For someone who logs in pretty rare, the evolution of features available from the editing side is pretty amazing. Recently, the Open-site code started to become a team effort, and this is responsible for the recent changes and for the recent evolution, which could be described as spectacular in some situations.

At the end of this efforts came the official launch of the 0.5.0 version. On 21st of July, the development team released the first in what would be a development serie that will provide the testing needed in order to launch later this year the stable 0.6.0 version. You can download the package from the download directory.

The Open Site Code's main page includes links that allows anybody to see the current bugs and features, changelogs with recent changes and so on. However, from an editor perspective, it can be quite difficult to keep up with this and to make a list with only the important changes regarding the user interface and the new available editing tools.

In addition to bugfixes and localization improvements, 0.5.0 also brings some new goodies for editors. Most of those were developed by Michael Webb, who recently wrote several patches designed to improve the Open Site experience and to improve the productivity and the performance of the hard "behind the scene" work of hundreds of volunteer editors.

Among the new features super-unreviewed could be mentioned. This tool allows any editor to see submissions from the public in an entire tree. While this tool was available for any category, it didn't include its subcategories. Now, in one page, submissions from any subcategory can be viewed, all in one place.

Another useful feature gives editors better than ever control regarding how to deal with public submissions. Moving sections out or into unreviewed queues is now one click away.

Linking to other pages has always been regarded as a relative difficult process, because it involved HTML. Not anymore; due to a recent feature, editors can specify a keyword and a link, and that keyword will be made clickable towards that link in the category were this feature is used. More help about this can be found in the description of the tool.

Other improvements include a better search engine and an editor stats tool, which allows complex queries to be made againest the editor database. Due to the open nature of the code and to the open license under which it's released, such new features will continue to become available and will continue to increase the productivity of editorial activities and to bring Open Site to the next level.

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