I have been testing development and release builds of dasBlog 1.7 for the past week or so. There are a few of us running it on our live sites to make sure everything’s working as expected and to provide real-world feedback.

This version – spearheaded by developers Omar and Scott and incorporating the work of several others – simply rocks.

There are a large number of performance improvements (it’s a lot faster and uses less resources on the server) and feature additions/enhancements. You can read about all the changes on the dasBlog wiki page for v1.7. Some of my favorites are the ability to post drafts without actually publishing to the live site, RSS 2.0 enclosures, referral spam protection,

One thing that I just added to this site with the latest build is live support for the Movable Type Blacklist, which is another mechanism to kill referral spam before it happens. There’s also the ability to block referrers from being listed by keyword. It’s all pretty cool.

It’ll be done soon, and when it is you’ll want to check it out, regardless of whether you currently use dasBlog.