2015 has been pretty intense for b2evolution! So many things have changed! If you haven’t been paying attention, or have been lagging in upgrading, now is a good time to check out what you missed…

Let’s recap what happened over the past 365 days:

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Are you a b2evolution professional?

Do you work for hire?

We are in the process of redesigning the "b2evo professionals" section. (The old one is here)

We get requests for paid help and paid development all the time. We have absolutely no time to respond to any of them ourselves. We'd love to send those customers your way! And we'll send them to you for free.

We'll advertise your business for free!

All we need from you is to know you're ready to accept some clients. If so, please complete your user profile on this site and let us know you're ready!

If you want, you can also describe more specifically what kind of jobs you can do: installation/configuration, graphic/skin design, custom development, etc.

Are you ready for some more paid client work?

This is just a quick update to let you know that the next release will be version 3.2.0-beta

It will include bug fixes and improvements on version 3.1 but also some new features. We expect to release 3.2 before the end of the month.

Many people have asked when a stable version of 3.x would come out. At this time, the target is still "before the summer" (that is, June 21 st).

In other news, we noticed the W3C was now running 17 blogs on b2evolution. Nice! :)

You probably already know that you can get more frequent updates on the development of new versions by following b2evolution on twitter... (If you don't know about twitter yet, it's a social network that let's you follow updates about your friends and other stuff you care about... like b2evolution.)

b2evolution is now also on Facebook. Please show your support and become a Fan of the new b2evolution page on Facebook. Fans will receive exclusive sneak peeks to upcoming features. (A neat side benefit of joining us on Facebook, is that you will actually see the true faces of many of the members on the forums! ;))

And last but not least, Scott from the b2evolution team has applied for the "Best Job in the World" where Tourism Queensland is looking to hire someone to be "caretaker" of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. There are many applicants, but only one successful candidate will get to live on Hamilton Island for six-months and spend his time exploring the other Great Barrier Reef Islands. The catch: he will report back on his adventures (via weekly blog updates, photo diaries and video snippets).

And it gets better, Scott actually stands a good chance of making it into the final stages of selection and we all hope to see him blogging from the islands soon... using b2evolution of course! ;)

So, please go vote for Scott and give him 5 stars now! :) (did you know you can actually vote once a day?)

Listen to it here: François Planque of b2evolution - Interview by Des Walsh on the Social Media Show.

This was recorded via Skype a couple days ago, with Des being in Australia and me being in California. The sound quality turned out to be pretty good... but that doesn't help that I still hate listening to myself... :p (Is that my real voice??)

OK, it's already almost a week since I've been to Blog World Expo... and I thought I should post a quick recap...

First off, Blog World is a fun place to hang out at! I didn't take any pictures of the conference, the expo halls and the crowds but you can still check out this tweetup dinner video to get an idea of what some of us looked like on the last evening.

I have to say I'm very impressed by how twitter allows people to meet up at random places. That's how that after hours dinner took place after the end of the conference.

By the way, if you are on twitter, you might want to follow http://twitter.com/b2evolution ;)

That said, the most interesting part for me was meeting with bloggers and getting feedback on the software!

Even if I wish I had met more b2evolution bloggers, I got a lot of feedback and interesting ideas! There is nothing like real people explaining what they really want to do with their blogs! Believe it or not, a live discussion makes your point way better than a cryptic forum post! ;)

One feature I've worked on since I came back is page level caching. This is a direct result from talking with Nelson Guirado about performance issues on his host. While we cannot control the server load and speed of the hosting companies, one thing we can do is try to make b2evolution use less server resources per page, thus operate faster.

Page level caching goes a long way in that direction. Basically it caches your blog pages so that subsequent results will be served much faster and with significantly less queries to the database. This also drastically cuts down on the load time for your visitors. (You need to not be logged in to experience the cache effect).

Page caching is already available in CVS. It's also activated on b2evlution.net, including this blog you are reading right now. If you see anything odd, by all means, let me know.

For more 3.0 features, stay tuned, either here or on twitter! ;)