I haven't posted here recently because I've been trying to do my small part for the b2evolution project. I don't want to say too much, but the new release is getting very close. I've been running a test installation and working on getting some skins ready for the new version. I even wrote a plugin only to find out that someone had already done something very similar. In testing this new release, my opinion is that it will be worth the wait. The best thing will probably be the new plugin system. We should see a lot of extra functionality built in to easy to install plugins. But there's some eye candy, too. Here's a screen grab of the new back office stats page, complete with a chart rendered in Flash:

That's with only four days of data. It will usually have 30. Recently we've been pulling all display of public stats from evoskins, just so spammers won't be able to see if they get through. But something like this, which doesn't include any links or even url titles, might be suitable for public display. It just gives an overall impression of the stats.

The charts are built on PHP/SWF Charts, a shareware lib that looks pretty fun and useful in itself. But having it built in to every install of b2evolution means that we may see plugins that use it for other things, too. How cool would it be to see a sidebar poll that renders results as a Flash pie chart?

Keep watching for the public releases of the new version of b2evolution. If any brendoman.com authors want to take a look at it, email me and I'll create a login for you on our test install.