Posts Tagged ‘b2evolution’

Over the last couple of years I have launched a few web projects. Some have been neglected and abandoned do to lack of interest or time, but others I have continued to maintain. Over these few years I have tried many different blogging engines and content management systems with varied results of success. Since I have documented my work and experience with Linux, particularly Debian, it thought it would be a good Idea to document the my work and experience with Drupal, and other CMS programs. Below is a list of CMS and Blog engines and a sysnopsis of my experience with them.

Joomla
I have tinkered with Joomla over the past couple of years to develop a social networking site that never got off the ground. Joomla is one of the most powerful and extensible CMS programs out there. There are countless third party extensions for Joomla to make it do close to anything you might need it to. There are also many free and professional themes for Joomla. The drawbacks to Joomla I have encounters is that extensions do not always integrate well with each-other and since the shift from 1.0 to 1.5 the framework has change enough that many extensions have not been revised for 1.5 compatibility. Even though there is a legacy mode to use 1.0 extensions in 1.5, they results of doing so has been hit in miss. Joomla can be stunning and intuitive to the end user, but administration of Joomla is not always a straight forward, and with all the option available managing it become a time consuming task for me.

Jaws CMS
Jaws excels as being simple and straight forward. It does not do a whole lot, and the extensibility of it is determined by plugins developed by the Jaws teem. The advantage is that the code and interface is clean, and straight forward. I have used it for a basic static information sites for non-profit organizations and my own personal website. There are not many plugins or themes for it, but for a simple easy to publish and maintain solution it does it job very well.

TikiWiki
I experimented with TikiWiki for a little while. Initially I was impressed with the collaborative features it had, and it robust features which came out of the box. I was also overwhelmed by the amount of features offered out of the box and annoyed that it weighed in at 80mb once installed on my server. To make things easier it has preset templates for different persposes, such as a personal blog and static site, to a comprehensive collaborative wiki like site. One I tried to customize it a little more for my project, an archive of band discographies and biographies, I found the wiki style was not quite what I needed for this particular project. TikiWiki would work great for one of those collaborative fan websites about TV shows, or Video Games, or even for a Linux Distribution site, complete with wiki, forum, and file manger.

WordPress
It does one thing and does it very well, Blogs. I have used WordPress for this blog in the past, but migrated to another system a while back. I still maintain WordPress blogs for a few of my projects, and have installed and configured WordPress for friends. It has many different plugins available for it from third party developers with varying quality of usability. There are thousands of free wordless themes available on the net. With the new 2.8x + releases managing plugins, themes, and upgrades of the system and installed plugins has become easy and intuitive. It is obvious to see why this has become the most widespread open source blogging engine out there, it is intuitive for both the simple end user who wants to journal their ideas and for the more advanced system administrator to work with.

B2Evolution
this is the blogging engine I am currently using for Oojah tec as of 20th of December 2009 (This Might change in the future). B2e, as it is abbreviated, is designed with multiple blogs in mind. However, it does not work as well if you want to have many separate blogs with different authors, but if you want to have different blogs with different subjects which integrate with each other in a neat fashion. I switched from wordrpess to b2e because I desired to blog about more then Linux and technology at the time and wanted to integrate blogs about politics, food, and music. This never happened, and I have stayed with it. There are not as many plugins or themes available for b2e, but I have found it to be easy to manage my blog posts and comparable to Wrodpress in some ways. It may not be as user-friendly for the end user as WordPress, but I have found its management to quite robust.

Drupal
With a new project, I have decided to use the Drupal CMS. I have tried Drupal in the past, but at the time found the learning curve to be too steep and intimidating. Now that I have learned the basics of many other CMS programs I am beginning to understand Drupal, and will provide some tutorials on it in the future.

The original intent of this blog was to just catalog and odd assortment of computer tips & tricks, recopies, thoughts about music, movies, and TV, and raving rants on politics. For whatever reason the first month has been primarily focused on Linux, computers, and technology in general. I have been pleased by the amounts of linkbacks i have gotten, the comments shared, and the overall daily hits I get.  It has been some great momentum for me, and other blogs I have attempts in the past have fallen flat on their ass.

I still want to explore the other avenues, but do not want to detract from the tech related topic but have a separate space entirely for the other topics without having to use yet another blog interface. I had tested b2evolution in the past and was impressed with its ability to implement multiple blogs seamlessly into one interface. I had once tried to maintain a multi-user multi-blog site with WordPress MU, but quickly found the MU edition lacked a lot of the polish and control offered by the single user standard edition. Now, my Oojah blogs will only have one author, but I wanted to give each general topic its own look and feel and keep them separate in some ways, but still part of the same site.

I installed a test run of b2evolution to get a feel for it, and see what changes may have been since the last time I checked it out. It provided me just the kind of interface I wanted and had some nice features already built into it, like a general stats engine.  Now the big question was how am I going to transfer my WordPress posts into a new b2evolution installation. Within b2evolution’s admin interface I clicked on Tools then Misc tab. Under the heading WordPress Import i found a hyper link to a database conversion tool. Everything said it worked without flaws and I confirmed the success by checking my Blog. Didn’t look like anything had happened. On a hunch a created my first blog on b2evolution, Oojah! Tech. Now I looked in Posts/Comments and everything including comments, categories, and tags had converted.

Now that I have successfully converted all my posts, comments, categories, and tags from WordPress to b2evolution I noticed there is not nearly the amount of themes availible to b2evolution that there are in WordPress. I had also fallen in love with the them Smilies Army by Ccucu. Fortunantly, b2Evolution had a tutorial on how to convert WordPress themes to b2Evolution skins.  However, i could not find the main loop string talked about in the tutorial, and I could not seem to get it to work. So Sadly, I had to hunt for a b2evolution theme I liked, and sadly there is not much of a selection and many of them are boring and do not reflect the pazas I liked about Smilies Army. So I am stuck with a boring theme, which I plan on editing later to ad some flare to it.