Hello everyone!

We hope you had a great summer!

Next release

We took a little time off but we’re back at fixing bugs in order to release version 5.1.2 and hopefully stick a "stable" label on it… We’re a bit picky about that ;)

Update: 5.1.2 has been released!

GitHub

In the meantime, please remember you can always get an up-to-date version, including the latest fixes, on Github here: https://github.com/b2evolution/b2evolution . This would be a good habit to take as we’re going to update GitHub even more frequently in the future. We’re also working on importing the previous project history onto GitHub (thanks to blueyed).

twitter

Are you following us on twitter already? https://twitter.com/b2evolution

Before the summer we posted quite a few interesting links about web design, front-end development and more generally: techniques to improve your website that complement the use of b2evolution. Did you find those helpful? Would you like some more?

UTF-8

While version 5.1.2 will remain unchanged, upcoming versions (internally "i7" which will probably translate to "6.0") will rely entirely on UTF-8. This is made possible because most web hosts now correctly support UTF-8 in PHP and MySQL which certainly wasn’t the case when we started b2evolution.

But we’re doing it not just because it’s possible. We’re doing it mostly because many users seem to have encoding problems as soon as they run blogs in multiple languages. By standardizing them all on a common character set — and UTF-8 is the de-facto standard for that — all those charset headaches might as well magically go away.

We also have a fallback for old web hosts that don’t have native UTF-8 support, at the expense of a small performance impact.

Globally we feel that moving towards UTF-8 will help us better fulfill our mission of providing a blog/CMS platform that just works from the moment you install it and with any content you add to it.

Stay tuned for more!