2.0 is a mere days away now (possibly even hours; I may start transitioning the new platform tonight). Here is some info on the upcoming version (both the positives and negatives):

• 2.0 *will* allow free custom templating (although it will be limited to 1 per account). There was initial talk of taking this feature away, but the response from the community made me reconsider... and we will definitely offer free custom templating for all free users.
• A new templating engine. Sadly, all you people with custom colors and templates will have your stuff reset to default templates. To provide a better templating engine, I rewrote the templating engine from scratch with new tags with more options. Because of this, you will have to recreate all your custom templates. However, I will try to build a crude converter script that will switch the tags over ... but this will probably be an 11th-hour feature and may not be available immediately after the launch of 2.0.
• We scrapped all the old layouts and created a few new ones from scratch. As I get more time, I will make more templates for all accounts, both paid and free.
• The color scheme tool has largely been revamped and now only will allow you to fix up relevant styles on your template.
• The control panel has been revamped and has more logical navigation (and is a heck of a lot easier on the eyes!). There are not many new features in this release; 2.0 was geared more to make the existing product better more than anything.
• Your RSS feeds will be moved. More on this shortly.
• We have dropped FOAF and OPML support temporarily from all accounts.
• Backups will now work (as will changing your username; both features have been broken for some time now). We removed the RSS file generation from the backups; backups will now generate a ZIP file of all your entries in HTML format. We have also lowered the time between backups; for free accounts, you may create backups every 10 days while paid users can create backups 3 days.
• Due to some technical complications, we will be dropping crossposting to Xanga (not that this feature has been working or anything). They do not have an official API for posting to their site, and this causes problems ... the initial release will have *no* crossposting features included yet, but we have developed "true" crossposting features and we will allow all Tabulas users to crosspost to their Livejournals, Deadjournals, GreatestJournal, Blurty, and Blogger accounts (even better than before because there will no extra clicking required!)
• Each users' galleries will be much easier to navigate from here on out; each individual image will have a next and previous link which will allow you to quickly navigate your gallery. We will also be providing links on each image to the *large* version of the image; this is to offset those complaints that "Tabulas resizes my images and I hate it!"
• The "Make Tabulas Stop Sucking" checkbox option in your old control panels has finally been removed (although it may be added again soon!)

When 2.0 launches, I expect there to be bugs that I did not foresee. Because I am the sole developer for Tabulas, I didnt' have to adequately do bug-testing to the level I'd like. I know there are no major bugs, but I would appreciate your patience during the initial days when people report bugs ... if you find any type of bug during the initial few days, please do not hesitate to post the bug as a comment in this journal.

That's all I have for now. So please be prepared for the new Tabulas 2.0; I truly feel this new version is a hundred-times better than the current version ... thanks for your continued support of Tabulas.com and I hope I can live up to my end of the bargain by producing a product you truly enjoy using.

- Roy