Billboards

In a previous post someone asked "Having started building a game level, one thing I'm missing are billboard/lookat objects. " to which Lioric replied:
"Yes, they are in the Pro version, i will consider making them available in CE" This was a year ago.

I have the pro version and don't see billboard support either in the plugin or in the loader. If it were supported, the loader should have the string 'billboard' and it doesn't.

Do I have the wrong version of the loader? Was this a feature that used to be supported but was removed?

This was supported with the previous Ogre engine version, in the update to the current Ogre engine version, this support was disabled because of interface changes

No user has asked for its support since then (consider that advanced billboards can be made with vertex shaders now), so probably it was not updated on the list

Is this (billboards using the fixed pipeline) a feature needed by your project?

Yes, I need the default ogre billboards. For now I will just do it myself with per-object properties and parsing.

some simple billboard functionality would be handy, vertical rotation and free rotation.