PHPFox 4.1 Released

PHPFox, the popular social network builder, has just released its latest version in the form of PHPFox 4.1.

The platform comes in two flavors; Nebula and Neutron, with the latter being their newer and more modern offering. Recently, PHPFox appointed a new Community Manager and scrapped their developer fees in order to encourage third party app and theme development.

As well as rolling out a new default theme and a couple of extra features, the PHPFox team have also announced a shift in focus for upcoming updates.

Focusing on Features

With this release, PHPFox have announced that they're moving away from maintenance builds, and are now shifting their development focus into the creation of new features. Sounds like good news to me.

The biggest improvement that PHPFox 4.1 brings, is a new default theme using the Bootstrap Framework. According to PHPFox, “this will allow designers to create many exciting new themes based on the already very large database of themes available to Bootstrap.”

The new default theme looks to be based heavily on the latest Facebook design. Not necessarily a bad thing of course, considering that most online community users will appreciate the familiarity.

In addition, PHPFox 4.1 introduces the feature to relocate cover photos for a users profile and a notification when there are new feeds on the dashboard, without the need of refreshing the page.

Here's what PHPFox Lead Developer, Raymond Benc, had to say upon the release.

This release not only marks our first wave of new features under development but also includes the coding skills of our new developers that will be taking our product to the next level over the next few months.

We are currently working on 4.1.1, which will be a maintenance build that will include additional improvements to our new theming system. Simultaneously, we are starting the development of the 4.2, which will include a heap of new exciting features.

Interestingly, PHPFox also announced that they will now close down their public Github repositories in order to improve our internal quality control.

So, new developers, and a renewed focus on features for upcoming versions, and a serious move to protect internal development. Exciting times seem to lie ahead for PHPFox users.

To find out more about PHPFox 4.1, check out the official announcement.