After a not very fortunate attempt to set up the b2evolution blog software a few weeks back that was cut short by the 9:37 event, I had another go during the week. As always with these things it took quite a while to get it right. When I did I blew it away & started afresh.
The b2evolution software has multiple domain support built in, but based on what I learned from my experiments, it is clear that the first domain has special properties and I didn't really want my other domains relying on a real domain name, so as this is my third b2evolution install and I was informally referring to it as "R3" I deployed r3.co.nz and the site is now officially "R3 (Revision 3)".
b2evolution may support multiple blogs from one software install and database, but I can't see it scaling very well for me and it is a nightmare to customise or configure beyond simple cases. Also there is considerable leakage from secondary domains back to the primary. I've asked on their forum, but no-one has bothered to reply to me.
One particularly annoying annoying idiosyncrasy is that if your primary domain name is www.example.com and www.example.net is a secondary domain then example.net is an alias for www.example.com not www.example.net. I had to use mod rewrite in my .htaccess fix to fix this.
Again my query on the forum about an official way to do this hasn't been answered.
When I tried using a pretty theme ("Skin" in b2evo talk) took me 5 hours to work out how to get rid of the tag "Follow up" inserted in the middle of my posts and in the end it was a guess after searching the documentation and the source and coming up blank too many times.
I can't get my head around the admittedly very elegant design of b2evolution templates and their documentation is a horrid mix of information about a very old version of the current templating engine and the one they replaced 4 or 5 years back with occasional references to recent changes. Sometimes it's not clear that it's talking about a back version until you are 1/2 way through.
Their forums don't give useful answers to real problems, the best I've had is that my hack to remove the "Follow up" should be OK.
I'm getting close to the point where I want to toss b2evolution ... only problem is it's the only half way decent multi-domain, multi-blog in a single database solution I can find. Wordpress' one is too new & still requires add-in mods to work.
Ranking: 3 1/2 food pellets, but only because of the lack of competition on the multi-domain front.
2 comments:
So how *did* you get rid of the 'follow up' tag? I hate it, but can't seem to lose it :/
Never mind, found it :)
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