I was asked what I thought of B2 the other day in one of my com­ments. Here’s what I wrote in reply.

I really do like B2. When I decided I’d like to get into this blog­ging stuff, I looked at a few, but didn’t really invest­ig­ate too closely. More a case of read­ing through fea­ture lists, look­ing at the matur­ity of the products and get­ting a gen­eral feel for the ‘polish’.

I chose B2 partly because it had the best feel to it, and because I’d not done any PHP work for ages.

Since then, I’m really impressed with it. There is quite a com­munity built up around it with lots of sup­port, Michel and Mac­shack are very respons­ive. More import­antly for me, plenty of hacks, mods and add-ons are being developed. I’ve con­trib­uted to a few, and cre­ated at two myself.

The code is not as clean and well struc­tured as I would like, but the up com­ing ver­sion 1 is a com­plete re-write using a tem­plate based system.

After see­ing my blog, my step-son Steve decided he wanted one, and it was no prob­lem to set him up as a sub­do­main on my host using B2. Since then I bought him his own domain and host­ing (for his birth­day) and trans­ferred his exist­ing site over to the new one with no prob­lems. I know MySQL quite well so it was no prob­lem to update the abso­lute paths in his data to be rel­at­ive for the new location.

Now my 11-year old grand­son has star­ted his blog, again as a sub domain on my host. Whilst he doesn’t update it as often has Steve or I, he does enjoy mess­ing about with it.

All in all, I can­not recom­mend B2 highly enough.