All my hard work on CodewiseBlog (a lot of hard work, believe me) is finally taking shape in a form ready for release. I just got done committing a handful of changes to the Subversion repository and tagged the trunk as release 1.0.0-BETA-r0. I also changed blog.codewise.org so it no longer uses the original CodewiseBlog system but uses the new version instead. It will always use the latest stable version.

The software is licensed under the GNU GPL and is free software for all. There's no good documentation yet, and I'm going to bust out the pen and paper hardcore over the next few weeks and try and document it all before I release it as 1.0.0 final.

So what is it, and why should you care? Good question.
CodewiseBlog is a nice blog system. It's got everything I'd ever want in a blog system, it runs fast, it's simple enough that changing things in it doesn't give me a huge headache, and it's über customizable. What more could you want?
An overview of the critical features:

• Multi-User

  Thismeans that you install CWB once on your server, and then if you're like me and host websites for several of your friends, they can have their own blogs powered by CWB all using the same codebase. No more making dozens of updates when a new version comes out. Make the update once and get on with other things.

• Skinnable

  CWB's skin engine, which I nicknamed "Voodoo" because it almost works like magic, means serious business. CodewiseBlog's appearance is completely customizable through its skins. I dare you to find a more powerful skin system that's as easy to use and is implemented as cleanly as Voodoo is. :D

• Sweet Control Panel

  I'm especially proud of the user control panel. Through it, you can write your posts, edit them, change the skin, and change your user info, all without ever touching a MySQL database. It's painless.

The list of things left to do before a final release:

• Write tons of documentation
• Make a real front page, with the latest posts from all users.
• Write an installer
• Add page to the admin control panel for adding new users.

Yeah, that's a lot of stuff. If anyone finds this interesting and would like to suggest features and/or help out with the project,feel free to contact me. My contact info is listed on my user page.