Hi all,
The last blog post regarding SMF's development was posted about half a month ago. I felt it'd be nice to give you lot some facts and numbers with regards to RC2's development.
At the moment I write this, 595 new entries were added to the changelog since the release of RC1, effectively bringing the number of open bug reports to 123, with only a few of them being show-stoppers for RC2. Some of the entries may describe trivial changes in the language files, but most of them describe proper bug fixes or full template conversions. Here's a geeky graph to illustrate the progress that has been made over the past months:


The last release candidate (i.e. a relatively stable version, but not quite the product we have in mind) was released on in February this year, with May seeing a security update for it. This led to confusion - why didn't we release RC2?
"Curve", is the answer to that question. It's taken us considerably longer than initially anticipated to convert every single template used by SMF. Our main priority right now is to ensure our new theme base will work in RTL languages and adjusting the our default theme (now known as Core) to work with the new base theme. We're also doing our best to ease transition for themes designed for previous versions of SMF by including a compatibility stylesheet. While this probably won't make it perfectly flawless transition, it will ensure the forum is functional at the very least.
As I know most of you just are very keen to see some of the progress on Curve, I'll go ahead and give a few sneak previews. Don't tell Compuart, though!


(Click an image for a larger version.)You may notice some non-theme related changes in these screenshots. For example, the registration section and profile fields feature recently had had a makeover.
I know most of you are eager to know when RC2 will be released. Unfortunately, I cannot say. Personally however, I am counting on a release this summer.

Aaron