Tonight, after a long development period, SPF has reached another milestone with the Beta 1 release of Version 4.1. This version has been running in Alpha form on our support forum for last couple of months and we feel its ready for a primetime Beta period.
V4.1 features a whole slew of new features and bug fixes. You can read about some of them in our earlier 4.1 update post.
If you want to download the 4.1 Beta 1 and give it a whirl, please visit the 4.1 Beta download page. Please be advised that while we think the software is ready for others to use, its still beta software and by nature will still likely contain some bugs and issues. This should be considered before using it on a production site. While we have done some extensive testing, there are lots of different server and WordPress configurations out there and we can’t possibly test them all. If you do download the Beta and try it out, please visit the special 4.1 Beta forum we have set up and let us know how it goes. We would like to know both the good and the bad to gauge when SPF 4.1 is ready for Gold Release. We would anticipate several beta releases during the beta program.
As a significant new release, the language files will need to be updated for V4.1. We have frozen the strings in the code at this point so that translators can begin work on translating SPF 4.1. If you would like to help out and translate SPF to another language other than English, please visit our contact form and let us know.
If you have developed a custom skin or icon set for an earlier version of SPF, it will need to be updated to be 4.1 compatible. The 4.1 Beta period will also give skin customizers a chance to be prepared for the Gold Release.
As always, we welcome the SPF Community’s feedback and suggestions for future development. After 4.1, we will have a much shorter development cycle for 4.2 and it will concentrate on improving and tweaking our current feature set. There will be very limited (if any) new features added to 4.2 as we want solidify what’s there before moving on to the next major upgrade.
Speaking of Community, I may be letting the cat out of the bag a bit prematurely, but we are currently building up an SPF Wiki site. We have the basic shell and some pages filled with content, but we have a lot more planned. If anyone is interested in helping shape and deploy the Simple:Press Forum Wiki, please let us know with the contact form or in the support forum. If you ask nicely, we might even mention the url of the SPF Wiki before its official launch – though I think more than a few people can guess the url. 😉
We hope our users find 4.1 to be a ‘Must Have’ release like we do!