Author: Tiara Rea

Here at Lunarpages Web Hosting, we take blogging pretty seriously… Okay, maybe not seriously, because blogging can be fun too!, but we love it. Whether we’re running the latest blog contest, offering helpful tips through our Newsletter, or explaining the importance and uses of a blog to new customers, we are really just interested in the potential blogging has for your website and your life.

There are about a gazillion blogging tools out there, but only a handful that are well-respected and renown in our industry. One of the ones we recommend most often to our customers is called b2evolution, and it happens to be one of the most important blogging tools out there. Fully-customization, easy to work with, and with advanced features that will blow you away, b2 is also a personal favorite of mine.

So imagine my delight when I got to have a quick chat with the one, the only, the amazing, astounding, incredible Francois Planque!!!!

Yes, he warrents extra exclamations, as he’s the creative genius behind this awesome blogging platform.

So let me introduce the awesome and very funny Francois Planque! Lookit how handsome <3

Thanks for taking the time to answer some of our questions. What is your official “title” over there at b2evolution?

My pleasure! I call myself the Project Maintainer because I am the one who keeps it all together… The user community however, they tend to call me the FG… which stands for French General!

And here I always thought “FG” stood for “Francois” and then whatever your middle name is…

Can you tell us a bit about how b2evolution came to be and how you came up with the unique name?

Back in 2002: the days when “blog” meant nothing to the average web user… I started using a PHP blog tool called “b2” for my own blog. What happened, though, is this: a couple of weeks later, the original author of b2 disappeared from the face of the internet and the development of b2 stalled.

After several months and still no news from the author, several users decided to maintain the software themselves so that their blogs would provide more functionality and stay secure at the same time.

Six months later, those of us who had done significant changes started to release them to the b2 community so that everyone could benefit from the improvements. When I first released my modified b2 version, I just called it “b2evolution”… as it literally was “an evolution of b2”. Ironically, the same week, another guy called Matt released his own modified version of b2. He called it… WordPress.

Another couple of months later, the original author of b2 came back from the moon and stated, out of the blue, that the official successor to b2 would be… WordPress… I guess the rest is almost history.

Since then, b2evolution has kept aiming at the more advanced bloggers, the one who wanted more than just a simple blog.

More about the history of b2.

Well speaking of the competition, what makes b2evolution different from other blogging platforms like WordPress?

Installing b2evolution on your website sure lets you run a simple blog like on a regular blog platform. However, b2evolution also lets you expand far beyond this!

First it gives you full control over the look and feel of your blog. You can start with a pre-built skin and thanks to the advanced widget system, you can rearrange the features on the page in a snap. Furthermore, the enhanced skinning system will allow you to adjust every aspect of what is displayed down to the smallest details. In b2evolution 2.x, flexibility and configuration options have been pushed to the extreme.

Beyond that, nothing actually forces you to stay within the boundaries of a traditional blog interface. B2evolution is designed from the ground up to integrate and blend in with existing and larger websites.

You can actually have different sections of your website embodied by different blogs, all managed centrally through a single install of b2evolution. You can add a photo blog, a link blog, and you could even add a blog for each member of your family or organization, all from a single installation of b2evolution. All this in subfolders, subdomains or even different domains. User and group permissions let you define precisely who can edit what.

Finally, b2evolution is pre-optimized for search engines, out of the box, and comes with integrated stats and web analytics. B2evo also comes with an AdSense plugin letting you easily blend ads into your posts if you wish to monetize your blog(s) that way.

That’s actually what I like best about b2 – the customization of every single feature! How about below the surface? What makes your software tick?

All you need to host b2 is a standard and ubiquitous PHP 4 or 5 webserver with a MySQL 4 or 5 database. Lunarpages Basic Hosting Plan is perfectly suited to start a few blogs on b2evolution.

The Fantastico Deluxe installer makes installation even easier but you should watch for the version number it offers. At this time, you don’t want to settle for less than version 2.4 or above.

How does b2 handle spam, considering it’s becoming such a huge issue these days?

B2evolution has both passive and active antispam protection measures with a feature we call Antispam Deluxe. It allows you to automatically synchronize with a centralized list of spam words and urls. When new forms of spam appear, users will report it to a central repository, and once validated, those spam signatures will be sent out to all other b2evolution user who wish to receive them. This helps block spam before it has time to spread.

