Also, please try the search field you’ll find at the top of these forums. You might find your question has already been answered.

Additionally, have you checked the user manual ? It has a search field too, which might prove incredibly helpful. Also if a page only partially answers your question, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom.

But I can’t log in to post into the forums!

There are a couple of solutions to this: check out this page.

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.

b2evolution is an evolution of the original b2/cafelog software, which is also the ancestor of WordPress.

The philosophies of b2evolution and WordPress have evolved in very different directions.

WordPress(.org) relies heavily on third party skins and plugins to let you build your blog platform. While this led to a wide variety of themes to choose from as far as the looks of your site are concerned, it also led to a great deal of confusion as far as the features of your site are concerned: picking the right plugins can be daunting and keeping them up to date and/or secure pushed many users into nightmare territory.

b2evolution, on the other hand, aims to integrate all essential functionality into the core so you don’t have to wrangle with dozens of plugins to run your site. The greatest gain here is that, without all those plugins, upgrades are much easier. Just click on "auto-upgrade" and b2evolution will upgrade itself without risking conflicts with third party plugins that wouldn’t be compatible with the latest release.

Of course b2evolution still does support plugins in case you need them, but most users don’t need to install any third party plugin.

Now let’s be honest: there is one way in which b2evolution may lack compared to WordPress: themes. In b2evolution, they are called skins. And while we definitely like our selection of available skins, there is definitely less variety than in the WordPress scene. Check out what we’ve got!

Benefits of b2evolution over WordPress

• (As already stated) No maintenance pain / no plugin hell
• Multiple blogs supported out of the box
• SEO friendly out of the box (+ many settings if needed)
• Optimized and multi-level caching out of the box
• Integrated Server-Side Analytics
• Integrated Anti-Spam tools (keywords, domains, emails, IPs, GeoIP, behaviour…)
• Integrated scheduler for automated maintenance
• Integrated Mailing Lists, if needed
• Integrated Photo Gallery, if needed
• Integrated Forums & Communities, if needed
• Integrated Structured Content publishing, if needed
• Integrated Multi-user & complex Permissions management
• Widget based

Migrating from WordPress

It couldn’t be easier: true to b2evolution’s philosophy, even the migration tool is included!

All you need to so is use the exporter in wordpress and then use the importer in b2evolution.

Additionally, b2evolution allows you to send newsletters to your user community and members can send private messages to each other.

+ + + + + + +

Once b2evolution is installed on your web server (or web hosting account), it will easily let you build a website consisting of any combination you choose of blogs, pages, photo galleries, forums, online manuals and more. You have full control of how small or how complex you want your website to be. You can start small (for example a simple blog) and extend it later. You can also customize the look & feel of each section with a combination of Skins and Widgets.

As soon as you have set up a prototype of your site, b2evolution will let you enter content (blog posts, pages…) and upload media files (photos, videos…) to be included in your content. Your content can be edited and re-organized at any time.

Once your content is published, visitors can leave comments on any page you choose. If you’d like, you can also let your users register an account for themselves in order to build an online community, complete with user profiles, public forums and private messaging as well.

b2evolution also provides Server Side Analytics and includes powerful Antispam tools for dealing with undesirable visitors or users.

All of this stays very flexible and can be modified at any time. This is why we call b2evolution a CCMS: Content + Community Management System.

Everything described here happens on your own website and your own domain. Contrary to other website or blog building solutions, with b2evolution everything is under your control and yours only. If you don’t have a website/domain yet, you may easily get one from our hosting partners. (They will even offer 1-click installation of b2evolution on your site to get you started even faster.)

Another noticeable advantage of using b2evolution for building your website is that everything you will need is likely to be included. You won’t need to hunt down, select, buy and maintain third party plugins for advanced features. With b2evolution, everything you need is included, right out of the box.

And it’s 100% Free and Open Source. (View on GitHub)

Organize all your contents into a complete website

b2evolution is a very versatile Content Management System (CMS) designed to organize all kinds of contents: simple web pages, blog posts, photos, videos, downloadable files (PDF, ZIP…), manuals, forums, and more (you can define your own/custom types of content). Your contents can be then combined and organized into a complete website, or – if you choose so – spread across several smaller websites in parallel.

For example, you might start with a simple blog. You just need to type something and hit "Publish now!". It’s instantly on your website!

