Mike Little’s Journalized

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.