I could not resist releasing another beta :) And there you, straight from the oven: plog-devel-20030725. Please consult the Changelog for more information on what has changed regarding the last beta, but to sum up, I'd say that it is very very close to becoming the major stable release. Oh, and support to send trackback pings ;)
Many thanks to Bradley Bliang for his registration script, that allows user to easily create new blogs in a server.

I am proud to announce that the first beta of the development version of pLog has been released. It doesn't have a proper version number (by the way, what should it be when it comes out, 0.1? 1.0??) because it is not a final version but a really stable beta. There are few little features which I haven't had time to implement but they'll be there for the final version (automatically open the links in new windows, automatic translation of smileys into icons, etc) as soon as I have time to finish them.
Other than that, this version has been in use in the project page for the last couple weeks without a glitch. It has to be noted, though, that this version is completely incompatible with the older stable version, mainly because the structure of the database has changed a lot. I haven't had time yet to write a script to 'convert' information from the old database format into the new one but that will be there in the final version too.
The package comes with detailed installation instructions that can also be checked here and as a new feature, a four-step wizard that will guide you through the process of installation. The wizard could have hidden bugs but it has always worked fine in my tests. If everything fails, a couple of sql scripts are also provided so that you can at least try to set up everything manually.
Other things that are planned for the final version are a nicer default template (do you know XHTML+CSS and want to help? drop me a line!) and a nicer set of templates for the administration interface (you'll notice that now it feels kind of "raw" ;)) In the meantime, the old default style and two more styles borrowed from The Book of Styles are included in the package.
Happy blogging!
UPDATE: Due to a bug report, reporting that urls were not properly encoded, I have made another maintenance release of the stable branch, 20030724. It is not a critical update unless you really need to have usernames with non-alphanumeric characters (for instance, "you&me" will not work prior to this release) Please report any other bugs you find. Thanks!!

Version 20030718 of the stable branch of pLog has just been released. It is mainly a maintenance release fixing a stupid bug in the code that generates the calendar, that made it not show the calenar correctly when using any other locale than English.
Other than that, it adds htmlarea, a replacement for the 'textarea' html tag. With htmlarea, instead of showing a plain empty box, htmlarea shows a real time preview of the text we're typing in a WYSIWYG maner. It also offers a toolbar with icons to change some of the text properties such as the font type, color, size, etc. Htmlarea only works with IE 5.5 or higher or Mozilla 1.3b or higher. If the browser is an unsupported one, we will still see the good old textarea. This feature comes enabled by default but it can be disabled in the configuration file.
Please leave a message in the project forums in case you have any problems! ;)