Despite some common misconceptions, snort is enjoying an active development cycle (the joys of open source software). Version 1.6 was released on March 20, 2000 and work is being started on version 1.7. Some of the features being worked on for 1.7 are:
address lists
port lists
dynamic rules
stuff I can't remember till I pull it off of the mailing list
IP:netmask format
and lots of new plugins