Switching to b2evolution

Posted by Andreas on Friday, February 08, 2008 at 11:16 (CET)

Finally, today I dumped my WordPress installation and switched to b2evolution. Playing around with b2evolution for the last few days, I am surprised how such a nice blog software could exist without me noticing it earlier.

Unlike WordPress, b2evolution has cleanly written structured code and lots of more features (and you don’t get new security issues every week or so). Sure, there aren’t as many plugins and themes available yet, but skins and plugins are well structured and easy to learn, so it was no problem at all to get all the features.

Migration was pretty easy. I just installed an export plugin to WordPress that exported all postings into MovableType format and imported that data with the b2evolution MovableType import function. All postings, comments, trackbacks and categories were converted and I later added tags to each posting manually.

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5 comments

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• Francois wrote about 8 hours later:

Thanks for the kind words about b2evolution! :)

Being a little curious: why did you go through the MovableType format instead of using the WordPress importer? Is there something the WP importer wouldn’t do?

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• hari wrote about 9 hours later:

You could have also used my WordPress to b2evolution converter which would have directly exported your WordPress posts to b2evolution.

I wrote my own converter to move my blog to b2evolution as well and I agree – it’s a fantastic blog software – tons better than WordPress.

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• ¥åßßå wrote about 17 hours later:

Congratulations on seeing the light ;)

¥

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• Andreas wrote about 24 hours later:

Yes, indeed I could have used the WP import directly. However, I didn’t want the import to overwrite my categories/settings/users I already had created in my new b2evolution installation. Therefore I chosed to go the long way round and export to MovableType. MT is a human-readable format and so I was also able to easily modify some post contents via search&replace with sed (like changing a category or modifying the html formatting of code snippets in posts).

Btw, I still wonder how to get rid of the duplicate post headlines when viewing a single post (one h2 and one h3.bTitle with a clickable link). Any ideas?

B2evolution is great – the only thing I was missing while configuring it, was a feedburner plugin. If I’ll find some spare time, I should perhaps look into how to write a plugin.

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• Andreas wrote 1 day later:

@Francois: Mhh, it looks like I didn’t get a pingback of your post. Looking at the html source of my blog, there isn’t any pingback link given. Inserting it into the skin like the b2evolution manual states, leads to an empty url ($Blog→disp( ‘pingback_url’, ‘raw’) returns an empty string).

Searching the web, I found out that pingbacks were removed from b2evolution quite some time ago. If this is still the case, it’d be too bad. Having automatic pingbacks is nice, since most people don’t care about copying the trackback url when writing to their blog.

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