Now that LifeType 1.1 is feature complete, it is time to allow users to test the development version of LifeType 1.1. UPDATE: nightly builds working again.

The development snapshots will be updated every night (00:00 GMT+2) and the newest snapshot will always be marked as lifetype-devel-latest.zip.

At this point no more new features will be implemented in LifeType 1.1, even though there will still be some changes here and there in the core (specially in the performance area) and of course all bugs found during this testing round will be fixed.

There is a more detailed list including all new features in LifeType 1.1 in the wiki, but the most important ones include a disk-based data cache for speeding up database operations, a reduction of the memory usage (now a normal blog will only require between 4 and 6 Mb of memory to run), paging of items in the public area of the blog and TinyMCE as the HTML editor (with support for Safari!) These are just a few of the new features so be sure to check the complete list.

Speaking of features, all the most important features that were in scope for the 1.1 release have already been implemented, even though at least an interesting one has been dropped and rescheduled for 1.2. Therefore, the development team would like to encourage users to download the development snapshots of LifeType 1.1 and give them a try. We are looking for end-user feedback as well as bug reports so please use the forums for feedback and our bug-tracking system for reporting bugs. When reporting a bug related to one of these development snapshots, please also include the version number that you can see in your version.php file, in the root LifeType folder.

In order to install this release, please use wizard.php as with any release so far. If upgrading from LifeType 1.0.x to LifeType 1.1, wizard.php will also take care of adding all new tables as well as of making changes to currently existing tables. In order to upgrade from an older development snapshot of 1.1 to a newer one, just upload the newest files to the server and overwrite the old ones except your own version of the configuration file (config/config.properties.php)

Regarding templates, they should work out of the box in LifeType 1.1 even though they need to be modified in order to use some of the new features such as paging. There is a page keeping track of which template sets have been already updated by the development team. However, we would like to encourage users who have previously submitted template sets to the development team to take care of upgrading these templates themselves. Please check "Porting Templates" in the wiki, as it will contain useful information related to updating templates to make use of all new features in 1.1, and use Mantis to submit the upgraded version of the template.

With regards to plugins, there have been extensive changes to the core API during the development cycle and therefore the amount of work needed to update all the plugins is quite big. The development team has already started working on this and the status of which plugins have already been updated to work with LifeType 1.1 can also be tracked in the wiki. Please keep an eye on the "Porting Plugins" page in the wiki as it will be used to describe how to upgrade older plugins (LifeType 1.0.x) to the new framework in LifeType 1.1.

There will be no development snapshots of templates and plugins yet, so the only way to get them will be from the project's Subversion repository.

Last but not least, it is a good time to start evaluating all the changes that will be required to migrate your customized sites from LifeType 1.0.x. to LifeType 1.1. The development team is aware that some of our users have put a lot of effort into customizing LifeType to suit their needs and this migration could take some time. The development team is also working on several new sections in the wiki that will describe all changes in the API and how to migrate code to the new release. Documentation embedded in the code is already available (just run Doxygen) in the class/ folder) even though it will keep getting better as the development team keeps improving the comments.