b2evolution is a strong evolution of b2 version 0.6.1.
Having been sick of Blogger's famous bugs and outtages for too long, I switched to Michel V's b2 in December 2002.
b2 was already a great blog tool and the future looked even more promising! At that time version 0.6.1 had been released for almost two months and everybody was expecting a new release soon...
Unfortunately, that never happened! Even worse: Michel V, the project maintainer and main developer virtually disappeared! We were literally worrying about what could have had happened to him. I personnaly got no an answer to any mail I would have sent to him. :(
Time was passing by and little by little, the b2 project started looking like a dead end. A few people had already created forks in an attempt to add features. One was b2++ but it was very complex to install at that time and felt really weird... at least to me and a few others. Another one was WordPress which was announcing a few interesting things but hadn't actually released anything by then...
By the end of April 2003, I just couldn't stand it any longer... There was so much more I wanted from b2 and absolutely nothing had moved positively for more than 6 months!
I could have switched to another blogtool again, but for some reason I decided to give it a try and just started hacking in the features I thought I desperately needed. I recall my first goal was to support multiple blogs so I could move back home another blog I was still maintaining in Blogger!
A little bit to my own surprise, I actually enjoyed refreshing my PHP/MySQL knowledge and decided to immediately follow-up on this by implementing some other features I considered paramount: Latest comments, multiple categories, realtime statistics, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks on same page, performance optimization, and a few more...
By May, when I realized I had been working almost three weeks non-stop on an evolution of b2, I started considering releasing it publicly.
Ironicaly... a couple of weeks later Michel made a short comeback and proclaimed WordPress as the "new official branch once they get a release out"... No need to say, WP rushed out their long awaited release.
I was undecided for a while... Matt from WordPress asked me to virtually take everything I had already done and rewrite it into WordPress... Hum... I eventually decided that was too much work for too little benefit. So far I had been doing this for fun, but doing it twice really didn't sound like fun any longer...
I thought it was more productive to continue on the b2evolution branch... and here it is. I'm quite happy with it. I bet you'll be too! ;D
Enjoy! And don't forget to check back for new releases ;)
-François.
You may also want to check the feature list.
