Simple Machines is proud to announce the release of SMF 1.1 RC2, the second (and final) release candidate for SMF 1.1, this New Years Eve.

There are numerous changes from the preceding Release Candidate 1.1 RC1 including the release of the new default "Core" theme. This theme introduces a whole new look to SMF, using tabs for the navigation making it look original and easier to translate to other languages. The previous default theme and the classic theme are still both included in this release. The old default theme has been named back to its original name "babylon" and the classic theme stays the same.

Some of the other notable changes in this release are:
AJAX editingEdit a post without page reloads
Double click to edit topic subjects on message index

Added new search features includingSearch within a topic
Search within personal messages
Search participation levels are now shown
A new feature to create a custom index for searching messages, and more.

Most Online Today and Most Online Ever has been added to the Info Center.

But there were also numerous bugfixes including:
Package manager bug was fixed.
Deleting empty categories bug fixed

To ensure the most optimal preformance the following changes were made:
Optimised the tables for holding "topic read" information
The search engine was rewritten to better accommodate the fulltext and custom indexes
Added cache support interface in admin panel where you can activate different accelerators.
Made it much easier to integrate SMF with other software.
Help files converted to template and language strings.
Ensured SMF is MySQL STRICT compatible.
The copyright text is now one line only.
Added a Private Messages link to the menu.

Installing/Upgrading information
Upgrading from your current version of SMF to the latest version could not be simpler, just follow the standard procedure of executing upgrade.php. But, please remember to make a backup!! The upgrader will upgrade any installation from YaBB SE 1.5.5 all the way up to the latest version of SMF. You can always find information posted here about things like installation, upgrade, and more.

Users with large boards
This release has huge optimizations in the log table structure to reduce the ongoing operating load on your server. However, to achieve this saving the upgrade has a lot of work to do - which for boards with more than 75,000 posts may take quite some time. Please bear this in mind during the upgrade - try to do it at a quiet time if at all possible. In most cases, it will take up to an hour to upgrade, but it could take several. Remember, the script has timeout protection and auto resume - so just get it started and leave it to do its job. We've added progress bars to the upgrade script to help give you an indication of how things are going!

Theme Authors
There have been a few theme alterations with the arrival of the new default theme. If you are having any problems with existing themes then read the topic theme alterations in RC2.

Attention
While we are confident that there are no major problems with this release, we want to remind you that it is still not to be considered stable software. We do not recommend its use in "live" situations and if you are not comfortable with using this Release Candidate we advise you to wait until the release of the final version before using the 1.1 line.

Download SMF1.1 Release Candidate 2

Thanks,
Simple Machines

You can view the full announcement by following this link:

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=62731.0

Regards,
The Simple Machines Community Forum Team.