Upgrade to b2evolution 1.8.2

I’ve upgraded my blog software to b2evolution 1.8.2 (Serenity), from 0.9.1 (Dawn). Featurewise it looks a reasonable improvement so far, as you’d expect with the version jump.

The whole project looks quite healthy, with the documentation now in much better shape than before, two new releases in quite quick succession, and a much better plugin model enabling easier community contributions. It still trails vastly in popularity behind WordPress, but that alone has never had much impact on my choice of software.

b2evolution has been one of the more annoying applications to upgrade. The directory is always given the same name in each version, which means you have to give the old (live) directory a new name, then extract the files, then do some more renaming again to keep things functional while working on the config. At least that’s how I do it – rather than follow the dubious advice in the docs of simply deleting the old version!

Other annoyances are that skin modifications are basically hacked into the template, so they need to be manually redone everytime you upgrade skins, and that all my stats have gone. The statistics in 1.8.2 are much more complete, but I’d have hoped for some sort of integration of the old stats. It was actually the pain of moving the stats that stopped me considering a move to WordPress a while ago 🙂

Things were a little broken for a while, and I still have to redo some of my custom skin modifications, but generally everything seems to be working again!

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