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!

Here's a quick update on what we've been working on since the last update ;)

GitHub

GitHub has become the go-to place for open source projects of all kinds. It was about time for b2evolution to be on GitHub too. We're happy to announce the new b2evolution git repository on GitHub:

https://github.com/b2evolution/b2evolution

This repository is already ahead of the latest 5.1.1-beta.

We are updating it weekly for now and we plan to use it as the primary development repository in the (near) future. Which means you will have extremely easy access to bug-fixes and new features in real-time as we work on them.

If you're unfamiliar with git and github, it is still very easy to download and keep up to date with this repository if you use the Git Client tool that can be downloaded from the GitHub home page.

Site Redesign

We changed our intro last month and changed it again today! There's so many possible angles to look at b2evolution that it's a bit tricky to choose one that really catches the gist of it...

We also streamlined the design some more. It's starting to look much more modern.

Anyways, as always, feedback on the homepage design is very welcome.

As a side note, let us give a plug to Font Awesome which we're now starting to use across the whole site.

Update: We also updated the design of the news blog ;)

Development Focus

The last month of development was very focused on performance. More specifically on reducing the number of files being loaded with each page b2evolution serves and also the size of the files.

This was achieve with several techniques:

• Concatenating multiples CSS and JS files into one;
• Minifying the CSS and JS files;
• Doing the above two automatically using Grunt (Note: You'll find our Gruntfile.js in the GitHub repository mentioned above));
• Loading non essential JS files asynchronously;
• Using an icon font instead of image sprites;
• Loading some resources from public CDNs...

You may already have noticed page load time improvements on this site. You will benefit from the same in b2evolution 5.1.2.

5.1.2

We expect to release version 5.1.2 before the end of July. We may call it "stable" instead of "beta" if it passes the tests.

Stay tuned!

b2evolution 5.1.1-beta has been released.

Check out the Changelog + Download page »

This release is only available for download on b2evolution.net. We are no longer uploading download packages to Sourceforge. (We actually found their download process annoying because it frequently presented ads with a confusing download button which made you download an unwanted product instead of b2evolution!)

We are also planing to migrate the source code to GitHub in the near future. In the meantime we will keep updating the CVS repository on SourceForge (but only the CVS repository, not the downloads section).

Note: this release is probably completely fit for production. We just call it "beta" because we want to clean up and test some more before calling it "finished". We're just a little perfectionists like that... ;)

You might have noticed a slight redesign of the b2evolution.net site header.

This was long overdue but was only made possible recently after we finally converted 100% of the pages of this site to be served dynamically by b2evolution.

So, now, of course, such a change is trivial as we only have the `site_header` file to modify in order to achieve this. But imagine that before that, the site had grown progressively since 2003 with many pages beeing static Dreamweaver files, others being handled by other software like phpBB (now integrated into b2evolution) and many sub-domains (likes skins, plugins, etc.) being handled by spearate installs of b2evolution, spearately installed and customized by contributors on separate servers. They all had the best intentions at the time but it had turned into a maintenance nightmare.

Now everything is back on one single b2evolution v 5.1.1 install. Maintenance will be easier and evolving the global site design/architecture will be easier too.

5.1.1

Speaking of 5.1.1, it is already available to test in the demo section. (Note: for security reasons, the demo runs on a separate server — sorry if it’s a bit slower soemtimes — but the demo homepage is on the main server).

A new downloadable release of 5.1.1 will be made available before June 15th.

A little bit of CSS

Regarding the recent design changes, you may have noticed the little triangle under the currently active main "tab" (which don’t look, like tabs anymore ;):

In case you’re wondering this is achieved with a little white square that is rotated by 45 degrees in CSS. The square itself is added dynamically by CSS using a :after selector.

Read more »

b2evolution version 5.0.9-stable has been released!

Download & Upgrade instructions here »

This is a maintenance release containing fixes for all bugs discovered since version 5.0.8.

We are committed to fully address issues with v 5.0 until v 5.1 is considered completely stable.

b2evolution version 5.1.0-beta has been released!

Download & Upgrade instructions here »

The general focus of this 5.1 release is to add the features we felt were missing in 5.0 that did not require deep changes to the 5.0 code and DB structure. We have been working heavily on version 6.0 in parallel.

Among quite a few new features, here are some highlights:

• Site-wide header & footer support allowing you to even quicklier build complex multi-collection sites than before. We are using this on b2evolution.net.
• Photo Albums Skin
• Goal Categories for your server side analytics
• Redesigned login screens based on twitter bootstrap (more bootstrap use to come in the next release)
• Additions and improvements to existing antispam tools
• Many small user requests

There will still be some more additions in the stable 5.1 release. If the one feature you've been desperately waiting for isn't in this beta, now is a good time to remind us! ;)