b2evolution is actually an evolution of the b2 blog software. Thus, a significant part of the codebase is b2 legacy. As of today, b2 legacy is a little less than 50% of the whole b2evolution code.

Every now & then I read these quite irritating remarks about some other b2 forks supposedly being so much better because their authors are planning to rewrite it from ground up someday. :crazy: Duh!

Beyond the intrinsic irony of this statement, I'd like to explain my position about this: I do not believe the usage value of software lies in its codebase!

Actually, I have experimented the rewriting path myself about 12 years ago. I had developed a piece of software working very well with lots of happy users. However, I decided that having written this software in GfA Basic wasn't good enough and rewrote it from ground up in C!

This was an unvaluable move for me to learn the C language (and a couple of other things I wanted to experiment with, like the GEM environment), but regarding the software, the new version - while significantly nicer - never reached the usage value of the previous one.

The product and the users would have benefited much more from me spending all this time adding new features to the existing codebase instead of reimplementing the same ones differently. However, as a developer, I personnaly benefited more from reimplementation.

See how precisely this translates to b2 and its forks?

Now, please give me a break with this rewriting crap! Anyone talking to you about rewriting doesn't actually care about the community but about himself. :lalala: I don't blame that - we work for free - I just don't want it turned into ridiculous "marketing" arguments.

Also, please don't get me wrong: I am not saying the legacy b2 codebase was all clean. The b2evo dev team has actually rewritten more than 50% of it in order to achieve better maintainance. But we don't advertise that. We take far more pride in providing new features on a regular basis. :P

Version 0.8.5.5 is now available for download.

This release is believed to be stable and will not be changed significantly until release of 0.8.6 (final).

Now is a good time for all translators to update their language files and send them in.

b2evolution 0.8.5.3-beta is available. You can download it here.

Here are some highlights for this release:

• Complete b2evo bookmarklet and sidebar;

• You can now switch to another blog in the middle of a post and preserve all your current edits (uses javascript);

• Comment spam prevention (vig-rx syndrome): blocks comments and posts containing blacklisted URLs (if you have had vig-rx posting on your blog, you know why you need this ;) ) This also applies to referrer spam.

• New post statuses: protected, private and deprecated
• New login/registering system. You can login directly on whichever function page you want. b2edit.php, b2browse.php, b2stats.php, etc… pick the backoffice homepage you prefer.
• New template functions: user_login_link(), user_register_link(), user_logout_link(), user_admin_link(), user_profile_link()
• Passwords are now stored encrypted in the database (by Swirlee)
• Security pacthes (by Sakichan)
• Smilies are now displayed in their correct chosen order. They are not displayed when they are deactivated.
• $allow_cross_posting = 0 will disable cross posting among multiple categories.
• Stats summary.
• Fully configurable directory structure. Spread b2evo all across your site! ;)

At b2evolution's, one of our main concerns is security. While we constantly keep securing the legacy b2 codebase while developing new versions, we felt it was appropriate to release a security upgrade for our latest stable release (0.8.2).


We are pleased to announce availablility of version 0.8.2.2.


b2evolution 0.8.2.2 is a maintainance release intended to fix security issues discovered after release of version 0.8.2.


This release includes some fixes against XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities.


All b2 users up to 0.8.2 are encouraged to upgrade their installation. These vulnerabilities most likely also affect other b2 forks but we have not checked them yet.


Vulnerabilities were also fixed in user-customizable skins, so users will need to reflect the changes to their own skins. Contributed skins on evoSkins.org may have the same vulnerabilities, but we have not investigated them yet.


Acknowledgements:

• Some XSS vulnerabilities were found and reported by office
• This release was compiled and brought to you by Sakichan.

b2evolution 0.8.3-beta1 is available. You can download it here.

Here are some highlights for this release:

• Full localization support even without gettext on PHP! (more on this below);

• XML-RPC Blogger API now supports draft publishing;
• Better UTF-8 support (by Sakichan);
• Wordcount support (by Swirlee);
• Checking PHP version on install;
• Better XHTML compliance (moving towards Strict);
• A lot of fixes for PHP notices, a few bug fixes and a lot of code refactoring;
• New front page for ‘my blogs’ explaining a little more what’s going on there ;) and some more changes in an attempt to remove confusion that some first time b2evo users have reported.

Okay, regarding i18n/l10n, this new release now supports localization without any hassle of setting up and enabling gettext on your PHP installation, much unlike previous release (alpha1). You can now translate b2evo seemlessly with a simple GUI tool (poedit) and enable it in b2evo as easily as you would activate any other option! :) Read all about it on the l10n how-to.

A few locales are already available in this release, and of course, anyone is welcome to contribute for his own language! :D

Does anyone know a good PHP/mySQL bug/requests-for-enhancements tracking system?


I originaly wanted to install BugZilla but this one requires Perl and its latest modules... thus it won't run on any of my hosts, which are shared hosts, including b2evolution.net :-/


All of the PHP trackers I saw don't seem to be much more advanced than the basic SourceForge utilities... :|


Hum... I guess this is another one of my "I want more" fantasies... :roll: Well, you know how this is going to end up again? ;D