UPDATE: Lots of testers and readers installed this RC and found some good bugs. Image uploading was slightly broken in this build, so if you haven't upgraded, hang back a bit. Remember that all bug reports should be filed on SourceForge, not sent to Omar and I directly. Feature requests should be filed also. We'll do another RC and/or possibly the 1.8 Gold Release later this week. There are also a few more features sneaking in, including 'pluggable' pings to blog sites like Technorati.
What are you doing this weekend? Why not install DasBlog 1.8 RC1? (as always back up your data!)
New Features of Note
- Anti-Spam Features
- Automatic Referral and Trackback blacklist update
- CAPTCHA for non-admin users
- Logging and display of Comment IP addresses and resolved Hostnames for Admins
- DasBlogUpgrader can strip spam from existing content folders
- Support for rel="nofollow"
- Ability to delete referrals and trackbacks directly from the Admin UI
- Security Features
- HttpOnly cookies
- Admin access auditing
- SMTP Authentication for outgoing mail
- Syndication Features
- Improved RSS Comments support for SharpReader and RSS Bandit
- Upgraded Atom support from 0.3 to Valid Atom 1.0. Syndication permalink changes but 301 is issued.
- RSS 2.0 validates via FeedValidator.
- Ability to mark entries as "syndicated" or not. Entries can appear on the site but not in RSS/Atom.
- Performance Features
- Search Highlighting is optional now
- Referrals are logged but not stored in XML by default. Configurable.
(This has huge performance benefits for high traffic sites.)
- DasBlog Upgrader can optionally remove all referrals.
(Again with high traffic sites some folks had 5meg XML files full of referrals)
- Theme templates are now cached in memory.
- Content Features
- Ability to pre- and post-date entries
- Permalinks based on Title and Date optional: 2005/06/06/title.aspx
- Latest build of Free Text Box including ability to upgrade FTB without upgrading DasBlog.
- Text Editor (FTB) supports FireFox
- Blog Statistics macro
- Mail-To-Weblog continues to improves. Works with Thunderbird.
- Extensibility Features
- Custom Macro Plugin model without recompiling DasBlog
- Theme Features
- DasBlog now ships with 16 themes and a Theme Combo to change between them.
- New theme.manifest file makes themes and image assets more portable.