Happy New Year everyone!

We had 8 releases of b2evolution 6.x last year but most of our work behind the scenes has been focused on b2evolution 7.x.

To this day b2evolution 7.x-PRO is already used by several PRO clients but we have not released a stable public release yet.

This is due primarily to the fast pace of adding new features that change the final widget/skin behavior. In public releases we need to write upgrade procedures for this, which is time consuming.

As a result, we are dropping b2evolution 7.0 and are moving directly to b2evolution 7.1. One major change is that site skins will be able to display a configurable Menu instead of just an automatic list of collections.

In the process we have also put the e-commerce features on hold as they are not among the current concerns of our PRO clients.

We expect a beta release of 7.1 in the coming weeks.

Did you know CSS has been around for 17 years now?! And yet it still feels incomplete... :P

The CSS Day conference took place on June 14th, 2013 in Amsterdam.

You can now watch the videos of all sessions on vimeo.

Those videos are great to get up-to-date on the status of the latest CSS specifications and how well (or bad) they are implemented in the different browsers. What's usable? What not? These topics are covered:

• Lea Verou: border-radius
• Tab Atkins: variables & conditionals
• Daniel Glazman: media queries
• Peter Gasston: animations & transitions
• Divya Manian: filters & compositing
• Stephen Hay: flexbox
• Bert Bos: selectors
• Eric Meyer: fonts & texts

You may start to use quite a few of these features in your skins. You can also count on us to start using them in b2evolution's back-office.

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

Blogs, as most current web applications, need to perform some caching of their pages on the server, in order to reduce webserver load and respond faster to client requests.

It looks like most people are quite happy with caching static versions of their pages for some defined amount of time. This method has often been called something like "half-baked/half-fried" in reference to the long running baked (static) versus fried (dynamic) discussion.

We actually think of it as "baked on demand"... but regardless of what we call it, we think it's not a satisfying solution!

With b2evolution, we have done some experiments caching blog homepages, which is already enough to significantly reduce server load and response times, since a very large portion of requests, including first visits, start with the home page.

However, this really makes the home page (or other pages we might apply this to) too static for many uses:

• We want to log some stuff in realtime
• We want new user comments to show up instantly (or at least, with a very short delay)
• And most of all: We want pages to be customized for each user: display new posts since last visit, display his personal choice of categories, etc.

Caching a whole page for every possible combination seems plain stupid. (And it is!)

Actually, the only smart caching mechanism one can be satisfied with in high-end web-applications is block-caching.

As a matter of fact, a web page can almost always be considered as an assembly of different blocks. Some are static, some are dynamically updated several times a day, some are related to the user himself and some are so dynamic they change everytime the page is displayed, no matter what! By caching each of these blocks individually when it makes sense and rebuilding only those necessary at a given time, you can then reconstruct your whole page dynamically significantly faster than if you had to reconstruct all blocks from scratch everytime.

And there you have it: performance and functionality.

Of course, it's also much more complex to implement than any other caching mechanism... BUT, you can count on b2evolution to implement something like this in the future!

Information overload!

The issue has been hitting weblogs quite a while ago, and that's why we have RSS. But still, we need to narrow down the flow of information our aggregators feed us with daily!

One solution could be Bayesian Filtering in the aggregator.

A more down to earth solution would be be providing separate feeds for each category. b2evolution lets you offer this to your users. Take advantage of it.