Released on May 18th, 2015.

This is a beta version.

"beta" means there may be a few bugs, but globally it works. There are definitely some details we still need to polish out, but we're pretty close to our goal for b2evolution version 6 here.

Also available on GitHub.

Installation

Our easy Installation Guide will provide step by step instructions to get you started with b2evolution.

Upgrade

If you want to upgrade your installation to this beta version, see: Upgrading an existing installation.

IMPORTANT: many root files are no longer needed in this version and should ideally be deleted from your web server. Also, you should use the provided tool to convert your database to UTF-8. Please check Upgrade to b2evolution version 6.x for instructions.

Changes

In addition to what's been introduced in 6.1.2-alpha:

• UI changes:
  • New evobar design. Pure CSS (no Javascript).
  • New evobar menu structure. We like to think it's clearer and more efficient.
  • Cleaned up and improved Bootstrap Back-office.
• New skins:
  • New Bootstrap Forums skin (used by default)
  • New Bootstrap Gallery skin (not used by default, select it manually)
• Users:
  • New design of the user profile screen (disp=user)
  • Extended User Fields now support icons (twitter, facebook, Linkedin, etc.) and colors when used with a font like Font Awesome.
  • User Links widget displays icons linking to some user's links. Especially useful for displaying social media icons of a blog owner. This is used by default on the home page and at the top of some skins.
  • New widget: Organization Members Widget. Use on the home page by default.
• Dev tools:
  • Toggle on the Dev menu with $dev_menu = 1
  • Enhanced Display Containers feature.
  • Feature to Display includes (for skin development)
• Enhanced skin API:
  • Skins can now declare whether they use the v6 or the v5 API (v5 is the default so old skins stay compatible)
  • Bootstrap based skins should use the v6 API
  • The v6 API uses different class names by default which follow a cleaner naming convention (some cleanup is still in progress at this point).
  • The v6 API uses HTML 5 semantic markup by default.
• Bug fixes... (of course)