Most of the materials from Seven Days has been moved to the Amara/Tutorial, which is also kept more up to date.
The road to Amara 2.0 has taken a bit longer than planned. Reminder: Amara 2.0 is just the XML core processing portion for the Akara project. For the most part we'll be referring to the project as "Akara" overall, just as the old name "4Suite" covered core processing as well as server components. Anyway, we ended up reducing our effort on the project over the summer for several reasons, but recently we've ramped up again. There is a huge amount of progress to report. In general, many parts of Amara 2.0 are at near alpha quality, and we really need to get going porting tests. I'll be sending out an updated call for testers on the akara-dev group. If you can help porting tests, please sign up there.
I've pretty much switched from Amara 1.x to the 2.x code base for all my XML processing tasks, and in terms of performance, API, features, etc. it's already more of a pleasure to work with than the older version. Yes there are still bugs, missing features and and rough edges, but it's getting very close. To showcase the many things you can do with Amara 2.0 *now*, I'll be sending a series of seven fun recipes for things you can do with Amara 2.x. I hope this inspires people to get their hands dirty with the new code.
Install notes at: Amara/Install
The seven days of Amara messages will give you some ideas exploring the new code, but you can always blaze your own trail, too. Just catch up with the very comprehensive "What's new in Amara 2.0" page.
If you run into minor, nit-picky bugs, it's OK to mention them here, or on the 4Suite Jabber channel ( 4suite@conference.jabber.org ). If you run into major fundamental bugs or feature requests that should be tracked, add them to the tracker.
We're looking forward to feedback.