Brian of Memenet is offering free hosting to anyone wishing to run a b2evolution blog! :yes:


Brian's offer here is verrrrrrry cool! B) Not only because it's free, but also because it works perfectly well and fast! Want to check out for yourself: here's the demo blog hosted by Brian's Memenet.


So now you can get a top class blogtool with top class hosting, all for free! How cool is that? B) Now we leave it up to you to make a top class blog out of it...! ;D


However, if I were you, I wouldn't wait until it's too late... :!:

Looks like the Echo Project Roadmap is getting a pretty wide acceptance in what we probably could call the ~`blogging industry'~ by now.


I definitely plan to support Echo in b2evolution... RSS has been such a mess for such a long time... something really has to change...


(I hope they'll move this project to some decent place though... the project is still small be the Wiki that hosts it is already a headache to navigate... :>> but I won't say more on this... since it's been up for 3 weeks now I think and I still haven't moved on with the new b2evo website :. )

Blogs, as most current web applications, need to perform some caching of their pages on the server, in order to reduce webserver load and respond faster to client requests.

It looks like most people are quite happy with caching static versions of their pages for some defined amount of time. This method has often been called something like "half-baked/half-fried" in reference to the long running baked (static) versus fried (dynamic) discussion.

We actually think of it as "baked on demand"... but regardless of what we call it, we think it's not a satisfying solution!

With b2evolution, we have done some experiments caching blog homepages, which is already enough to significantly reduce server load and response times, since a very large portion of requests, including first visits, start with the home page.

However, this really makes the home page (or other pages we might apply this to) too static for many uses:

• We want to log some stuff in realtime
• We want new user comments to show up instantly (or at least, with a very short delay)
• And most of all: We want pages to be customized for each user: display new posts since last visit, display his personal choice of categories, etc.

Caching a whole page for every possible combination seems plain stupid. (And it is!)

Actually, the only smart caching mechanism one can be satisfied with in high-end web-applications is block-caching.

As a matter of fact, a web page can almost always be considered as an assembly of different blocks. Some are static, some are dynamically updated several times a day, some are related to the user himself and some are so dynamic they change everytime the page is displayed, no matter what! By caching each of these blocks individually when it makes sense and rebuilding only those necessary at a given time, you can then reconstruct your whole page dynamically significantly faster than if you had to reconstruct all blocks from scratch everytime.

And there you have it: performance and functionality.

Of course, it's also much more complex to implement than any other caching mechanism... BUT, you can count on b2evolution to implement something like this in the future!

Thanks to Brian LARTER from memenet offering hosting to the b2evolution project, we now have an official b2evolution.net website with a lot of horsepower under the hood! :D


First two concrete applications already available are:


1. An online running demo of b2evolution where everyone can try it out.


2. Full featured support forums like the good old original b2 ;)

By popular demand, b2evolution 0.8.0 is now publicly available!

You can get it here!

If I told you it's so good you'll never need to download anything else, you wouldn't believe me... and you're right: you'll want next version too! :)) Nevertheless, you may want to check out what others have to say about it! ;D

b2evolution 0.8 will come with blog skins (evoSkins).

What are blog skins?

Well basically if you've used any skin-enabled software (like WinAMP) you probably have an idea. ;)

Bloggers using b2evo will be able to select a complete look & feel for their blog by just clicking on the "skin" they like the most.

b2evo will come with a few selected blog skins from cool people who already allowed their design to be included in the release package. B) Hopefully, new skins will be made available in the community so bloggers not knowing or willing to design their own will have a great choice available... :D

The other benefit of evoSkins is that your readers can also choose, from a selection of skins you provide, which one they like the most! :D

(Of course, this is optional... in case you don't like the idea! ;) )

What about my current blog template? :?:

If you already have a b2 blog template and just want to upgrade, you can just reuse it without worrying about skins.

Alternatively, you can turn your existing template into an evoSkin (instructions provided) and take full advantage of the evoSkins skinning system.

What's the difference between evoSkins and a CSS style switcher? :?:

Good question! Why do we need evoSkins when we already have CSS? :)

As a matter of fact, a blog skin can be as simple as a custom CSS design. But evoSkins can also provide more variations than what you can do with CSS. Here are a few examples:

• Some evoSkins may have popups for comments while others display them inline
• Some evoSkins may have a very light HTML footprint for use on Palm and mobile devices and others may have a full-featured output
• Somes evoSkins may use plain standard HTML/XHTML, others XML, others WML, others cHTML, and others even FLASH! (=> BTW, if you are a Flash designer and want to work on accessibility compliant Flash Blogging, please contact me! :) )

I'll put up a demo as soon as I have a minute. I'm a little overloaded by the upcomming week-end right now... :roll: