Unlike the Bush Administration, who usually announce bad news on Friday afternoons, Wichert Akkerman chose this past Friday afternoon to announce the release of Ploneboard 1.0-alpha.  Ploneboard is the next-generation web forum product for Plone, and you can download it from Plone.org if you want to give it a whirl.

As the name implies this is not a final release but a first development release, intended further testing and
translations.

A lot has changed since the last release (0.1-beta). Most of the work has taken place under the hood: the code has been completely refactored. A couple of user interface improvements have also been added: threaded conversation views, a mini-kupu for editing comments, translatable templates (Dutch translation included) and editing and removing of comments.

There are a few missing features that will be included in the next alpha
release:

* comment moderation
* better user interface for editing and removing comments
* use mini-kupu more often

There's been a tremendous amount of pent-up demand for a clean, simple, modern Plone forum product, and it looks like Ploneboard is poised to deliver on its early promise.   It still needs some bug-fixing and general cleanup, and it's definitely not ready for production use yet.  But it's time to do that open-source thing and get lots of eyes on it.

Big love to Wichert, Tim, Alexander, Helge, Geir and all the other folks who have put a lot of effort into this important product.