You might then add a photo gallery. Then, you might add a reference section about your area of expertise. Then, you might want to add a forum where your community can start discussing topics of their own. Or maybe you’d like your members to be able to create blogs of their own? Also possible!

b2evolution lets you start as small as you want and grow as big as you need.

Customizable look & feel 

b2evolution will present your content using a system of skins (aka themes), containers and widgets. For example, you might use a blog-type skin which brings styling around 5 main containers: a header, a navigation menu, a content area, a sidebar and a footer. Each of these containers contains customizable widgets. For example, the main area may show a combination of the following widgets in the order you decide: post title, date, author, teaser, attached images, categories, tags. You may reorder them, remove some, or add some. For example you could decide to add a download button for each post (if relevant).

The sidebar may contain any number of widgets related or not to the main content, such as a list of categories, recent posts or even ads.

The menu may be entirely customized to provide the navigation you need.

Once you have decided on the general layout of your content blocks/widgets, It is possible to change the look & feel of your website by customizing the existing skins (CSS3/HTML5) or using different skins entirely. You may also choose to use different skins for desktop, tablets and/or smartphones in order to provide an optimized experience for touch devices and/or small screens. Of course, you can also build custom skins of your own (PHP).

Social & Community features

b2evolution easily lets you add one or several forums to your website, allowing your members to discuss various topics among themselves.

But even if you don’t want a forums section on your website, there are many other social features you can take advantage of:

• You may allow your visitors to leave comments almost anywhere (even on info pages or on photo albums if you choose so). You may even allow them to attach files to their comments.
• You can rely on b2evolution’s extensive antispam features to keep your site spotless and clean… or you can limit some operations to members only.
• You can create member accounts for your users or allow your visitors to register themselves. For added convenience, they may also login with Facebook, twitter, etc. [b2evo v6].
• Members may have an editable profile page and may appear in the site directory.
• Members may communicate privately through private messages.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can go as far as allowing your members (or members of certain groups) to create and publish their own blogs on your site.

Marketing features

b2evolution can send email newsletters to your members. Actually, it can even send targeted email to subsets of your user base through its complete campaign management interface.

b2evolution also includes goal tracking and server-side analytics.

Management features 

Registered users can have different permissions depending on the User Group you put them into or on the User Level they acquire.

You can entitle other users to create drafts in one area or your site and/or moderate comments in another. General permissions such as user management can also be assigned based on User Group permissions.

b2evolution is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

GNU General Public License

Version 2, June 1991

Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Preamble

The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.

For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.

Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations.

Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".

Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.

1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program.

You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

• a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

• b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

• c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.

In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

• a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, 

• b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

• c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.

5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.

6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.

7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances.

It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice.

This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License.

8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License.

9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.

Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.

NO WARRANTY

11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Rich & Flexible

b2evolution lets you organize your content into collections of items. A collection could be a blog (collection of posts), a photo gallery (collection of photos), a forum (collection of discussions), an online book/manual (collection of pages), etc. In each collection, contents can be tagged and organized into categories.

Your collections can be published as separate websites or assembled into a more complex website with transversal navigation.

Homepage builder

In its simplest form, b2evolution lets you create a homepage for yourself or your organization. The homepage can contain a background image and can be customized will all kinds of widgets, including text, photos, a video, a map, a contact form, etc.

And because b2evolution is designed to run multiple sites, you can actually have multiple homepage; e-g: one for each member of your family, or one for each member of your community.

Multiple blogs

Install b2evolution once and use it for 1, 2, 3... 10... 100 or even 1.000 blogs at the same time. Some universities use it for giving 25.000 students and staff a blog each!

Each blog can have a different owner and different or shared contributors, editors, moderators, etc. You can also share content (cross-post) between multiple blogs/collections.

Forums

Allow users to register on your website and provide them with a place to discuss topics that matter to them. Forums can be public or private, accessible only with an invitation.

Photo Galleries

b2evolution will beautifully showcase your photos with skins specifically designed to put images first. Add text only if you need it. If you have many photos, you can group them into albums.

b2evolution takes care of adapting the photo size to the viewing device and generating a thumbnail index.

Newsletter

Let your users register on your site and keep in touch with them using b2evolution's integrated newsletter feature!

No need to export your user base, de-duplicate email addresses and worry about users who unsubscribed. b2evolution handles everything automatically, out of the box.

New users are on your list immediately. One-click unsubscribes are immediate too.

Private Messaging

In addition to publicly commenting on posts/pages and participating in discussions on the forums, your users can also send private message to each other.

