Yesterday I upgraded the blogs to b2evolution's newest release candidate. The most obvious changes are the skins now, the update breaks compatibility with the old system, it'll be a lot of work to bring the old crystal skin back so I'll stick with this one on my blog for now, and try and put together a better one for the other blogs and the Gamercast website over the next couple of weeks.

The new way the skins work is a lot better now, and provides much more features too. For example now you can use the control panel to add custom HTML into the page, or add plugins and arrange them onto the page.

There's a rating system now, as well as a tag cloud (which I'll enable once I get more posts tagged), it is quite a large update and brings it up to date with other blogging solutions.

Windows Live Writer still doesn't work properly, I'd like the XMLRPC stuff sorted out, but things like that typically are low-priority. There's also the good old fashioned date bug that has cropped back in somehow.

All in all a good upgrade, hopefully the release version isn't too far off and it can polish things up a bit.