State of the Evolution

I feel like life’s been keeping me far too far away from b2evolution for the last 6 or 12 or maybe 18 months!

Actually, I can’t even recall the last time I was as precisely focused on the development of b2evolution as I have been for the last month. (Though, I can recall quite a few depressing “life’s a bitch” situations in the last 18 months… but that’s not the point!)

Looking back, I’m still pretty happy with b2evolution v4 so far. It has once again proven rock solid and dependable, just as I like it. (My ex Boss actually keeps telling me how amazed he is about his b2evolution powered sites still running smoothly after years with no supervision at all.)

As a matter of fact, b2evolution 4 gave me just the industrial strengh reliability I needed during those times where I had other things to deal with than breaking down servers…

Now, I am even more happy with version 4.1 which actually makes using b2evolution quite fun in previously boring situations, like killing spam for example. It’s so easy now ;) Sometimes, I log in and I almost wish there was more spam so I could play shooting it a little more. (Okay, *almost* !)

The next act – b2evolution 4.2 – is going to be even more exciting though. This one will really bring to life the community oriented features we’ve been aiming at!

Well, this may not be for everyone, but if you are running a blog website for a community like maybe a class, a whole school, a church, a user group, a club or maybe even a small town (and we have some of these using b2evolution already) you actually have a community of users comming to your site.

Now picture this: with b2evolution, these users will be able to create accounts for themselves and upload profile pictures very conveniently, without leaving your blog, without needing to understand the backoffice or the file manager for that matter. They’ll very easily update their profile and all their comments will be personalized, thus bringing your blog and your online community to life!

Furthermore, they’ll be able to send private messages to each other, still in a friendly end user interface, integrated with your site design, and still no need to go to the backoffice. Your users will even be able to have group discussions involving multiple members at a time.

And this is only the beginning… Can you think of what’s next?

Though we don’t have a roadmap set in stone, we’ve now arrived at a sweet spot where our patiently built infrastructure allows us to add really exciting user-oriented features on a regular basis…

This, to me, gives a whole new life to the project! ;)