Dev Team
General
I finally got a chance to do some work on the main website. There's no longer any php in use, which should free up some RAM. I also took the opportunity to fix a typo, add an entry to the FAQ, and add an email field to the contact form.
I also updated the features page to make it more current, though I'm pretty sure that I missed a few features that were added since the last time that page was updated. :-)
There was a stupid bug which caused archives to sometimes not be updated when a new post was added to a post chain. That bug has been squashed. All archive pages update properly when links are added to a post chain.
Post Chaining is maturing. At Eugene Volokh's request I added a bulk post chain forging page, which should make creating post chains of content that wasn't originally chained together much easier. I also added some documentation, though it could certainly use some improvement — it's really as much an attempt to get people to use it as a description of what post chaining is and what it's used for.
I'm really excited by post chaining, though. I've spent too much time jumping into the middle of discussions by following Instapundit's links only to wonder what the person wrote afterwards but not being inclined to read their entire front page to find out. I really think that post chaining will improve the usefulness of the blogosphere if its use takes off — while frequent new material is one of the great strengths of the blogosphere, it's also a weakness in that it can be difficult to keep up. Post Chaining helps to alleviate that problem without weakening the strength of constant posting and instant updates.
I've modified the post composition menu a bit to shorten the words (so that it's more friendly to small monitors) and also to add an Entities™ menu®. Now, whether you want to say $100, £55.84, ¥11,003 or €82.22, powerblogs is there for you.
(note: neither Entities nor menu is actually a trademark of anyone that i know of)
I've added a new page to the Prefs tab which allows one to control various aspects of the syndication features (Email lists, RSS, etc). It's now possible to control whether the various syndication options are used, and in the case of RSS, displayed.
Also, I've added a content template to the full content RSS feed to faciliate sticking advertisements in the full content RSS (that one was requested by Dean Esmay).
Finally, I've aggregated all of the syndication options into a single variable for the sidebar templates: [$SyndicationList$]. You'll have to reload your theme or add this to the appropriate sidebar manually, but once you do you'll never have to manually adjust the syndication links again.
I've just uploaded a bunch of revisions and tweaks, plus a few new features. It's late, so I'll say what they actually are tomorrow.
I've updated various portions of the archive generation code to use the new (category-friendly) code.
Also, for those rolling their own themes, the important variables to use in the sidebar templates are [$CategoryList$] and [$CategoryName$].
A great new feature will be coming out in the next few days. More on that as it nearly maturation.
I've added the ability to recategorize published posts via the published post editing interface. This is somewhat clumsy, but since it had to be done anyway, this will allow recategorization until a dedicated recategorization (and bulk recategorization) interface can be made.
I've just uploaded the category support code. This is still definitely in BETA, and all of the functionality necessary to support categories isn't quite there yet (most notably, recategorization of posts), but there's enough here to be useful.
Tomorrow I'll post the steps necessary to take advantage of category support, but in the interim if you're using a straight-up powerblogs theme, just re-load it and you'll get the changes to the sidebar template. (If not, and you're impatient, read the documentation in the left and right sidebar editing pages; the new variables are documented.)
Also, FYI, you can create (and delete) categories from the site-wide tab.