Ladies & gentlemen,

Though we're a little bit ashamed it took so long, we're also proud to announce that we're finally back with a brand new release and a load of brand new features.

The much anticipated Phoenix release is now available at SourceForge, you can get it here.

The main new features are:

• File manager
• Mailing lists/Subscriptions for new posts and/or new comments
• Group based blog permissions with presets for new users
• Enhanced user interface

The multiple domain support is still experimental and will work well only under specific conditions (you'll have to use the forums for more on that...)

More below...

This release is a real collaborative work with at least 15 contributors involved, some developping, some testing, some debugging, some validating... Many thanks to all of them!

This is an ALPHA release. This means it's far from perfect... but still, we already like it, use it, dig it... as it is! We only recommend that you upgrade if you are comfortable with patching bugs manually in case of need. Otherwise you should probably wait for the Phoenix Beta or Final.

This is a FEATURE release, not a PERFORMANCE release. So we don't recommend that you upgrade if you are running a production site with several thousands of users, of blogs or tens/hundreds of thousands of pges served every day. The "Dawn" release will still do a better job for this. This is not a promise, but we expect to come back to similar performance levels with version 1.7 or 1.8 .

Here's a longer list of changes:

• File manager (blueyed)
• Multiple domain support (blueyed, fplanque) (TODO: (cookie/admin) Debugging!)
• Mailing lists: Subscriptions for new posts and/or new comments (fplanque)
• Who's online? (jeffbearer, blueyed, fplanque)
• Email form to contact authors without revealing their email address (jeffbearer, blueyed, fplanque)
• Paged display in antispam (fplanque)
• Improved hit logging (bluyed, fplanque)
• Stats enhanced with Flash charts (fplanque)
• Added options to allow a blog stylesheet or a user stylesheet to override the skin stylesheet. (edgester) (TODO: Only the "custom" skin works with the options at the moment. Other skins must be modified.)
• Lost password: sends a link to allow password changing instead of generating a new password right away (blueyed)
• New setting in the blog's advanced tab for choosing the comment's policy on a per blog basis. You can now choose if you want to allow comments on a blog, if you want to be able to disable them on each post, or if you don't want any comments at all (gorgeb)
• Added Global Features section to admin settings (halton)
  
  • Online help: started implementation (halton) (TODO: online help server, relocate function)
  • Blog by email: moved settings from config file, started alternate implementation (halton)
• Post editing extensions:
  
  • Alternative backoffice layout(s). A skin can be chosen in the backoffice user profile. (fplanque, blueyed)
  • "Deprecate now" function (fplanque)
• Post browsing extensions:
  
  • Complete contextual browsing: you can combine several filters: author, month, category, etc (fplanque)
  • Browse by author (fplanque)
  • Calendar: Links to next/prev month/year are only provided if there are posts in that direction (blueyed)
  • Calendar: Fixed contextual accuracy (fplanque)
  • Fixed ability to select multiple authors at once (via URL params) (fplanque)
  • Added ability to combine categories in search (fplanque)
  • New URL parameter 'dstart' allows to start browsing at specified date (same fprmat as 'm'). useful with unit = 'days'.
  • New URL parameter 'unit' allows overriding of configuration to select what to display: 'posts' or 'days' (fplanque)
  • Slightly enhanced week handling (weeks start on sunday or monday depending on user locale) (requires MySQL >= 4) (fplanque)
• Post extensions (fplanque)
  
  • Extra status
  • Post type
  • Popup calendar for dates
  • Assigned to
  • Priority
  • Deadline
  • Counting number of views for each item (template tag $Item->views()) (jeffbearer, blueyed, fplanque)
• Permissions:
  
  • Group based blog permissions (halton)
  • Extended group permissions (fplanque)
  • Blog permissions presets; Member, Editor, Admin (blueyed, fplanque)
• Packaged plugins:
  
  • Wacko markup plugin (fplanque)
  • WikiLinks plugin (fplanque)
  • LDAP authentification plugin (blueyed)
  • Some previously built-in features have been moved to plugins (fplanque)
• Code:
  
  • Day at the start of the week moved to properties of the locales (blueyed)
  • Subpaths now include trailing slashes (that was another odd b2 legacy...) (blueyed, fplanque)
  • User profile validity checking (fplanque, blueyed)
  • AdminUI object that allows easy skinning of the backoffice (blueyed, fplanque)
  • Enhanced debugging (blueyed)
  • Unit tests in /tests, using simpletest framework (blueyed)
• Fixes:
  
  • Fixed Mozilla/Firefox's scrolling to the top of the textarea when clicking on toolbar buttons
  • Atom 1.0 compatibility
  • And many more.. (yabba...)