Released on June 28th, 2013.

Main new features of b2evolution v5 compared to v4.1

• Blogs / Collections:
• Instead of talking about multiple Blogs on a single installation of b2evolution, we now talk about multiple Collections. A collection (of posts+comments+files+skin) can still be a blog of course, but it can be much more… like a forum or a manual for example.
• Support for Forums (special kind of blog/collection with special skin) including phpBB importer
• Support for User Manuals (special kind of blog/collection with special skin) allowing to browser content through hierarchy (and transversally with Wiki style links)
• Many additional blog / collection settings.

• Content writing / management:
• Enhanced renderers and plugins
• Ability to insert linked images anywhere in a post with syntax like <code class="codespan"></code> – easy insert icon is available
• Enhanced support for custom fields
• Embedded support for ads if you want to rotate ads on your blog (for commercial blogs)
• Enhanced feature to create post(s) from images
• Support for meta categories
• Ability to import WordPress XML exports
• Additional visibility statuses: in addition to "draft" and "public", we now also have "community" and "review" for example.

• Comments:
• Comments can no have attachments like images (configurable)
• Optional threaded comment support
• Renderers can now apply to comments in addition to posts
• The community can vote on comments to say if they were useful or not

• Users
• Enhanced user management
• Enhanced user profiles (for communities)
• Enhanced user directory (for communities)
• Enhanced private messaging between users, including contact management and blocking of abusers

• Skins / Themes / Layouts:
• Support for automatically serving Mobile and Tablet skins (provide sample: Touch skin)
• Sample Forum skin
• Sample Manual skin which allows browsing a hierarchy of contents rather than posts sorted linearly in chronological order
• In-skin login / registration / password recovery
• In-skin editing
• In-skin profile management
• New & enhanced widgets

• Plugins:
• Google maps plugin can show a location for each post
• GeoIP plugin for country detection (useful for antispam)
• Customizable text CAPTCHA plugin
• Several video players

• Email notifications:
• Very granular control for users to decide which notification emails they want to receive and which not, including 1-click unsubscribe for each.
• Automatic reminder messages for pending actions like account activation or unread messages
• Fully automated (and configurable) Return-Path processing
• HTML and plain text email templates
• Newsletter feature with variable replacement

• Antispam features:
• GeoIP plugin to assist flagging spam or spammers by country of origin
• Ability to delete spammer users and all their content in one swoop
• Ability to crowdsource votes on spammy content
• Moderators can promote/demote new comments in 1 ajax click.
• Spam bankruptcy feature for blogs that have been left unattended for too long.
• Additional antispam measures.

• Perfomance & Maintenance:
• Reduced number of files served to users by using CSS3, image sprites and combining some .js files
• Scheduled jobs to automate database maintenance (CHECK / OPTIMIZE / ANALYZE)
• Automatic upgrades can be controlled by a policy file.
• Ability to temporarily lock the web site in "read only" mode for maintenance

Main changes from 5.0.3-beta-5 to 5.0.4

• Default blog skins were optimized for CSS 3, greatly reducing the number of files that need to be loaded. This results in better load times of your blog and also easier customization of the default skins.
• Email notifications
• b2evolution can now send full text notifications for new posts.
• Viewing sent emails now also shows the HTML version in HTML form
• For users subscribed to notifications on many posts, the list of posts in the notifications management screen now links to the original posts, so users can easily see if they are still interested in that topic.
• Users with a custom sender address or name will be highlighted in the backoffice
• Antispam:
• Enhanced IP Ranges handling
• Suspect Users management
• Removed "xxx" from the blacklist at install – too many false positives.
• If requesting the lostpassword screen when already logged in, we are redirected to the home page.
• If the blog owner has defined a nickname, it will be displayed in the contact form (when contacting through link in footer of blogs for example).
• Comments:
• When voting is enabled for comments in a specific blog, it’s possible to specify a question. (Max 10,000 chars)
• Expired comments can be easily seen in the backoffice, under their parent post.
• It is possible to prevent some user groups (e-g: spammers) from posting comments even if anonymous users are allowed to post anonymous comments! Spammers go over their target sites so fast, that this added complexity is sometimes effective in stopping them in their tracks. However, this can create some counter intuitive permission management. These situation are now highlighted with an warning in the back office.
• Plugins:
• Star renderer plugin allows to insert star ratings anywhere in the text of a post/comment.
• Twitter Plugin made compatible with Twitter API v1.1
• When creating posts from pictures, we use the long title of the pictures (if available) to name the posts.
• Allow some special chars in autolink definitions (especially useful for filenames)
• A few presentation changes in the back office.
• Tools:
• Find and delete orphan File objects (with no matching file on disk)
• Sample posts creation tool now displays progress dots…
• Bug Fixes:
• Fixed issues in the upgrade procedure
• Fixed issues with entering multiple slugs per post
• Fixed detection of IE 10 (removed message saying version was too old)
• Fixed Goal Stats screen (headers & footers)
• Fixed handling of [img:] tags after <–more–>
• Fixed wrong display of "?" in the evobar for users with little permissions
• Various bug fixes.