If you're reading this in your RSS reader, check out our new site design.

Otherwise, you have probably noticed already!

Please let us know how it works for you...

The subsites (skins, plugins, manual, forums, demo...) will be updated to follow the main design shortly. In the meantime, please bear with a little inconsistency

You may also have noticed the new b2evolution logo... just to give you a foretaste of 2.0

Happy New Year to everyone!

And if you're a b2evolution blogger, I foresee 2007 will be a great year for you!

From where I stand, I see an upcoming 2.0 release this year, featuring many of the most requested features, plus a couple more that you may not have expected.

Before that, we'll also release a stable 1.9.x version, which should feature a new selection of default plugins.

And right now, you may have noticed, we have cleaned up the website a little bit. Most obviously, the home page now has the news in a prominent place. That's not just a design decision; that's also because we expect more news this year than ever before... Stay tuned!

In the meantime, the whole evoteam wishes you the best blogging year you can possibly make!

-François.

I am sorry to report that our forums server (the one in New Zealand) crashed... and crashed pretty bad... most recent backups included

The forums are back online but, unfortunately, the most recent backup we could restore is from Dec 18. While we've had it worse in the past, we still hope to do better in the future. Anyway, if you asked for help recently and you can't find your post, don't get mad, your post has *not* been deleted... it unfortunately got lost. Please post again.

On a related note, you may have noticed that the main b2evolution.net site (that one hosted in the US) has suffered some (a little bit too frequent) outages during the last weeks/months. In an attempt to improve this, we have just moved the site to a new server. (Hopefully it gets better... if you notice a difference, please let us know...)

If you can read this, you are reading off the new server!

If you're not reading this in an aggregator you have probably already noticed the new site layout!

It is a work in progress. The navigation needs to be redone and many pages still have the old layout. But someone once said "release early, release often". And that site has definitely been lacking some new releases for some time...

Feel free to comment...

PS: the site now runs on b2evolution version 1.9

So... this site is now running on b2evolution version 1.8 ...

... which will show us if this version is ready for production or not...

One thing's for sure though: it will trap all the spam! And all comments will be moderated from now on... Sorry about this, but once you let one comment spam through it gets indexed within the day and then attracts a bazillion other spammers.

Please report any issues not working on the upgraded site.

-François.

Thanks to Ed (Head of Central Antispam) and Ryan (New Host), we now have a brand new host for our central antispam list. It's a separate host from the main site, so we might get better performance on the one or the other if not both

Because it's a new server, you will need to do some small modifications to your b2evo installation if you want to take advantage of it.

Pick your easiest solution:

Solution 1

You're not in a hurry: just wait for the next 0.9.2 [Update: available now] or 1.8-alpha release and you'll be fine.

Solution 2

You care a lot about antispam, but not so much about pinging b2evo when you publish a new post.

Just go into your /conf/_advanced.php file, and at the end of the file replace this line:

$evonetsrv_host = 'b2evolution.net';

with this line:

$evonetsrv_host = 'antispam.b2evolution.net';

Solution 3

You're running version 0.9.1 and you want it all:

Go the end of your /conf/_advanced.php file, and add the following lines:

$antispamsrv_host = 'antispam.b2evolution.net';
$antispamsrv_port = 80;
$antispamsrv_uri = '/evonetsrv/xmlrpc.php';

Note the $antispamsrv prefix. It is different from the existing $evonetsrv lines.

Download this file and use it to replace your existing /b2evocore/_functions_antispam.php file. (If you have trouble with downloading the PHP file, you can get this ZIPped file instead).

CVS

Note: CVS servers are not up to date right now because SourceForge? has had them down for the whole week... stay tuned.

Update: 0.9.2 is now up to date on CVS (look for the v-0-9-1 branch).

I had to take down the centralized antispam backlist because it's really eating up a lot of resources, thus slowing down the main site.

If you really rely on the centralized blacklist more than on your own spam defeating techniques (or on the new Phoenix techniques), I'd like to hear from you.

Also, in order to put the list back up, we could really really use someone willing to provide some server CPU & RAM to run something like antispam.b2evolution.net . It's mostly about processing SQL queries in memory. It's not that much about bandwidth or disk space. If you feel like giving it a try, please step forward Thanks!

-François.

Update: we have a new server for the antispam blacklist.

Until today, if you wanted to get a glimpse at the new "phoenix" version of b2evolution you had to check it out from the SourceForge CVS. That was hard enough to only let the most motivated users look at hit...

Today, we're opening it a little more: just visit the all new demo site set up by Daniel/blueyed...

Check it out at demo.b2evolution.net !

You'll be able to play with it as much as you'd like.

You'll also be able to test the latest release from the stable branch (0.9.x) and test it with PHP 4 as well as PHP 5.

Even better: those versions synchronise with CVS every hour. So you know you always look at the very latest code. Very cool stuff Daniel!

What you don't know though, is if someone has already played with it before and mashed up the settings... but as said, it resets every hour, so we have faith it will work for you when you go there.

Stay tuned for more! (Yes yes we're working on the alpha release)

PS: We'll update the links on the main site shortly.

After the skins site by Graham and the plugins site by Danny/personman, here comes the new and enhanced Forums site, managed by Whoo and hosted by Nicolas & Elpie from Axian (in New Zealand!).

Whoo has already added quite a few neat features like sub-forums and an RSS feed.

I also want to renew thanks to the whole moderators team: EdB, Topanga, personman, stk, Graham and blueyed.

New forums, same address: forums.b2evolution.net .

It is my pleasure to announce immediate availability of the new sub site: plugins.b2evolution.net

That's were you'll be able to find all cool plugins and hacks to extend b2evolution's capabilities. Of course there's only a handful of these registered so far, but feel free to submit new additions at any time.

This site is maintained by Danny Ferguson with the help of Steven Cherry. Both have responded to our call for help and reacted incredibly fast. Thanks a lot guys!

More to come soon...