Is Subtext project… dead?

I’ve been using Subtext for this blog since its very beginning 10 months ago. Back then I installed what was the latest version (1.9.5 with later security-fix). I was pretty happy with it. I don’t have high needs: it is supported by Windows Live writer, is stable and just works.

However I’ve been receiving emails from people complaining that they cant post comments to my blog. I checked the issue, and I was able to reproduce it, with error message presented on the screenshot. I googled for it, but I didn’t find out anything useful. I decided to upgrade my blog installation to latest build hoping, that this would fix the issue. Meanwhile I wanted to backup by blog to BlogML, in case something went wrong, and it turned out, that this function is broken as well. I received error message complaining that operation can not be continued, because it couldn’t find some .png image. Anyway, I upgraded to latest 1.9.6 build, but it didn’t fix any of the issues. All it changed, was that now, while exporting to BlogML I get other error, saying that my connection string is wrong. This got me mad, because now I’m tied to Subtext, and there’s no other easy way to migrate to other blog engine without loosing my content.

While I was poking around, looking for solution, I discovered few things. With Phil moving to be the PM of Microsoft’s MVC framework, it looks like Subtext may be a dead project now.

Last Phil’s contribution was 5 months ago, and his last contribution to trunk was 9 months ago (roughly the time he announced he will join Microsoft). There are other contributors as well, but still, the project hasn’t incremented from 1.9.5. to 1.9.6 yet, and it’s been almost a year since last release. Fast look at their build server, reveals yet another issue: there hasn’t been a successful build of Subtext 2.0 for almost 6 months. This all makes me think, that while Phil apparently doesn’t have the time to contribute to the project, it will soon share it predecessor’s (.TEXT) fate.