Another frequent question about Phoenix is: What are these "workflow" fields for?

Workflow fields are: Status, Assigned to, Priority and Deadline.

These fields are particularly useful when you are publishing a professional blog which involves several editors before a post goes public. You would typically create new posts as Drafts and then Assign them to someone for review, with a given priority and/or deadline.

You can use none, all or only several fields at your convenience.

The Status field is there in case "draft" is not enough for you. You can add your own custom statuses under the Settings tab. You might want to create statuses such as "idea", "to be reviewed", "needs spell check", "needs final approval", etc.

You will also discover some brand new uses of b2evo with these fields in future releases (probably starting in 1.7)

Now, if you don't need this at all and you think it's just an annoyance on your screen, rest assured, we'll give you an option to turn this off completely very soon. Even better, we'l give you control over hald a dozen of features of the edit screen, allowing you to display just as much as you really need and keeping the other features under the hood, just in case you need them sometime later.

One question that is comming back frequently is: What happened to the language files in Phoenix? Why are there only translations for French, German and Japanese?

Actually all previous translations are still there in CVS. However we haven't shipped them with the release because they haven't been updated yet, i-e they do not contain translations for many many strings in Phoenix. Using the old files would only partially localize Phoenix to the desired language.

To update 0.9.x languages files to Phoenix, you need to merge them with the new .POT file found in Phoenix as described in the online manual.

Also, we're planning to only ship a limited number of localizations by default in future releases, in order to keep the main download file small. All other languages will be provided separately in their own language packs.

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 .

Read more »

Last week, at PHP Forum Paris 2005, Rasmus Lerdorf (the father of PHP if you don't know) showcased "Scanmus", a tool he's been developping internally at Yahoo in order to detect any severe security holes in PHP applications.

Of course, I took the opportunity to submit b2evolution as a candidate for the scanner to try all its evil tricks on!

While I was a little bit worried, since I submitted the not-yet-perfect Phoenix release, the results are pretty comforting about the overall security level provided by b2evolution.

Actually, the only issue detected by the scanner, as explained by Rasmus, is due to the demo server running an older version of PHP. Moreover it impacts PHP sessions, which b2evolution does not actually use (we'll turn them off on the demo server as well).

Of course, the test cannot be considered definitive, but still, if you compare b2evo's results with average results, you should get an idea about how much work and effort we've been putting into b2evo lately.

If you're interested, you can watch the video! Well, you will see no more than the screen from the picture above (except it moves a little), you won't even see Rasmus on screen, but you'll hear him commenting! ;)

My favorite quote: [Looking at the vulnerability report] "...nothing else?... That's disappointing! :>"

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/_g94H14uNAY

b2evolution is now integrated in the "unstable" release of Debian and should soon enter "testing".

To install an up to date version b2evolution on your debian system, update your package list:
apt-get update
then, simply run:
apt-get install b2evolution

For more information or download the package manually, visit http://packages.debian.org/b2evolution

Thanks a lot to Arnaud Guiton who created and maintains this package.

The latest "Dawn" release will apply a rel="nofollow" by default to all comment/trackback links posted on a blog. Since I get all sorts of questions about that all the time, here is a quick explanation...

The purpose of rel="nofollow" is to tell Google (and most other major seach engines) this "I don't know who posted this link, I cannot guarantee it is relevant, I am not endorsing this link". The result is that this link will have no contribution in raising the refered site's pagerank and placement in the list of results.

The indirect purpose of having that by default in b2evolution is to tell spammers this: "Do not bother searching for b2evolution powered sites on Google in order to post spam in them, because spam on those sites will provide *no* contribution in raising your site's pagerank...".

Before "Dawn" it was exactly the opposite. b2evo was like a honeypot for comment spammers.

In a similar manner, "Dawn" won't display any referers publicly any longer. This again is to tell spammers this "Do not bother referer spamming b2evolution blogs, because your referers won't even appear anywhere to be seen".

Now, the question many people raise is this: "When someone posts a legitimate comment, I want to endorse the link to his site and I want Google to give that site a little love on my behalf...". Right. We understand that. The plan is to have a checkbox in the backoffice to remove rel="nofollow" from comments you have approved, but *only* those that you have approved. Again we don't want spammers to get through it. Also, when a comment is suspect, sth like "Nice site." and an URL to a page that is "Under Construction" (i-e waiting to be used...) we encourage everyone *not to* endorse the URL, even if you might want to keep the comment...

Next question is "when?". The Answer is "Phoenix", a few weeks, something like that... unless someone comes uo with a hack earlier.

PS: no need to send links to all those sites arguing about rel="nospam". 8 out of 10 of these arguments are irrelevant, and the remaining ones just can't outweight the spam stress we all get by not being firm on blocking it.