Today I took a look at b2evolution (as usual, just a brief superficial test flight). It's related to WordPress and that alone is interesting - let's see what others have done with the same base code. So I got the software, grabbed the Kubrick skin (hey, I'm liking Kubrick these days), and got started.
What immediately stands out: b2evolution places much more emphasis on multi-everything. Multi-blog (it comes pre-installed with 4 blogs, one of which is an "all blogs" blog and one is a link blog), multi-user (with permissions for blogs etc. - so suitable as a blogging platform for smaller user groups) and multi-language (nice: you can set the language for each post, set languages per blog). That's already appealing. The backend is reasonably easy to use and you can find most things pretty quickly.
But then the documentation. Ok, yes, the important stuff is documented and findable. But as soon as you go deeper, almost nothing is self-explanatory or documented. Ok, I admit I shouldn't have immediately set out to make the URIs as complicated as possible - namely via so-called stub files. These are alternative PHP files through which everything is pulled to preset special settings via them. Apparently you're supposed to be able to get a URI structure like WordPress with it - the b2evolution standard is that index.php always appears in the URI and the additional elements are tacked on at the end. That's ugly. I don't want that. Changing that apparently only works with Apache tools done by hand (no, not like WordPress's nice and friendly support for the auto-generated .htaccess file) and then corresponding settings in b2evolution. Ok, you can do that - I know Apache well enough. But why so complicated when there's an easier way?
Well, but the real catch for me comes next: b2evolution can only do blogs. At least in the standard configuration. Exactly - just lists of posts ordered chronologically. Boring. Not even simple static pages - sorry, but where do I put the imprint? Manually created files that you put alongside it? Possible, sure. But not exactly user-friendly.
There are also some anti-spam measures, for example a centrally maintained banned words list (well, I personally don't think word lists are that suitable) and user registration. Not much, but sufficient for now. You can certainly do more via plugins. Speaking of plugins, there's a very nice feature to mention: you can have different filters activated for each post. Each time anew depending on the post. Very nice - WordPress has a real deficit there, the activated filters apply to everything across the board - one change and old posts suddenly get formatted wrong (if it's an output filter).
Also nice: the hierarchical categories really behave hierarchically - in WordPress they're only hierarchically grouped, but e.g. not much is done with the hierarchy. In b2evolution, posts from a category automatically move to the parent category when a category is deleted. Also, thanks to the multi-blog feature, you can activate categories from different blogs for a single post and thus cross-post - if it's allowed in the settings.
Layout adjustments work via templates and skins. Templates are comparable to the WordPress 1.2 mode and skins are more like the WordPress 1.5 mode. So with templates everything is pulled through a PHP file and with skins multiple templates are combined and then the blog is built from that. Special customizations can then be done via your own stub files (the same ones that are supposed to be used for prettier URIs) and via those you could, for example, build fixed layouts with which you could simulate static pages.
All in all, the result of the short flight: nice system (despite the somewhat baroque corners in URI creation and quite sparse documentation) for hackers and people who like to dig into the code. For just getting started directly, I find it less suitable - WordPress is much easier to understand and get going with. And to compete with Drupal, b2evolution is too thin on features - just too focused on blogs. You can certainly bend it in the right direction - but why would you want to do that when you could just use something off-the-shelf that can already do all that?
Hmm. Sounds relatively similar to what I wrote about b2evolution almost a year ago. There hasn't been much development there in the meantime.