Finally convinced myself to postpone everything else and spend some time on updating the website. There's a mailing list now, and “Powered by” page is finally updated with a number of installations which better show off Sphinx capabilities.

With the advent of said mailing list, there now is a plan to post development updates here somewhat more regularly, ie. weekly or bi-weekly.

To start those updates, I'll shortly overview new features which are already implemented in Sphinx 0.9.8 (version currently in development). They include

• improved support for attribute updates;
• added support for 64-bit document and word IDs (so 4 billion document limit is now removed);
• added support for libstemmer which brings French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish stemming support to Sphinx in addition to built-in English and Russian stemming;
• added support for multiple-valued attributes (ie. you can now attach multiple integers, such as tag IDs, to each document);
• added support for synonyms/exceptions; it is now possible to map several different keyword combinations to one normal form (eg. map both “MS Windows” and “Microsoft Windows” to “Windows”) and also to index exceptions with special chars (such as “OS/2” or “C++”).

Even though 0.9.8 is not yet ready to be tagged “release” because of missing docs for the new features and some not-yet-implemented bits, it still seems stable enough already to be at least tried for production use. As usual, everyone interested is welcome to request a fresh snapshot. (If there's a lot of interest I think I'll be forced to tag it RC1 and release “as is”).