We are pleased to announce, Backlight 6 is available now!
Purchasing Backlight 6
If purchasing Backlight for the very first time, get Backlight 6 here.
If upgrading from an existing version of Backlight:
- Log into your existing Backlight admin.
- Visit the Backlight Modules page.
- If updates are available for your current version of Backlight, update to the latest available version.
- Find the upgrade banner on the Backlight Modules page, or look for the "upgrade available" notice in the footer of your admin screen.
- Click the link to purchase the upgrade. If you are eligible to receive a discount, the discount will be automatically applied.
For more information how to upgrade from within Backlight's admin, see our blog post from last year, Cheaper, easier upgrades to Backlight 5. The process is the same for Backlight 6.
New in Backlight 6
Here are the highlights.
New "Kookaburra Blog" module
The new blogging module provides a convenient way to share updates and work, and is a great alternative to Wordpress. Support is provided for multiple blogs and flexible organization between topics and sub-topics. Blogs bring across the authoring options from Kookaburra Journal, including embedding photos and albums. Blogs excel for posting news and updates, logging events, making announcements, journaling, photo blogging, etc. - the sky is the limit! The new module provides full RSS support so that your audience can stay up-to-date on your latest news and updates.
Visit our wiki for additional documentation for Kookaburra Blog.
Search improvements
Backlight 6 adds new options for ordering of the Search results, including ordering by title and ordering Alums and Photos in chronological or reverse-chronological order. Search now includes Album Sets. An option has been added to disable Search caching so that users see the latest content on sites that provide rapidly-changing content.
New menu structure
The menus and pages within the Designer and Publisher modules have been reorganised so that you can better find your content and how to design your site.
Contact forms
A new option has been added to enable a Honeypot on Contact Forms. The messaging for reCAPTCHA 2 and 3 has been improved to help simplify configuring spam protection. Emails no longer include the customer’s email address in the reply-to field, improving deliverability.
Other improvements
Backlight 6 includes numerous tweaks and bug fixes, and will provide ongoing support for upcoming PHP versions. (edited)
Things to know about Kookaburra Blog
By way of keeping expectations in check, there are some things that WordPress users may be expecting that cannot be found in Kookaburra Blog. There are no post comments, no tags, and no ecosystem of third-party extensions.
Composing posts with Kookaburra Blog is the same as composing essays with Kookaburra Essay, except that published posts appear chronologically in a feed.
In fact, you can copy-and-paste essays into blogs, or blogs into essays. The toolsets are the same, and the content is interchangeable.
Blogs and Essays offer two different organizational paradigms for your content, and you will likely find that one or the other is more suitable for a given piece of content.
What next?
As usual, there is more to come. Throughout the lifecycle of Backlight 6, we will continue to work through Kookaburra's roadmap, and will continue to improve the new Kookaburra Blog module.
Come shout at us in the forum, and let us know which features and improvements are most important to you.