It's that time of year again, when I get to work on new features (instead of supporting the old ones). With a major change to the version number of the way I took the opportunity to introduce major improvements too. ModSecurity 2.0.0-dev1 is available right now and it offers the following major improvements:

• Transaction scoring.
  
• IP address tracking and blacklisting.
  
• IP address scoring.
  
• RPC API.
  
• Functions (e.g. you are no longer confined to using only regular expressions in rules).
  
• Real-time Black List (RBL) support.
  
• Completely re-written response buffering code. It is now more robust, consumes less memory, and able to put a limit on the response size.
  

The new features are properly documented so you shouldn't have any problems trying them out. I will follow up on some of them here, to explain why I think they will change how you view ModSecurity.

P.S. There is no support for Apache 1.x in this development release.