Eagerly anticipated and full of great new features and enhancements, dasBlog v1.8 has been officially released.

Scott covers the details and pontificates the important readme file information on his blog. Here's a list of many of the cool new features:

New Features of Note

Anti-Spam Features

Automatic Referral and Trackback blacklist update
CAPTCHA for non-admin users (Font warping has also been increased in this version)
Logging and display of Comment IP addresses and resolved Hostnames for Admins
DasBlogUpgrader can strip spam from existing content folders
Support for rel="nofollow"

  • Ability to delete referrals and trackbacks directly from the Admin UI

Security Features

HttpOnly cookies
Admin access auditing

  • SMTP Authentication for outgoing mail

Syndication Features

Improved RSS Comments support for SharpReader and RSS Bandit
Upgraded Atom support from 0.3 to Valid Atom 1.0. ATOM Syndication permalink changes but 301 is issued.
RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 validates via FeedValidator.
Ability to mark entries as "syndicated" or not. Entries can appear on the site but not in RSS/Atom.

  • New between RC1 and Gold: Plugable, configurable pinging of Blog Search engines like pubsub and technorati.

Performance Features

Search Highlighting is optional now
Referrals are logged but not stored in XML by default. Configurable.
(This has huge performance benefits for high traffic sites.)
DasBlog Upgrader can optionally remove all referrals.
(Again with high traffic sites some folks had 5meg XML files full of referrals)

  • Theme templates are now cached in memory.

Installation Features

New VBS for IIS permissions and VDir creation
Support for running under ASP.NET 2.0

  • Support for running on Win2k 2003 without changing permissions when impersonation is enabled

Content Features

Ability to pre- and post-date entries
Permalinks based on Title and Date optional: 2005/06/06/title.aspx
Latest build of Free Text Box including ability to upgrade FTB without upgrading DasBlog.
Text Editor (FTB) supports IE7
Text Editor (FTB) supports FireFox
Blog Statistics macro

  • Mail-To-Weblog continues to improves. Works with Thunderbird.

Extensibility Features

  • Custom Macro Plugin model without recompiling DasBlog (see the source for the example custom macro)

Theme Features

DasBlog now ships with 16 themes and a Theme Combo to change between them.

  • New theme.manifest file makes themes and image assets more portable.