It has been nearly 6 months since Checkmate was released and it has gone under a few updates and been downloaded a couple thousand times. It has been featured on Smashing Mag, Web Blog Tools, and several other sites and now it is getting a major update.

I’ve been promising this for awhile and finally got the time to spend a few days making changes, fixes, and redesigning. I still don’t have a release date planned, but testing should begin pretty soon. I’m happy to say the new version of Checkmate is going to well surpass the first one while still keeping things simple for tweaking.

Checkmate 2.0 has gotten a fresher look, new menu, new icons, cleaner and more usable all around. Some of the changes are minor and some are a huge slap in the face. Checkmate 2.0 also addresses some issues people had like pagination, image floats, etc.

The theme options page has been completely re-done with new options available. Checkmate 2.0 will be even easier to customize than it’s predecessor. There are some new widgets and almost all of the old widgets have been updated.

There is a little taste. This may be the last chance you have to request features or submit bugs to be fixed, so comment away.