Users can also start private group conversations.

Multiple sites / multiple domains

All contents in b2evolution are grouped into collections. A collection can ba a blog, a forum, a gallery, etc.

Each collection can live on its own page, in its own folder, or on its own domain... You could also choose to display several collections on a single page.

Install b2evolution once at the root of you web hosting plan, set up as many "alias domains" as your web host allows you to, and let b2evolution take care of running a different blog/site on every domain.

Multiple users and authors

Any user can be given permissions to read, write, moderate or fully customize any number of blogs. Complete and detailed permission management is included.

Integrated stats

b2evo will show you activity graphs for each blog, including robots, RSS readers and browser hits broken down by referrers, searches, direct accesses, self-referred, etc. Also includes search keywords, user logins and more.

AntiSpam Deluxe

Effective combination of active and passive antispam measures -- including a community shared blacklist -- to block comment and referrer spam.

Plugin framework

In the occasional case wher b2evolution doesn't already include a feature you need, its advanced plugin framework allows you to extend the application with virtually any feature you may need... or simply install prebuilt plugins provided by the community.

Localized in several languages

Many languages packs are available for download. If you can't find your language, use the localization toolkit to easily localize b2evo to your language.

Workflow

For example: submitters can post drafts, then assign them to an editor who in turn may assign them to reviewers for final approval and publication on the site. Actual workflow, permissions and statuses are all up to you.

Multiple post types support

With b2evolution you're not limited to writing in-flow blog posts, you can also write random pages that you can link in the menus (thanks to widgets) and access randomly.

You can also write intro posts for each blog or even for each category.

b2evolution also has a post type for podcasts which will automatically produce correctly formatted RSS feeds for podcasts.

Attachments

b2evolution lets you attach files not onloy to posts, but also to comments. This way your users can easily post comments on blogs or in forums with pictures attached (can be configured).

Easy install & upgrade

b2evolution's installer will take care of almost everything. Basically, you only need to give it the name of a MySQL database and you're set. Upgrading is equally simple. Only heavy customizations may require special care when upgrading.

User profiles

Users can create a profile with profile pictures as well as a number of custom fields that can be configured by administrators.

SEO friendly

Each URL type can be configured. Each link type can be configured follow/no-follow. Each page can be configured index/no-index.

Posts/articles can have a `<title>` different from their `<h1>` and additional meta tag info can be configured.

Pages/posts can be 301-redirected. Other 404's can have a custom error page or can also be redirected (301, 302, 303...)

WYSIWYG Editor or not

With b2evolution, authors have a choice or using a WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE is included) or not. In that case other types of fast markup can be used: GM Code, BB Code, Markdown as well as WiKi-style markup, including quick WikiLinks.

Mass Posting

If you have a collection of texts in a text file, you can copy/paste it in the mass posting editor and it will automatically creat enew posts for you by recognizing posts, titles and paragraphs based on newlines/blank lines.

Server Side Analytics (SSA)

Identify and block spammer activity! Spammers never load the Javascript Analytics packages such as Google Analytics and stay under the radar. With Server Side Analytics you can see what they do, identify them and block them.

SSA will further allow you to track everything where other analytics packages can only track page views from visitors using a web browser with JavaScript enabled. b2evolution will track all page views:

• Even if Javascript is turned off
• RSS and Atom feed requests
• robot, crawler and spider activity
• spammer activity
• AJAX requests
• Incomplete pageloads (even if the user aborts loading the page, the view is counted)

See Manual page.

More

• Multiple & sub-categories
• Posts can have custom fields - -
• Comment ratings
• Keyword search
• Contact form
• Private posts
• Protected posts (reserved to members)
• Drag & drop widget management
• File Manager
• Automatic thumbnail generation
• User / Group management
• Users can have custom fields
• Page level caching
• Block level caching
• Object level caching
• APIs
• Optimized for search engines & advanced SEO settings
• AdSense plugin
• Task scheduler for automatic maintenance

You can think of building a website with b2evolution CMS as opening a big box of Lego® bricks.

There are many types of bricks included in the box. You are free to assemble them however you like to build the website that fits your needs.

It helps to be aware of the different types of bricks you can use…

Basic bricks for building your site…

No third party bricks required

Included: Advanced bricks for power users…

Included: Advanced bricks for email lists…

(to be continued…)

• Guided Tour
• Guided Tour - Back-Office
• Guided Tour - Taking Control

Click on each screenshot to get a high resolution version.