Own your data, Own your site!

First, b2evolution is a self-hosted solution. This means that, at any-time, you are in full control over your domain and over your website’s data, privacy and intellectual property.

No plugins required!

Second, compared to other self-hosted solutions, b2evolution is the most integrated you will find. No extra plugins or modules are required to build a full-featured website. This means that, any time you want to upgrade for better security or for new features, a single button press will upgrade everything at once. No plugin incompatibilities. No dependencies issues. b2evolution’s goal is to make the maintenance of a self-hosted website as simple as can be.

What’s different?

Compared to just-sign-up-and-build-your-site solutions, downloadable software like b2evolution gives you real and complete control over your website, including limitless customizability and extensibility.

Compared to other blog engines, b2evolution is designed from the ground up to handle multiple blogs. Additionally, b2evolution’s philosophy is to include everything you need right out of the box. You likely won’t need to search, select, install and maintain extra plugins.

Compared to other content management systems (CMS), b2evolution lets you build your site through the concept of assembling Collections. Each collection can be a Blog, a Photo Gallery, an Online Manual, a discussion Forum, or something you customize entirely.

Compared to other Forum/online community engines, b2evolution completely integrates your forums and user management with the rest of your site. If a user comments on a blog post or likes a photo in a gallery, he does so with the same account as he uses for posting on the forums. You have one central user base and permission management.

Compared to typical 3rd-party mailing list management solutions, b2evolution comes with its own fully integrated emailing engine which lets you send email campaigns to your most up-to-date user base. Your users’ email addresses and preferences will always be up to date. No more importing, synchronizing or missed opt-ins/opt-outs while dealing with a 3rd party email list manager. And of course, no need for users to sign up twice for email and for forums.

Be the master of your domain! 

Your domain is your identity. You don’t want to let someone else decide what can or cannot appear on it (including ads…)

Unlike online blog tools or site builders, b2evolution runs on your very own domain and website. You are in full control. And your possibilities for customization are limitless.

b2evolution is designed to be set up quickly on any standard PHP/MySQL hosting account.

Multiple blogs done right! 

Why mix your cooking recipes and your travel photos with your more serious pro blog on your site if you could have them neatly separated into 3 different sections of your website?

b2evolution will let you run multiple blogs side by side, as different folders of a site, different subdomains or your domain… or even as completely separate domains if you wish so.

Unlike other blog tools, b2evolution lets you do all this with a single installation, a single database and a single web hosting account. This makes maintenance so much easier! No more week-ends spent upgrading all your blogs and sites separately!

Additionally, members of your site can sign in once and be recognized on all blogs/sections with the same user account.

Much more than blogs… 

Maybe your portfolio or even your vacation pictures would be much better organized as photo albums, rather than as a linear blog feed? b2evolution can handle photo albums.

How about adding a reference section on your web site? Content organized into a book-style hierarchy rather than by date? b2evolution can handle online manuals.

How about adding a forum for your visitors to start new discussion topics instead of just replying to your blog posts? b2evolution can handle forums too!

Bring your community together! 

In addition to allowing public discussions in forums, your users can create user profiles and send private messages to each other.

This is all possible without additional plugins and without the need to integrate a third party solution.

Beyond publishing: marketing 

Have you considered staying in touch with your users through email newsletters?

Unlike other solutions, b2evolution doesn’t require that you export your user’s emails and import them in a third party tool. You can create campaigns directly in b2evolution and target them at any subset of your users, using all the criteria available on your user profiles.

Plus your recipient base is always up to date since it’s based on your live user accounts and user profiles. If someone unsubscribes, no syncing is necessary. It does’t have to be complicated.

b2evolution delivers your emails too. b2evolution has a full built-in emailing engine, handling your email campaigns as well as your transactional messages (password confirmations, new reply notifications…) with complete support for delivery incident management (full Return-Path handling).

b2evolution also integrates server-side analytics and goal tracking.

A truly integrated solution 

Contrary to popular belief: plugins are not your friends! They break, they create incompatibilities, they create security holes (third party developers do not all code to the same standards) and they are a pain to keep up to date.

Having a plug-in framework is great, but it should be reserved for last-resort cases / cutting-edge implementations. We believe there is no reason to withhold common features from a full and clean integration into the system core.

