After some time in the oven 1.0 Rel 15 is ready for use (or so I think) - This update adds lots of new functionality to the forums, such as categories and forums arbitrary ordering, skin use (4 skins provided), abiliy to add/edit any skin, no more "corner images", zforum displays the rounded images using good ol' CSS (which allows for skin customization) and several other goodies.

As for bugfixes, well, the ">" and the "<" are now "properly" rendered (for use when pasting those nasty tracebacks in a topic), removal of IP showing fo the user, "hot" topics are now flagged with a "red" envelope icon, more security added and countless small changes aimed to performance enhancements.

Upgrading:

If you are updating zForum from version 1.0.8 to this version (1.0 rel 15) you need to run two SQL patches, the 1.0.9 patch and the 1.0.15 patch.

If you are upgrading from 1.0.9 through 1.0.14 to this version (1.0 rel 15) you need to run the 1.0.15 SQL patch only.

For those installing zForum for the first time, the standard schema_mysql.sql or schema_postgres.sql already contains all the patches.

Changelog for this version:

Version 1.0.15
--------------

- Released TBD
- Forums and Categories display can be sorted arbitrarily, controlled via
  administrative section
- Skin Management implemented, Forum administrators can enable system wide
  skins and optionally give registered users the ability to change their own
  skins
- Administrators can now allow users to either add or only reply (or both) to
  any forum in the system, this is useful, for instance, if you want to use
  the message boards as a blog system, where only admins can add topics (the
  owner) and users (either anonymous or not) can respond to them only.
- "Hot Topics" finally works, Administrator controls the number of "hits" that
  the topic must have in order to visually mark the topic as a "Hot Topic" in
  the "view_forum" page
- Search back to operational status
- "Quick Jump" bug fix, drop-down only shows the list of forums which the user
  is allowed to add/edit topics or view access only (read-only).
- Fixed ValueError condition on "fixTableBreaks()" where the error could be
  triggered by an esoteric condition.
- Experimental change to zf_parse (the one module in charge of the
  no-less-than-important task of preventing html injections in the posts, to
  allow html code to be processed but not rendered (before all the html code
  passed was being silently dropped, but this caused some problems when the
  users were posting, say pieces of code))
- IP address on a topic is now available only to administrators
- Update SQL schema: schema_mysql_patch_1.0.15.sql and schema_postgres_patch_1.0.15.sql

Feedback is, as always, appreciated.

Release 16 Update:

Release 16 came out just two days after release 15, it is mainly a minor revision, and its main change was to remove the cookie dependency of zForum to handle the skins, all skin information is now stored in the zope's SESSION object, much cleaner if you ask me, and more "web browser friendly" (hear that? Opera and Safari), where Cookie changes are not too well handled by these browsers, a minor speed enhancement in a form of a SQL index added to one of the tables has also been added to the patch file. Please post your questions in the forum if you have any, regards,

-- sb