I am happy to announce the 1.2.3 release of the Alpha Framework has be completed. The focus of this release was on improved usability and user interface design. The following major enhancements are included:

• All standard pages are now using HTML5, and are passing validation.
• Alpha now supports UTF-8.
• A generic search interface has been designed, which will allow support for alternative search engine providers like Solr or Spinx with future releases.
• A new CMS editor has been added, with real-time Markdown preview functionality.
• Alpha now uses Bootstrap 3 in place of JQuery UI for standard interface widgets.
• The unit test count has been increased to 230.

You can find more detailed information from the change log and the updated user documentation, while Alpha 1.2.3 can be downloaded from here.

The next minor release will focus on performance improvements.