Oxwall audience is so diverse, I don’t even know where to start today. It’s September 1, so some of you go back to school (Congrats! Try to look at least half-interested), while some of you send your kids back to school (Huge congrats! You can finally win back some time for yourself). But there’s one event all of you will hopefully celebrate together with us: it’s September 1, and it’s Oxwall 1.8 beta day!
We’ve been long developing a few big things that didn’t make it to earlier minor releases. Finally the stars aligned, and we got them ready to be unleashed upon you in one release. That’s Oxwall 1.8.
So, what’s new? In short: new theme and many admin area improvements. In detail? Follow along:
New default theme: Simplicity
Our new theme to succeed the Origin theme is here. It’s Simplicity and it’s called so for a reason. Reflecting the latest trends of reducing visual clutter, it’s really all about highlighting content and helping your users take advantage of everything your Oxwall site has to offer. Stand out from the crowd!

Simplicity theme covers the desktop version and the admin area so far. It will support mobile version in 1.8.1.
New admin area navigation
At some point a piece of software becomes so powerful that only looking at all configuration possibilities becomes daunting. With Oxwall we tried several approaches to reorganize the admin area to make it intuitive without reducing what it has to offer.

Having touched the topic of navigation we also reorganized some admin interfaces in a different way to make administering your website as easy a daily task as possible.
Admin dashboard widgets
Continuing the quest of admin area improvements we are introducing something that makes Oxwall even more open source in the ideological sense: Dashboard widgets.

With version 1.8 your dashboard comes prepopulated with important statistics widgets like user registration, finance, content, and moderation. Now developers can take advantage of this new feature to create more widgets essential to your daily routine as admin.
Content graphics management
And the last one in the admin area for today: greatly improved management of graphic images. This interface proved to be so inefficient before, now your life as a content creator is a little easier.

Complete list of changes can be found in the changelog.
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… but hold your horses, folks: it’s a beta!
Now, to the less exciting yet very important things:
Oxwall 1.8 beta is available immediately for beta testers. All developers and designers are encouraged to test their items on the new release to ensure compatibility.
How to become an Oxwall beta tester: https://docs.oxwall.org/dev:store:beta-testers
ATTENTION: This is a beta release which is unsuitable for applying on live websites, hence we do not provide any update tools. Please, wait for the official release – it will show up as the update button in your admin area.
The official Oxwall 1.8 release is scheduled for September 8.
Thanks for creating with us!
Oxwall team