b2evolution is a strong evolution of b2 version 0.6.1...
And you know what other project spawned from b2? WordPress! Read on to learn how the lives of b2, b2evolution and wordpress are connected...
Having been sick of Blogger's famous bugs and outages for too long, I switched to Michel V's b2 in December 2002.
b2 was already a great blog tool and the future looked even more promising! At that time version 0.6.1 had been released for almost two months and everybody was expecting a new release soon...
Unfortunately, that never happened! Even worse: Michel V, the project maintainer and main developer virtually disappeared! We were literally worrying about what could have had happened to him. I personally got no an answer to any mail I would have sent to him. :(
Time was passing by and little by little, the b2 project started looking like a dead end. A few people had already created forks in an attempt to add features. One was b2++ but it was very complex to install at that time and felt really weird... at least to me and a few others. Another one was WordPress which was announcing a few interesting things but hadn't actually released anything by then...
By the end of April 2003, I just couldn't stand it any longer... There was so much more I wanted from b2 and absolutely nothing had moved positively for more than 6 months!
I could have switched to another blogtool again, but for some reason I decided to give it a try and just started hacking in the features I thought I desperately needed. I recall my first goal was to support multiple blogs so I could move back home another blog I was still maintaining in Blogger!
A little bit to my own surprise, I actually enjoyed refreshing my PHP/MySQL knowledge and decided to immediately follow-up on this by implementing some other features I considered paramount: Latest comments, multiple categories, realtime statistics, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks on same page, performance optimization, and a few more...
By May, when I realized I had been working almost three weeks non-stop on an evolution of b2, I started considering releasing it publicly.
Ironically... a couple of weeks later Michel made a short comeback and proclaimed WordPress as the "new official branch once they get a release out"... No need to say, WP rushed out their long awaited release.
I was undecided for a while... Matt from WordPress asked me to virtually take everything I had already done and rewrite it into WordPress. I eventually decided that was too much work for too little benefit. So far I had been doing this for fun, but doing it twice really didn't sound like fun any more...
I thought it was more productive to continue on the b2evolution branch... and here it is. I'm quite happy with it. I bet you'll be too! ;D
Enjoy! And don't forget to check back for new releases ;)
-François.
After a while, it became clear that b2evolution and wordpress were going to focus on different goals.
WordPress would be more focused on aesthetics and little on code. Most sites running WordPress have found that they required to install numerous third-party plugins to get the results they wanted. They also require frequent security patches and updates in order to stay operational.
b2evolution would be more focused on have a strong solid framework to rely on for future developments. Most features needed for common websites are immediately available within b2evolution. The platform is generally regarded as being very secure. (b2evolution no longer includes original code from b2. Everything has been rewritten in the period 2003-2008).
You may also want to check the feature list.
