Here are a couple of explanations about the design philosophy of b2evolution.
While we value web standards -- all web standards -- we also value reality. And in the real world a lot of people use non standard compliant tools like IE6...
So, we try to comply to web standards as much as possible but when something just won't work as the majority would like it to in a standard way, then we do any integrism about it.
We want to make b2evolution available to the broadest range of users. In this respect, we use the very common PHP + MySQL (LAMP) platform.
Furthermore, we take care in only using versions of PHP & MySQL which are commonly available on a wide majority of hosts.
Though b2evolution originally started as an evolution of b2/cafelog, we found out that the legacy codebase was unable to handle the scalability, security, functionality and versatily we were expecting from b2evolution.
So, little by little we rewrote all of the core of the application. As of August 2006 the legacy code is less than 5% and b2evolution has not much left in common with its ancestors.
We are very vigilant in keeping the codebase clean from now on.
The efforts put into cleaning up the code lead us to not integrate any further hacks into the application. If you want to add functionnality and make it publicly available, we suggest that you start by taking advantage of our plugin framework.
