Important information

Blog B DOES contain a few posts in the ‘b2evolution Tips’ category.

All these entries are designed to help you so, as EdB would say: “read them all before you start hacking away!” 😉

If you wish, you can delete these posts one by one after you have read them. You could also change their status to ‘deprecated’ in order to visually keep track of what you have already read.

Multiple Blogs, new blogs, old blogs…

By default, b2evolution comes with 4 blogs, named ‘Blog All’, ‘Blog A’, ‘Blog B’ and ‘Linkblog’.

Some of these blogs have a special role. Read about it on the corresponding page.

You can create additional blogs or delete unwanted blogs from the blogs admin.

Skins, Stubs and Templates…

By default, all pre-installed blogs are displayed using a skin. (More on skins in another post.)

That means, blogs are accessed through ‘index.php‘, which loads default parameters from the database and then passes on the display job to a skin.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to use the default DB parameters and want to, say, force a skin, a category or a specific linkblog, you can create a stub file like the provided ‘a_stub.php‘ and call your blog through this stub instead of index.php .

Finally, if you need to do some very specific customizations to your blog, you may use plain templates instead of skins. In this case, call your blog through a full template, like the provided ‘a_noskin.php‘.

You will find more information in the stub/template files themselves. Open them in a text editor and read the comments in there.

Either way, make sure you go to the blogs admin and set the correct access method for your blog. When using a stub or a template, you must also set its filename in the ‘Stub name’ field. Otherwise, the permalinks will not function properly.

About evoSkins…

By default, b2evolution blogs are displayed using a default skin.

Readers can choose a new skin by using the skin switcher integrated in most skins.

You can change the default skin used for any blog by editing the blog parameters in the admin interface. You can also force the use of the default skin for everyone.

Otherwise, you can restrict available skins by deleting some of them from the /blogs/skins folder. You can also create new skins by duplicating, renaming and customizing any existing skin folder.

To start customizing a skin, open its ‘_main.php‘ file in an editor and read the comments in there. And, of course, read the manual on evoSkins!

Apache optimization…

In the /blogs folder as well as in /blogs/admin there are two files called [sample.htaccess]. You should try renaming those to [.htaccess].

This will optimize the way b2evolution is handled by the webserver (if you are using Apache). These files are not active by default because a few hosts would display an error right away when you try to use them. If this happens to you when you rename the files, just remove them and you’ll be fine.

Clean Permalinks!

b2evolution uses old-style permalinks and feedback links by default. This is to ensure maximum compatibility with various webserver configurations.

Nethertheless, once you feel comfortable with b2evolution, you should try activating clean permalinks in the Settings screen… (check ‘Use extra-path info’)

This is a sample linkblog entry

This is sample text describing the linkblog entry. In most cases however, you’ll want to leave this blank, providing just a Title and an Url for your linkblog entries (favorite/related sites).