Today BlogEngine.NET 1.6 is available to everyone as announced here.
The two big features are a new Comment Management area to view, edit and delete comments across all posts. This also includes a new automated comment moderation system. Just like how you can build custom Extensions, custom filters can be built and plugged into the event system when a new comment is posted. BE.NET 1.6 ships with two custom filters – a filter for Akismet filter and one for StopForumSpam.com. It’s quite slick.
The other notable feature is Multiple Widget Zones. This has actually been in the code base for several months now. I blogged about Multiple Widget Zones back in April.
If you’re upgrading from BE.NET 1.5, there are a couple of changes to be aware of, including one change you must make related to the ExtensionManager sub-folder in the App_Code folder. Simple upgrade instructions are available here in the documentation.
A more complete list of features and changes in BE.NET 1.6 can be found here. It’s definitely a worthwhile upgrade I recommend going to.
The next version of BlogEngine.NET has been released and is available for download. This new version features several new upgrades including support for IIS7, a much newer version of the tinyMce WYSIWYG editor, support for WLW 2009, compiled extension support, and nested comments to name a few.
Arguably even more important for BE.NET users since the last release is the growing number of available themes, widgets and extensions for BlogEngine. A few noteworthy places to get themes is from this site that has aggregated themes from several locations (live previews available), from another theme aggregator with live previews, or directly from onesoft who has adapted several themes for BE.NET.
The documentation has also been updated and moved with this release. The new location is now at CodePlex.
If you're already using BE.NET, upgrading should be pretty painless -- especially if you haven't done too many customizations to files outside your theme. If you're looking to start blogging, BlogEngine.NET is a great blogging platform to go with. It runs right out of the box, and since it's open source, you can optionally customize any part of it.
BlogEngine.NET 1.5 can be downloaded here.