b2evolution actually includes quite a few invisible features. This guide will reveal them to you so that you know they are there when you need them:

Responsive images

When you upload images to b2evolution, it will store the original high resolution file on disk but it will automatically resize it to serve an optimally scaled down version to the viewer, depending on his screen size and resolution. (Small images that would not benefit from resizing will be served in their original form).

Caching

page caching

Complete content pages may be cached to a file on disk and served very quickly to anonymous visitors instead of being re-generated from the database. Content caching is not used for logged-in users.

block caching

Blocks of content (especially widgets) can be cached depending on the parameters that govern their creation. They are cache din memory (using APCu cache for example) and can be reused to speed up some page generations.

pre-rendered content

Posts and comments are rendered by using renderer plugins. In many cases the result of the rendering is cached in a special DB table, so that the rendering does not need to be applied every time the content is displayed.

Some rendering cannot be done in advanced. In that case it is done at the time the post is displayed.

.htaccess magic

The .htaccess file is preconfigured to optimize using b2evolution with Apache 2.

SEO settings

b2evolution offers many settings to optimize the way Search Engines crawl and index the contents of your site. These settings are optimized out of the box but you can tweak them to your liking.

Background tasks

b2evolution has a background tasks scheduling and execution mechanism that you should configure to run periodically (for example every 1 minute) through a cron job on your system. This will do things such as DB maintenance, updating the antispam blacklist, and checking for returned emails to detect invalid user email addresses.

Transactional and notification emails

b2evolution sends emails to confirm account creations or to notify that there are new posts or comments you might want to read and/or moderate. There are many different possible notifications. The templates can be customized.

Mailing lists / newsletters

Your users can manage their subscriptions and you can send emails/newsletters to selected subsets of your subscribers. The system includes tagging of users depending on actions as well as very configurable automation (b2evolution 6.10+)

Return Path handling

When a system sends out email to many people, a fair number of these emails will be returned because the recipient doesn’t exist, because the receiving email system thinks its spam, or a host of other reasons. b2evolution can read and process the returned emails (from a POP or IMAP return email address) and take appropriate action.