b2evolution is one of the hottest blogging platforms available today, and for good reason. b2evolution offers something for everyone from the blogging newbies to the seasoned IT pros. This blog is run on b2evolution. Being more grounded in Joomla i thought long and hard before deciding to run my personal blog with b2evolution.

Follow up:

This blog was all but set up in Joomla, however the lack of pinging, and multi blog management caused me to look around to see what else might be available.

An hosted solution such as blogger, wordpress, typepad, myspace and facebook were out of the question as i wanted to control the blog on my own server. These are managed blogs, so all the setup and technical maintenance is managed for you. Just you template(blog design) and start adding content.Most of these services can be setup and running in a matter minutes.

Self host blogs that are hosted on your own server included Movable Type, WordPress, Textpattern, b2evolution, and Nucleus.

All these packages each had there benefit and drawbacks however None have the power and flexibility of b2evolution. I especially like the ability to manage multiply blogs on different host with only one installation. This and the built in pinging ability were enough to move me from Joomla to b2evo for a stand alone blog. The up coming Joomla 1.5 promises to address some of these short comings but as a pure blogging platform b2evolution runs circles around the current and next version of Joomla.

Some b2evolution features include:
* Advanced browsing (paged, calendar, categories, search…)
* Extended and multipaged posts
* Image/file upload & management
* Multiple and sub-categorie
* Draft and quick publishing
* RSS & Atom feeds
* Automatic pinging of blog directories
* Multiple blog support
* Multiple user support
* Multiple skin support
* Localized in many languages
* Multilingual blogging
* Web standards compliance with integrated XHTML checker
* Clean search engine friendly permalinks
* Advanced user permission management
* Private/protected posts
* Open/closed/disabled comments
* Trackback & feedback
* Integrated hitlogs and stats
* Robust antispam features
* Plug-in architecture
* Advanced rendering plug-ins

In conclusion B2evolution is a heavy duty blogging engine with the ability to serve as a lite CMS system, however it lacks the horsepower of a full blown CMS such as Joomla. Ranked among self hosted blogging engines b2evolution is definatily the alpha dog.

As i create more post and delve into the inner workings of b2evolution i will report my findings here. In the mean time surf over to b2evolution.net and take a look.