This refers to very old versions of b2evolution.

This page is going to begin as my notes about using b2evolution as a content management system (CMS). I’m just going to jot down some notes as I work and later I (or someone) can come back and expand this into an article about how to use b2evolution to create what you might call a static web page.

Personman10:30, 21 April 2006 (CDT)

• Create a different blog for each top level page. The bloglist can serve as your navigation.
• Disable commenting, pinging and trackbacks in the Advanced settings of each blog.
• Set posts per page to 1.
• Strip everything out of your template that you don’t want, like includes for arcdir, linkblog, remove plugin calls for categories (or just disable those plugins). Leave the archives block in the sidebar (see below).
• Use post by post archiving mode. Now the archives block is a list of all of your posts, aka your sub pages.
• Make the archive plugin call look like this:

<?php 
  $Plugins->call_by_code( 'evo_Arch', array('title' => '<br />', 'more_link' => '' ) ); 
?>

• I manually wrote links to the two RSS feeds I wanted to make available. One is recent posts from the News page and one is recent posts from all blogs, so people can get notified of any changes to the site. I had to manually edit the rss skin to override the backoffice setting of only using one post per page.
• Linking directly to the contact from for one of the users can make a nice Contact Us page. Use mod_rewrite to make it a nicer url.
• For any internal links that I put in posts, I linked to the final url, but I used a renderer plugin to search for the final url and convert it to the development url. When the site goes live I’ll just uninstall that plugin.
• Spell check, weather and poll plugins come in handy.
• $Item->edit_link() makes it easy to jump right to editing a page. I removed the date, author, category, etc, but I did leave the edit link. The depreciate link could be useful, too.

Plugins/features that would make this an even better CMS

• The ability to switch from ordering posts by date to ordering them manually using drag and drop or up/down buttons. As it is now, you can edit the timestamp, which works ok.
• An archive plugin that doesn’t use depreciated functions. I was able to hack around to get nice permalinks in the archive. The normal post-by-post archive gives a permalink that ends with "p28" (where 28 is the post id) rather than the post title.