Dear SysCP-community,

after a long time of adding a lot of new features, endless bugfixing and two developer meetings (sponsored by SyGroup and Key-Systems, see Sponsors), we are proud to announce the release of SysCP 1.4.

It's been over eight months since our last release but we guarantee you - the waiting was worth it. SysCP 1.4 had more than 800 revisions in SVN, which is a third of all commits SysCP ever had.

These are the top SysCP 1.4 features:

• APS: The Application Packaging Standard found its way into this release. Let your customer install Blogs, Guestbooks, Boards with just one click. See RadiatioN's APS handbook for more information.


• Billing-Module: Florian Lippert - founder of SysCP - wrote a complete billing-system for FORMER 03 (see Sponsors) which is now fully integrated into SysCP. The module let's you manage top-level-domain templates, exact settlements, invoices and much more. Thanks to FORMER 03 who donated the work on this feature.


• Autoresponder: Out-of-office or vacation notifications are more and more important for business. Therefore this feature has now been implemented within SysCP to provide you and your customers the ability to easily create such autoreply messages.


• Cronjob: The heart of SysCP has been completely rewritten and got lots of improvements and bugfixing including suexec-, fcgid- and lighttpd-support.


• Dovecot-support: Thanks to jamiewolf, SysCP now also supports the dovecot mailserver as alternative to courier. Dovecot is an excellent choice for both small and large installations. It's fast, requires no special administration and it uses very little memory.


• Email-Quota: Give each customer a specific mailbox-size with just a few settings in SysCP. Available for courier and dovecot.


• FCGID: Run PHP-scripts in a safe environment - each customer has its own php-starter-file and php.ini.


• IPv6 improvement: SysCP now can fully handle IPv6 addresses for nameserver and webserver. Ready for the future!


• Lighttpd-support: Often requested and finally implemented - lighttpd support for SysCP. Lighttpd is a fast and easy to use webserver and a worth alternative for Apache2.


• Logging-system: See what's going on - with this feature you can easily log actions of customers, resellers, admins, updates and the cronjob.


• Security: To secure the data and values in the syscp-database, we now use the php-filter extension to check the validity of any given data to syscp.


• Settings-Page: Our new improved settings-overview page has been categorized and provides quick On/Off-switches for extra features.


• SSL: Use ssl-encryption for your webserver, mailserver and ftp-server - everything through SysCP.


• Traffic-visualizer: Shows the customers a graphical overview of their traffic-usage. Thanks to toby and falzo, who originally posted this mod in our forums.


• Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron): SysCP now also features configuration-templates for Ubuntu 8.04 - thanks to monotek who submitted these to the bugtracker.


• Usability: Many interface-improvements makes the usage of SysCP very easy and userfriendly.


• Bugfixes: A lot of bugs have been reported by users and testers - thanks at this point for reporting - which lead to more than 390 codechanges (according to diff).

SysCP 1.4 can be downloaded from files.syscp.org. The direct link is: http://files.syscp.org/releases/tgz/syscp-1.4.tar.gz
We also provide packages for Debian and Gentoo on our downloads page: http://www.syscp.org/download.html

Please note that the Debian Repository now also supports secure apt. You'll find the public key on the downloads page.
As Debian Sarge isn't supperted anymore we also decided to drop support for it. We are currently investigating Debian Lenny and plan to support it in one of the next releases.

Some personal words from me: The last few months were extraordinary for me. I want to thank everybody in the current SysCP team, atari, d00p, EleRas, jamiewolf and RadiatioN for their great work. It was always a pleasure to work with you, and I hope we'll do many more releases together.
I also want to thank all of you who have contributed to SysCP by writing endless tickets and bugreports, sending patches and new ideas, testing the code and of course all of you who are using SysCP!
Last but not least I want to thank our sponsors (http://www.syscp.org/sponsors.html), who provide us with all the gear we need to keep up our work.
Thank you all, we hope you enjoy using SysCP 1.4.

We wish you a very nice 1st advent,
Flo and the SysCP-team