What Is It?

b2evolution originally started as an evolution of b2/cafelog, the same birthplace for WordPress. The developers eventually discovered that the legacy codebase was unable to handle the scalability, security, functionality and versatily expected for b2evolution. So, little by little, the application core was rewritten so that by August 2006 the legacy code is less than five percent of the original core. Now based upon a framework known as “evoCore,” this blog application is freely available for anyone to use. It is dual licensed so users can choose to apply it under either the GNU GPL or the Mozilla MPL licenses.

Who Is it For?

b2evolution is designed to work for anyone from the novice blogger to IT professionals. To this end, b2evolution uses PHP4 and the MySQL (LAMP) platform available on just about any Web host server. The efforts put into cleaning up the code lead its developers to not integrate any further hacks into the application. If you want to add functionnality and make it publicly available, they suggest that you start by taking advantage of their plugin framework.

Blogging newbies can type a post into the b2evolution form, hit “post this,” and the blog is published automatically on the Web site. Average bloggers can take advantage of advanced browsing, RSS and Atom feeds, skins and themes and plugins. Advanced bloggers can compare b2evolution to Movable Type, except that “b2evos” can run b2evolution on any Web hosting service. These users can utilize multiple blogs, advanced categorization, and upgrade this blog software easily. IT professionals may want to know that b2evolution is a medium scale CMS centered around the Blog concept, fully featured with multiple blogs, content and presentation separation, full user management, full internationalization (i18n), workflow management… and extending towards features normally provided by Wikis, trackers or hierarchy driven CMSes. b2evo is so W3C standards compliant that it is used by the W3C.

Features

b2evolution includes all the features of traditional blog tools, and extends them with evolved features such as file & photo management, advanced skinning, multiple blogs support as well as detailed user permissions. The advanced plugin framework allows users to extend the application with virtually any feature required. The software is localized in several languages, and uses can grant permission for several users and authors to read, write, moderate, or fully customize any number of blogs.

Anything that a user can find in the WordPress software can be found in b2evolution, including spam filtering, keyword search, protected posts, smiley plugin, complete file manager and more. It comes with an easy installer and many users may find b2evolution packaged in their CPanel or Fantastico Web host management system.

Compatability

Though most people will run b2evolution on Linux with the Apache Web server, those are not requirements. It is possible, for example, to run b2evolution on Windows with the IIS Web server. In any situation though, users will need to utilize a Web server that features PHP 4.3 or above, or MySQL version 3.23 or above. Version 1.8 b2evo often requires more than the default of 8MB of PHP memory. To change this, users or server administrators need to change the “memory_limit” php.ini value to e.g. 16M. Directions for this application are available on the b2evolution site. A note to IT professionals: b2evolution also uses a DB abstraction class which will make it easier to port to another DBMS.

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