilian Portuguese is in the works...


I count on you to produce a language files galore for the next release!

b2evolution's development efforts have been moved to sourceforge.net lately. So if you're interested in contributing, localizing or even just in the latest cutting edge releases, feel free to visit: https://sourceforge.net/projects/evocms/ .


Actually the hot spot is the CVS repository. If you're unfamiliar to CVS and sourceforge.net you'll be able to find introductory information on this page: https://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=85535 .


CVS will let you seemlessly update your b2evolution test/develoment platform with the daily new enhancements.


Right now, for example, the CVS version has full internationalization/localization support... and a few translations are already available.


Please note however that you should only use the CVS version of b2evo for testing and development purposes. You should always wait for stable (normal) releases before putting it into production.


...that is unless you know what you're doing of course

The final 0.8.2 version has been released.

Download here: http://b2evolution.net/downloads/

This version took a little time to mature because we wanted to release a very stable version before we start a new cycle of heavy modifications on the legacy b2 code. Here it is...

Below's a list of enhancements since version 0.8.0:

• 0.8.2 (Final release)

  • Security fixes
  • Fixed pingbacks in b2mail.php
  • Fixed taborder is b2edit.php

• 0.8.2-RC3

  • Fixed user reported bugs
  • Tooltips + shortcut keys on tag buttons
  • Fixed timezone handling

• 0.8.2-RC2

  • Categories ordered by name
  • Fixed time difference for new post dates
  • Fixed bug preventing from editing comment dates

• 0.8.2-RC1

  • Ability to link each post to an URL
  • Dynamic blogroll (the blogroll is just another blog on the system)
  • Supports multiple blogs per page
  • Supporting special blog #1 aggregating all blogs on the system
  • Sending email notifications with significant 'from' address
  • Checking if comment authors' email addresses are valid
  • Fixed calendar some more (hum... legacy...)
  • Clean links for monthly/weekly/daily/post-by-post archives, including from calendar. (e-g: /blog/2003/06/ )
  • Archives show number of posts per month or day
  • Ability to limit number of archive links displayed
  • Ability to display full archive directory in main display area
  • Categories show number of posts per cat
  • Not accepting HTML tags in comments by default for security reasons.
  • single_month_title(-) now displays day of month or week number when available
  • Search can now be done on all words (AND), some words (OR) or whole sentence ("")
  • Displayed stats on blogs are filtered by the current blog
  • Slightly enhanced backoffice stats view, including ability to delete spam hits from stats
  • New & improved edit screen
  • Support for textile
  • New preview
  • Better post browsing in backoffice
  • In back-office: ability to display past or future posts only
  • In back-office: ability to display draft or published posts only
  • Supports using blogs as upcomming events calendars
  • Ability to limit viewable posts between two datestamps.
  • evoSkins now include a skininfo.html file for your information.
  • Automatically set wanted permissions and owner on newly created stub files
  • plain text urls, email, aim and icq addresses will be automatically converted to links, wherever they are displayed
  • Integrated XHTML validator (by Sakichan)
  • Filtering of illegal tags
  • cleaned up RSS feeds, better compliance to RSS 2 spec
  • Using GM times in RSS feeds (the only ones Syndirella can handle)
  • fixed bug with /archives/ page
  • Better cookie management. Cookies will be shared between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com. However, if there are multiple b2evolution installs on the same site those will not share cookies (this is especially important if /~username/ subdirectories are used...)
  • Support for non permanent cookies
  • Some more code cleanup
  • Some more security fixes