Yesterday I created a b2evo IRC channel for fun and sent the address to a few contributors. I thought I'd see one or two of them passing by...

To my surprise, everyone dropped by! :D And we spent a couple of hours yesterday evening chatting together. There's always been someone on the channel ever since! So I guess it's alive and bound to stay! :p

You are all invited to join for discussion. The channel is #b2evolution on irc.freenode.net .

We'll try to all get together today at 17:00 UTC (click for local times).

If you are unfamiliar with IRC, don't worry. I was too, no later than yesterday! :)

There is an incredibly easy way to get started: install the Mozilla browser (which comes with a bundled IRC client) and just enter the following url: irc://irc.freenode.net/b2evolution . Easy as pie!

Here are some more IRC resources:

• An IRC Tutorial
• A Short IRC Primer
• An IRC FAQ

I'll be off for a few days. There's so much happening in the forums right now that I'd really like to stay and iron out any remaining issues on 0.9 . However, I really have to leave here. So I'll work twice as much on b2evo next week when I'm back! ;)

Anyway, there's some great stuff you can check out in the next few days:

• The long-awaited-but-finally-alive-since-Graham-thankfully-took-it-over Skin Site is opening in public beta. Check it out! And if you've got some cool skins you've been working on, please submit them and let the world know! :yes:
  
   

• As announced previously, blueyed's MT migration script should be available shortly, just let him recover some sleep :P Check out the forum topic on MT-to-b2evo.

-François.

With all the frustration about MT3's licensing conditions, we've been asked a lot about a migration tool from MT to b2evo... just like many other blogtool makers I guess ;)

The bad news is that right now, we can't offer much more than our brand new version 0.9 and some cut & paste... :-/

The good news is that we're working on a migration script. You'll have it in less than two weeks... at most! :D I'd promise it for tomorrow if we hadn't already rescheduled so much of our normal lives to arrange for the timely release of the 0.9 beast! :roll:

For the last year, b2evo has been designed as a Free, Open-Source, GNU GPL alternative to MT. We have already included all the bells and whistles you might expect as an MT user, so trust me, the migration script is going to be there too! :yes:

As promised, here it is!

There's so much good stuff in this one I don't even know where to start! ;D

So I'll start by thanking blueyed for the incredible work he did on this release. I don't think a single contributor has ever coded that much into a single release. It was quite hard for me to keep up! :>>

Okay, let's go for a quick rundown of new features:

• Install and start using b2evo without editing a single config file (fplanque)
• Localized install screens (blueyed)
• Most settings moved to backoffice
• Improved antispam with full control on what you report to the centralized blacklist (fplanque)
• RSS & Atom Feeds for Comments (fplanque)
• Comment authors are automatically identified with their profile if they are logged in (fplanque)
• Comment permalinks (fplanque)
• New template tags (object oriented) (this is the visible part of the code cleaning iceberg ;) (fplanque)
• Enhanced Calendar (counts posts, links to archive of month, browse by year...) (blueyed)
• More link type options (fplanque)
• Search Engine Friendly Permalinks: use post title in the url (URL titles) (fplanque)
• Community blogs: protected posts are now restricted to blog members and are no longer visible by any logged in user. (fplanque)
• Optional output buffer handling, which provides ETags-support and handles gzip compression. (blueyed)

• Plug-in system, with value added plugins included: (fplanque)

  • Texturize plugin.
  • Auto-P plugin.
  • Textile 2.0 plugin.
• Comments can be closed / open / disabled (post per post). (fplanque)
• Full locale support instead of lightweight language support.
• Locales can be fully administered in the backoffice now. (blueyed)
• b2evo will redirect to correct blog if permalinks point to wrong one (fplanque)
• Blogrolls have been renamed to Linkblogs which should be a little easier to understand.
• Backoffice improvements.

Go get it from the downloads page.

Press Release:

The b2evolution development team proudly introduces the next significant release of the b2evolution open weblog software, version 0.9 . b2evolution, a multi-lingual, multi-user, multi-blog engine, builds upon the system originally released as b2/cafelog.com .

Version 0.9 of b2evolution is focused on ease of installation and feature richness. Version 0.9 can easily be installed on almost any LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) host in a matter of minutes. With the latest release, no config file editing is necessary as all configuration is handled through the installer or administrative back-end.

This release also introduces plug-ins, a new feature allowing 3rd party developers to easily extend the functionality or add additional displays to b2evolution. By request from our users, several popular text formatting plug-ins have been included such as Textile, Auto-P, Greymatter, BB code, Texturize, and graphic smilies.

The b2evolution platform was developed to make available a free, feature rich, extensible, and easy to install solution for efficient web-publishing of information ranging from professional news feeds to personal weblogs.

You can preview version 0.9 with the online demo!

Translators, please send your language files before Sunday 16:00 UTC.

Detailed Features Here!

Communiqué de Presse:

L'équipe de développement de b2evolution est fière de présenter la prochaine version significative du logiciel libre de gestion de weblogs b2evolution, version 0.9 . b2evolution, un moteur multi-blogs, multi-utilisateurs, multilingue est développé sur la base du système diffusé anciennement sous le nom b2/cafelog.com .

La version 0.9 de b2evolution met l'accent sur la facilité d'installation et la richesse fonctionelle. La version 0.9 peut aisément être installée sur pratiquement n'importe quel serveur LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) en l'espace de quelques minutes. Avec la dernière version, il n'est pas nécessaire d'éditer un quelconque fichier de configuration dans la mesure où toute la configuration est prise en charge par le script d'installation ou l'interface d'administration.

Cette version introduit également un système de plug-ins permettant à des tiers d'étendre facilement les fonctionnalités ou d'ajouter des méthodes d'affichage supplémentaires. A la demande de nos utilisateurs, nous avons inclus plusieurs plug-ins de formatage de texte populaires tels que Textile, Auto-P, Greymatter, BB code, Texturize et les smilies graphiques.

La plateforme b2evolution a été développée avec l'objectif de rendre disponible une solution libre, fonctionnellement riche, extensible et facile à déployer pour la publication efficace d'informations sur le web, qu'il s'agisse de flux de news professionnels ou de weblogs personnels.

Vous pouvez voir la version 0.9 dès à présent dans la démo en ligne