FlexWiki 1.8.0.1677 Released

For a long time now, the FlexWiki development team (a formal-sounding term for a bunch of guys who hack FlexWiki in their spare time) has been working towards FlexWiki 2.0. We have a fairly extensive list of features that we want to implement to get there. Some of them are done, but many of them are not. Although we build on every checkin, and make every build available to the brave, we were hoping that we would be able to jam through the remaining 2.0 features via a coherent push to get a new version of FlexWiki “blessed” as the official release sometime soon.

Last week, we came to the realization that it's still going to take some time to get to 2.0. And in the meantime, real users are having problems with build 1613 (the last “official” release), to which the answer is most often, “Oh yeah, we fixed that since November. Upgrade to the latest interim build.” At some point, we realized that it made more sense to simply make the latest build the official release and keep driving towards 2.0. “Release early, release often” is a good motto for open source projects to have. So that's what I spent part of today doing: you can now download FlexWiki 1.8.0.1677 from SourceForge. Here are the release notes I posted, in case you were wondering what goodies have been added:

This release contains many, many new features and bugfixes. Here is a
partial listing. See the change notes for a complete history. Thanks
to the many contributors who wrote all these goodies in their spare
time. 

* Added support for colored text via the %color% tag.

* A completely rearchitected storage engine that allows for pluggable
  stores. 

* An implementation of the pluggable storage engine that allows a
  namespace to be stored in SQL Server. 

* RSS feed format improvements. 

* A new URL scheme. Topics can now be accessed using URLs like
  http://www.flexwiki.com/default.aspx/Namespace/TopicName

* Fixed newsletter functionality. 

* Improved anti-spam technology, like nofollow support and URL
  blacklisting.

* Improved testing - the automated build installs FlexWiki and
  verifies correct behavior via a browser. 

* Support for page and page fragment templates. 

* Many WikiTalk improvements, including improvements to forms-building
  support. 

* Improved support for Windows 2000 installation. 

* Support for setting page title using page's Title property. 

* Better support for Firefox. 

* Support for "breadcrumb" functionality to display user's
  most-recently-visited pages in a sidebar.