Whisper has been mostly dead for the last four years or so. Here’s the deal:

Last winter, I inherited a small website. It wasn’t complex, but its editors did need some sort of content management. PHP was available, but MySQL was not. My usual solution, WordPress, was not going to work on this server.

I immediately thought of Whisper. I’d played with it a little back in 2003 or so, but at the time I didn’t have a use for it. I’d filed it away in the back of my mind and paid no further attention to it.

Now that I needed it, though, it was gone! The whisper.cx website was dead. Some intensive Googling finally turned up a single site that not only used the software, but offered downloads of all the old versions.

I installed it and began playing again. I realized right away that I was going to have to make some changes. My site would need a search feature and perhaps some sort of basic news capability. Also, I’d found some major bugs in the first few minutes — creating a page called “Steph’s stuff,” for example, created irreparable problems in the page database. I started sifting through the code.

By the time I’d started work on three new plugins and made big changes to the admin interface, I realized I wasn’t just customizing this thing for my site. I was working on a new version of Whisper. I contacted its first two developers for their blessing and spent some late nights wrangling PHP… and here we are.

I hope you like the changes. Let me know what you think, and visit the poll to vote on features in the next version.