GibbonsR.net

I’ll admit it, I was a bit nervous about using b2evolution. The admin interface in wordpress had set my standards pretty high. But, much like my distro of choice, I like to choose things away from the norm. I can report that I have been pleasantly surprised.

First off the admin interface is very sharp. The new ‘chicago’ skin adds a nice tool bar type interface and a pretty good layout of everything else. While it doesn’t have some of the web2.0 features that wordpress has, that is okay. I don’t care that much about eye-candy in my admin interface, I just want a clean look and something that works. One interesting things to note here, is when create post, there aren’t tags like most modern blogging tools provides, but there are categories. You can choose your main category, and then add others, so in a sense, this provides your tagging.

Another neat feature, or at least it seems to be b/c I haven’t dived into it too much yet is the Type of post. By default everything is a “post” But you can change the type to Link, Page or Podcast by default install. You can also define your own post types, I am not sure what all this defines, but it sounds cool, and it sounds like it would display them diffently. As for static pages, in my menu bar, I have added the plugin for to display pages, and then set the post type to page. It then shows that post as a page instead of in my blog … a different school of thought, but so far it makes sense and I like it

The other nice feature seems to be it’s skinning. While it doesn’t use a default skinning engine, it seems to be a pretty simple one. They provide default layouts for all the sections, so you can just copy and paste it, or if you don’t need to modify it, you can just include it in yours. The code seems to be pretty explanatory, and without a lot of fluff. Right now I am using one provided by b2evolution install, but I think I might look into convert a CSS theme over to b2evolution in the near future

Overall I can say I am very happy, and I am still just scratching the surface as to what it can offer. With multi-user and multi-views, the possibilities are really endless. (Okay not quite endless, but close to it)