Here are a few examples of features included in b2evolution that would require extra downloads and maintenance on other platforms:

• Total caching for best performance (page cache, block cache, client-side cache)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Forums
• Photo galleries
• Email campaign management
• Collaborative work / publishing workflows
• Advanced user permissions
• Server side analytics
• Efficient anti spam features
• And more…

Hassle-free upgrades 

As outlined above, unlike other solutions, b2evolution does not require any third-party plugins, themes or extensions to reach it’s full potential.

This means you can get your site up and running faster (you don’t need to hunt for anything, you don’t need to pay for additional features, you don’t need to deal with compatibility issues) but furthermore, it will save you a lot of time, effort and pain every time you try to update your site!

With b2evolution, everything gets updated at once, in one single swoop and without any compatibility issues.

Easy to customize 

There are multiple ways to customize your b2evolution website. Many of them are redundant, so you’re guaranteed to find one that fits the level of skills and effort you’re willing to put into it.

Here is a rough breakdown of customization options:

• You can easily switch skins for each blog/collection/section of your site;
• Most skins have settings to let you change the colors, fonts and graphics [extended in v6];
• Everything is displayed though widgets that can be reordered and reorganized at will [extended in v6];
• You can edit the CSS files of your skins;
• You can work with Sass (SCSS) [v6];
• Some skins are based on twitter bootstrap [v5.1];
• You can edit the PHP templates of your skins;
• You can create custom templates;
• You can create custom skins.

Winning the SPAM war! 

Any semi-popular website is a target of choice for spammers. They will send their robots and their low-cost employees to post comments with links to their sites (comment spam), create fake profile and engage legitimate users through private messages.

b2evolution has deployed an arsenal of counter-measures for all these nuisances.

Undesired activity may be blocked by keyword, IP, country and/or behavior. Users can also report suspect activity and we took care to make cleanup as seamless as possible (1-click AJAX deletes with possibility to undo in case of error).

Future proof 

b2evolution will run on almost any standard web server featured with the LAMP environment: Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP. See requirements. Because this is the dominant platform for websites today, it means it’s a future proof choice for the long term. You are guaranteed to find a plethora of web hosting providers any time when you need one and any country where you’d like to host your site.

b2evolution also leverages the jQuery library for javascript and twitter bootstrap as a CSS framework [v 5.1]. These are also ubiquitous de-facto standards that make it extremely easy to work with b2evolution.

Easy to maintain 

Because b2evolution is a single software package for your entire web site, with no added plugins required for most uses, it makes it extrelmely quick, easy and seemless to upgrade and keep up to date.

It can generally be done in 5 minutes at the push of a button. Then you go home and relax while others spend their week-end upgrading their sites one by one, trying to fix plugin/theme/extension incompatibilities along the way.

Industrial strength! 

Members of b2evolution’s team have been dealing with web deployment, maintenance, performance and security issues since 1997.

Streamlining the upgrade process and minimizing the need for system administration is one of our top priorities.

b2evolution lets you focus on building a site, creating a community and developing your business rather than doing technical maintenance work.

"I found B2Evolution after Wordpress was getting ready to do another update and blow up my website up yet again.
I installed b2evolution and working out the bugs (Proper PHP, site screw up, etc), I checked it out.
Quite the funky backend until you figure out how they do things, then it all makes sense.
Next step was to brick the site up so I could plan ahead for problems. I was amazed that under normal operations I didn’t have any issues. I had to do really do stupid stuff to break it.
For fun, I found older b2evolution CMS, and upgraded them to the latest. I upgraded 3 times. Everything works fine.
I wish I knew about b2evolution 2 years ago, My site would be heavily populated by now.
I am extremely impressed with B2Evolution.
Keep up the awesome work!"
– Mikes

100% Free and Open-Source. 

Not just for a trial. Forever. No matter how such traffic or how many users you will get.

b2evolution is a true open source project. You can download it, use it, modify it, redistribute it freely. (GNU General Public License). You have the liberty to customize it to infinity.

Also, for open-source connoisseurs, we’re now on GitHub too.

Note: just to be clear: b2evolution is the free software you install on your website to give it all the features you need. You need to bring your own domain and your own webhosting. If you don’t have a domain or a web hosting account yet, we have a few recommendations for cheap web hosting solutions as well as quality web hosting solutions.