So far b2evolution has been like organic food applied to CMS software: it is the Best Quality Ever but it had no flashy packaging to advertise for it. Well it turns out people like flashy packagings. And flashy packagings don't make what's inside any less organic and high-quality.

So let's try to pimp our packaging a bit, shall we?

If you have looked at b2evolution's home page today, you can't have missed our efforts on that! ;)

Following a first cleanup, we have radically changed it this week-end. We hope you'll agree we actually "radically improved" it ;) There have been both "tactical" and "strategic" changes. Both planned changes and changes suggested by you, our users. There's been more than a hundred hours of work on this redesign already and we have a remaining list of changes for at least another hundred hours. But we'd like to take a moment to ask for your feedback.

Do you like where this is going? ...or did we go too far?

What do you think the next priorities should be?

What info is missing?

What's too much?

Have you seen interesting things on other sites we should draw inspiration from? (URLs welcome)

How much farther should we go?

5.1

Also, under the hood, this new page (and the majority of the site) now run on b2evolution 5.1. A giant live beta test if you will. We're fixing bugs by the dozen. If you see something strange, please kindly report it ;)

What this also means is that a public beta of 5.1 is really close now. It's hard to estimate a date because the real date is "as soon as we don't find new bugs any more" but I would guesstimate about 10 days from now.

Note: we're also working on all the feedback we received. Please continue to tell us what you'd like. We're all ears! :)

b2evolution version 5.0.8 (stable) has been released!

Download & Upgrade instructions here »

This is mostly a security/bugfix update.

Although the security risks are moderate, we do recommend this upgrade for all users.

Time to eradicate the ugly stuff.

You might have noticed a few changes on the homepage. It's nowhere near final yet. It's more of a first step towards rebuilding it cleanly.

We started by removing a lot things that were not needed. Did we go to far? Should we remove even more? What should we add? What do you want to see on the homepage?

Maybe you have ideas of what would make a great catch phrase or a great marketing argument to promote the use of b2evolution?

Maybe you can think of a missing link to some content you want to access frequently.

No matter what, we'd like to hear about it! ;)

Update: we added a couple of cool tweets mentioning @b2evolution -- and we'd love to add yours too ;)

b2evolution version 5.0.7 (stable) has been released!

Download & Upgrade instructions here »

This is a maintenance version addressing all identified bugs since release of version 5.0.6. It also features a few small enhancements.

We recommend this version for all users.

PS: All these little bug fixes have delayed release of version 5.1 but it's a good thing to have those bugs resolved before adding yet another layer of features to the cake ;) Also rest assured that development of 5.1+ has been progressing substantially in between. Stay tuned!

The new skins site is here! :)

It's not completely polished yet but it should be working pretty fine already.

Please note we have dropped the old star rating system as there were too many anonymous votes that didn't mean anything.

Please note we also dropped live previews as it's a bit complicated to maintain. We may bring back this feature some day but it's not a high priority right now (the next priority is the plugins repository ;)

We welcome your comments on how to improve navigation on the skins site and also on what help you would need to start creating and contributing your own skins.

Of course, we also welcome your comments on each and everyone of the listed skins. Especially, if you have worked with one or several of these skins, please let us know if they are easy to work with / easy to customize or not.

Thank you!

Happy New Year everyone! :^)

To start off 2014, we have put together packages for all the languages that received the most contributions on Transifex (the collaborative translation platform we use for b2evolution).

Here are all the languages we have packaged so far for b2evolution v5:
language packs download page.

You are welcome to contribute a few strings on Transifex or even start a new translation for your own language.

PS: b2evolution 5.0.7-stable and 5.1.0-beta coming soon (we're still fixing some bugs... ;)