1) The cvs site was down for several days due to a security incident.
2) I'm going on vacation from July 15 to 25.
3) As soon as I'm back, I'll get an .LRN 2.1.2 beta out asap
4) The steps after that depend on exactly what must be in the next release, which I'm still not clear on aside from the ongoing theming work.
5) I'd like to propose have big status meetings on IRC every week, inviting people from all of the different active institutions, a few of which I've heard from directly and others some of you have been contacting. At a minimum, we can ask people to manually test the new beta, including upgrading.