pLog, an Open-Source blogging software platform, reaches version 1.0 milestone after almost a year of development.

The 1.0 release is built on top of the strong feature set of the 0.3.x series and adds many new features such as a friendly and completely revamped user interface, native support for subdomains, template caching and support for HTTP conditional requests, fully customizable URLs without mod_rewrite, a much improved plugin framework, custom fields in posts, support for the metaWeblog API and many more small improvements.

In addition to the new features, pLog 1.0 ships with over 30 plugins and 50 beautiful additional templates so that pLog blogs can be customized in any possible way. Examples of plugins available with pLog 1.0 include the highly requested template editor, a plugin that will allow users to use Textile, phpBB, Markdown or Wiki markup, one to put all new comments in a moderation queue, or several new additions to our anti-spam arsenal.

Please download pLog 1.0 and spread the joy! Plugins are described in our plugin repository and can be downloaded here, while templates can be downloaded here.

For those of you new to pLog, upload the files to your server and run the wizard.php script. Detailed installation instructions are available in the wiki.

For those of you upgrading from an older 0.3.x release, please make a backup copy of your database and follow the upgrade instructions as described in the wiki. Old templates should work just fine with the new version even though some features might be missing. While plugins from the old version will not work in pLog 1.0, most of them have already been ported to the new framework so it is only a matter of updating them.

Our forums and bug tracker are still open so please let us know there if you have any suggesion or would like to report any bug (when reporting bugs, use "1.0-final" as Product Version)

The pLog project is proud to announce that the final release date for pLog 1.0 will be April 1st (no, it's not a joke!) unless major problems appear during these last few days before the release. The beta testing rounds have been a great success and we think that the code is ready for prime time. From here we would like to thank all those of you who have helped so far.

Code in our subversion repository is in state "frozen" meaning that nothing else will be changed before the final release (save one or two small fixes, if needed) This means that the beta packages that will be generated until the release date can be considered "release candidates" and we have even removed all debug and logging stuff from the code. In the meantime, if you find any more bugs please do not hesitate to report them via our bug-tracking interface at bugs.plogworld.net.

For those of you who want to help the project but do not know how, you can help us by promoting pLog in your company, community or just with your friends. We have created the pLog 1.0 Communications Kit, which is a package that includes all you need to promote pLog: logos, badges, and several documents and slidesets in PDF format with more information about pLog (and a formal press release too) If you don't want to download the whole package, you can also download only the logos and banners. If interested in creating alternative logos in other languages or with new slogans, we have also made available the original PSD files (to be used with Photoshop or GIMP) Finally, the rest of templates can be found in the plog/misc/comms-kit folder in our subversion repository (there you will find the PPT, DOC and Office files used to create the documents)

We are also aiming to translate the comms kit to as many languages as possible so if you want to help, let us know!

PLog 1.0 is nearing its final release and it is about time to start working on new translations. So far, the only complete ones are English (en_UK), Chinese (both zh_TW and zh_CN) and Norwegian (no_NO). The French (fr_FR) translation is in test status although it is already included in the nightly snapshots. The Spanish (es_ES), Russian (ru_RU) and Catalan (ca_ES) locales are currently under work but they are not yet available.

The development team would like to see as many translations as possible in the final release so you've got still time! We are planning to have a final release around the beginning of April so that still gives us about 3 weeks left. Please see this post or this other post for more information on how to get your hands on the latest development version... Would you like to help us to pLog make one of the best blogging tools out there? What are you waiting for!? :)