v0.8.9 is just around the corner, and will bring several improvements.

Most important of these is a nice, automatically-generated front page, listing users’ blogs and various details. Second on the list is per-user categories. A few new template tags to allow phpBB avatars are also available (check out the comments in this blog for a preview!).

There are a multitude of other features, such as automatically cleaning up default template settings (removing things like “Author Archive”, parsing posts through the phpBB word censor, and more flexible setting of page options.

In addition, some of the login code is being moved out of blog.php other places, to improve performance, and a few key bugs are being squished.

The plan is to have it out the door by 20 Feb — or thereabouts — so, stay tuned!