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!

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... ;)

With the release of version 5.0.6 approaching, we are reaching the end of the bug fixing cycle that follows each major release. This means we're getting ready for the rollout of new features again!

Version 5 was our largest new release ever with more than 200 new features!

100 of these new features were direct responses to your feature requests/problem descriptions! :)

Are you ready for some more? ;)

Today we'd like to ask you two distinct questions:

1) What is the main reason that made you choose b2evolution for your website?
(If possible: what problem did b2evolution solve for you?)

2) What is the feature or improvement you miss the most at this time?
(Please describe the problem you have before describing a requested solution.)

As always, we'll try our best to find an elegant solution to what your need.

Some requests will be addressed in b2evolution 5.1, some will be addressed in version 6, but we'll evaluate them all.

Please give us your feedback in the comments below!

Thank you!

As we are approaching the 3rd stable release of b2evolution v5, we'd like to ask you for contributing some translations.

As we have adopted Transifex as a translation platform, it is now super easy to contribute 10 minutes or 10 hours of your time on translating b2evolution to your language.

All you need to do is to create a free account on Transifex, go to our project page, select your language, and start translating the provided strings! Every translated sentence helps!

Here's the current status of translations for v5 (dynamically updated):

Top translations: b2evolution » b2evomessages

In case you want to go a bit deeper, check out the manual pahe about localizing b2evolution.

Since the beginning of the year we have been relentlessly adding features and features and more features to b2evolution v4. All the while not producing a packaged release! If you wnated to use them, you had to dig into CVS...

Ok, this has been going on for far too long now! ;)

We have stopped adding features until we make a 4.0 release! Below, you will find the final list of features that made it into the next 4.0.0-alpha release.

No new features, means we are now focusing on cleaning up some of the code that doesn't seem quite right and then we'll release the alpha. (Don't ask, I'm not giving dates any more, even if this time I can actually feel the release ;) )

This alpha release will be functional as advertised but the UI may not be polished everywhere it should. We'll do some extra polishing for the beta and stable versions.

Watch out, this is a massive release!! ;) There is a lot of extra power and new stuff under the hood! Here's the list:

Read more »

We tried to put so many new features into b2evolution v4, and we tried to make everything so perfect, that by asking us for a release date, we just had to make a wild guess... Especially: a guess about when we'd be satisfied enough with the outcome to make a public release.

Well, it turns out that at the end of April, we were not satisfied!

Sure, we were satisfied about everything that had already been done. But we were not satisfied about the big picture and the global coherence of the development at that stage. Making an alpha release at that point wouldn't have made much sense beyond "being on time" for the sake of "being on time".

There would have been features partially implemented and others not working because they depended on something else to be finished... So, instead of releasing a version that would have been "broken but it's an alpha, what did you expect?" we decided to wait a little and release an "alpha version you can actually run on production"... because that's just we way we like our alphas to be! ;)

So, we took the to-do list, combed through it carefully and came up with a feature set rather than a date. That feature set is not perfect, but it will still make a coherent alpha. Based on that, our best guess would be a release early June.

Later than expected, but you'll get so much more out of it that you'll probably agree it was worth the wait. After that, we'll resume to incremental changes and more regular releases.

Btw, in your opinion, what would be the ideal delay between successive releases?