Hi there!

We have updated all our info pages about translations, locales and language packs:

• What are the available translations?
• How to create a new translation?
• How to update an existing translation?

Of course, there may still be unanswered questions. So, if after reading those pages, something is still unclear, please fire up your questions. We'll do our best to include answers! ;)

A few people have been asking for this for quite a long time...

... and today i'm pleased to announce that I finally put up a small site for evoCore, the PHP framework at the heart of b2evolution.

It's not much, but it's something! ;)

Another frequent question about Phoenix is: What are these "workflow" fields for?

Workflow fields are: Status, Assigned to, Priority and Deadline.

These fields are particularly useful when you are publishing a professional blog which involves several editors before a post goes public. You would typically create new posts as Drafts and then Assign them to someone for review, with a given priority and/or deadline.

You can use none, all or only several fields at your convenience.

The Status field is there in case "draft" is not enough for you. You can add your own custom statuses under the Settings tab. You might want to create statuses such as "idea", "to be reviewed", "needs spell check", "needs final approval", etc.

You will also discover some brand new uses of b2evo with these fields in future releases (probably starting in 1.7)

Now, if you don't need this at all and you think it's just an annoyance on your screen, rest assured, we'll give you an option to turn this off completely very soon. Even better, we'l give you control over hald a dozen of features of the edit screen, allowing you to display just as much as you really need and keeping the other features under the hood, just in case you need them sometime later.

One question that is comming back frequently is: What happened to the language files in Phoenix? Why are there only translations for French, German and Japanese?

Actually all previous translations are still there in CVS. However we haven't shipped them with the release because they haven't been updated yet, i-e they do not contain translations for many many strings in Phoenix. Using the old files would only partially localize Phoenix to the desired language.

To update 0.9.x languages files to Phoenix, you need to merge them with the new .POT file found in Phoenix as described in the online manual.

Also, we're planning to only ship a limited number of localizations by default in future releases, in order to keep the main download file small. All other languages will be provided separately in their own language packs.

Last week, at PHP Forum Paris 2005, Rasmus Lerdorf (the father of PHP if you don't know) showcased "Scanmus", a tool he's been developping internally at Yahoo in order to detect any severe security holes in PHP applications.

Of course, I took the opportunity to submit b2evolution as a candidate for the scanner to try all its evil tricks on!

While I was a little bit worried, since I submitted the not-yet-perfect Phoenix release, the results are pretty comforting about the overall security level provided by b2evolution.

Actually, the only issue detected by the scanner, as explained by Rasmus, is due to the demo server running an older version of PHP. Moreover it impacts PHP sessions, which b2evolution does not actually use (we'll turn them off on the demo server as well).

Of course, the test cannot be considered definitive, but still, if you compare b2evo's results with average results, you should get an idea about how much work and effort we've been putting into b2evo lately.

If you're interested, you can watch the video! Well, you will see no more than the screen from the picture above (except it moves a little), you won't even see Rasmus on screen, but you'll hear him commenting! ;)

My favorite quote: [Looking at the vulnerability report] "...nothing else?... That's disappointing! :>"

Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/_g94H14uNAY

The latest "Dawn" release will apply a rel="nofollow" by default to all comment/trackback links posted on a blog. Since I get all sorts of questions about that all the time, here is a quick explanation...

The purpose of rel="nofollow" is to tell Google (and most other major seach engines) this "I don't know who posted this link, I cannot guarantee it is relevant, I am not endorsing this link". The result is that this link will have no contribution in raising the refered site's pagerank and placement in the list of results.

The indirect purpose of having that by default in b2evolution is to tell spammers this: "Do not bother searching for b2evolution powered sites on Google in order to post spam in them, because spam on those sites will provide *no* contribution in raising your site's pagerank...".

Before "Dawn" it was exactly the opposite. b2evo was like a honeypot for comment spammers.

In a similar manner, "Dawn" won't display any referers publicly any longer. This again is to tell spammers this "Do not bother referer spamming b2evolution blogs, because your referers won't even appear anywhere to be seen".

Now, the question many people raise is this: "When someone posts a legitimate comment, I want to endorse the link to his site and I want Google to give that site a little love on my behalf...". Right. We understand that. The plan is to have a checkbox in the backoffice to remove rel="nofollow" from comments you have approved, but *only* those that you have approved. Again we don't want spammers to get through it. Also, when a comment is suspect, sth like "Nice site." and an URL to a page that is "Under Construction" (i-e waiting to be used...) we encourage everyone *not to* endorse the URL, even if you might want to keep the comment...

Next question is "when?". The Answer is "Phoenix", a few weeks, something like that... unless someone comes uo with a hack earlier.

PS: no need to send links to all those sites arguing about rel="nospam". 8 out of 10 of these arguments are irrelevant, and the remaining ones just can't outweight the spam stress we all get by not being firm on blocking it.