The WordPress team have announced the release of WordPress 2.6, the latest version of the popular open source blogging software.

It has only been a few months since the last major version update, 2.5 was released back in March, and this release was actually pushed out ahead of schedule according to the team.

The new release of WordPress adds many new features, including:

• Post revisioning - save multiple versions of a post while you are editing, compare and roll back at any time.
• New ‘Press This’ functionality for making a blog post directly from something you find on the web.
• Support for Gears to speed up blogging on slower connections.
• A new ‘theme preview’ function, so you can test out new blog themes without committing to applying them.

Find out more and watch a video detailing the new features on the announcement blog post.

The new WordPress 2.6 release can be obtained from the official download page.

In the last post in this multi-part series, I’m going to look at arguably one of the most popular PHP free forum solutions out there, phpBB. It is designed to be feature-rich and a complete solution for building an online forum.

It requires PHP 4.3.3 and a supported database (including MySQL, Oracle, Postgres and even Microsoft SQL Server). I’ll be covering the latest version at the time of writing, 3.0.1. As always, it’s all about Ease of Installation, Features, Extensibility and Themes.

Read the rest of Open Source Forum Shootout - phpBB

Welcome back to the open source forum shootout, here at FOSSwire. In this part, I’m going to take a look at PunBB.

Like all of the other forum solutions I’ve covered so far in this series, PunBB is written in PHP. The current stable is 1.2.17, and development work is being done on the 1.3 branch. For now, I’ll take a look at 1.2.17.

Just as before, I’ll cover the following categories: Ease of Installation, Features, Extensibility and Themes.

Read the rest of Open Source Forum Shootout - PunBB