Just several months after version 1.6 was released, we're happy to announce that a Release Candidate for BlogEngine 2.0 is available.
We accomplished meeting most of our Roadmap goals. The most visible change is the redesign of the control panel. Many thanks to team member Janko Jovanovic for this much more modern control panel UI. There's now a Dashboard, and new pages to View all of your Posts and Pages, which is really nice for easily being able to see your data.
New Databases
On the database side, we are now supporting SQL CE 4. This is a standalone database similar to SQLite and VistaDB. We're no longer providing updates for VistaDB, but you may update your existing VistaDB with the new DB tables & columns which can be found in the upgrade scripts for other databases we continue to provide updates for (SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite).
Features & Upgrading
A complete list of new features in BlogEngine v2.0 can be found here. It's worth noting that this version has made the leap from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5. If you are upgrading from a previous version, there's been a lot of changes to files and folders. Please see the upgrade instructions which provide a relatively painless way to upgrade. As this is just a Release Candidate, there may be unidentified problems that need to be fixed. A number of team and community members have been running the latest builds, and it's fairly solid now. If you do find any problems, please report them in the Issue Tracker.
Video
If you'd like to get an idea of some of the new features and see what the new control panel UI looks like, the 4 - 5 minute video below hightlights this.
Acknowledgements
BlogEngine version 2.0 has been developed by an unprecedented number of contributors. Switching to Mercurial for source code control has made it very easy for enthusiastic developers to create forks and contribute code. Special thanks to the following people who made version 2.0 a realization.
Download, Test & Enjoy
Download BlogEngine 2.0 RC now. If you find any problems, we really appreciate if you report them in the Issue Tracker. Again, here are the upgrade instructions. We hope you find 2.0 to be stellar!