Passive measures include making the comment forms look very confusing to robots (spambots) while keeping them visually neutral to human users. This is pretty effective and doesn’t even require the user to respond to a funky CAPTCHA challenge with undecipherable letters…

Nonetheless, there is one caveat you should beware of, no matter what blog platform you use: trackbacks!

Trackback is an automated system designed to specifically allow machines to post content on other servers, in a very fast and efficient way. If spammers were designing a system to spam harder, better and faster, they probably wouldn’t be able to come up with anything more evil than trackback! Seriously, whether or not you’re using b2evolution, WordPress or anything else, my advice is to turn off trackbacks and you’ll immediately cut back on 95% of your spam. There is no single other action you could do with such great results in comment spam reduction!

That’s awesome advice for any webmaster!

You guys offer a very concise list of visions for how uses can utilize b2. But what do you think b2 works best for?

I believe b2evo works best for anyone who wants to customize his blog to his very own personality or even blend it into a more complete website. B2evolution allows virtually infinite flexibility in this regard and the widget interface makes it incredibly easy to get started: remove the calendar, add a local weather forecast, replace the list of categories with the latest comments, etc…

You touched a bit on SEO earlier, and blogging with SEO in mind has become very important. How do b2 blogs work with search engines?

Thanks for that question! This is actually one of the key strengths of b2evolution!

We have optimized b2evolution with the help of no less than five of the top world class SEOs (if not THE top 5 SEOs): Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), Stephan Spencer, Andy Beal, and Michael Gray!

This resulted in a long page of settings allowing you to fine tune SEO settings individually for each of your blogs. The best part, though, is that you don’t even have to understand all these options: if you want, you can just pick one of our five SEOs, click on their icon and have all your blog instantly optimized the way they recommend for best results!

That’s such a valuable resource, getting tips from those experts! I know your customers (like me!) really appreciate it.

Now let’s talk design. There tons of resources for free blog themes. Does B2 have a community of designers for b2 skins?

Interestingly enough, most blog apps don’t actually have a dedicated designer community. The way it merely works is that there is a general web design community creating free/open source CSS designs for the whole world to use. All blog apps then have a community of people adapting those designs to be used with the application. This is why every now and then, you stumble upon the same design on different blogs, powered by different blog platforms.

At this time we are adapting several dozens of the most popular blog designs to b2evolution. We also invite anyone to contribute one or several skins.

What’s your current favorite b2 skin?

I would say TerraFirma, but that might be just because it’s the last one I’ve worked on

However, what I dig the most, is when people blend in their b2evolution blogs into their site in a way were you may not even recognize b2evolution anymore. There are some great examples out there:
• http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/
• http://www.laurabryna.com/
• http://www.trishayearwood.com/
All of these are websites powered by a several blogs all managed centrally through a single install of b2evolution.

On more traditional blogs, I’ve also seen some incredible custom designs:
• http://www.mar-10.com/m-blog/
• http://quintoelemento.controradio.org/index.php?blog=5
• http://theworldofjenotopia.com/blog/index.php?blog=2
• http://www.tcpaul.com/blogs/index.php

What are your plans for future releases of b2?

Our mission is to push the envelope of what a blog platform can do. That’s what we’ve been doing since 2002! As we speak, one very active area of development is advanced web analytics. Features that really let you see how people find you, what they look at and where they go from there. This is a must for pro bloggers… but also turns out to be incredibly addictive to the casual bloggers as well!

Another active area of development is advanced photoblogging. I’ll have to come back to talk about the details though…

More interviews with b2 in the future? We are SO game.

So, Amy was telling me that you visited America recently and stayed in downtown LA. Are the people in America as friendly as in France?

As a matter of fact, I liked L.A. so much that I’m going to be moving there in a couple of months. What more can I say?

I didn’t know anybody liked LA that much. hehe. Also while in LA, you got to visit one of our datacenters. Were you impressed or SUPER impressed?

Actually, I was super impressed indeed by how much bigger your datacenter was compared to several other hosting companies!

And now for some random fun: If you started a web hosting company what would you call it?

LamaHosting. Don’t ask me why. But the .com is available! :p

(Somebody’s going to snap that one up, I know it)

What do you like to do when you’re not working on the latest in b2 releases?

I guess I watch way too many American TV shows. Over time I’ve been hooked to Friends, The Practice, 24, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break and Boston Legal… Lately I’ve been trying to selectively shut out all the bloody images in Dexter!

Do frog’s legs really taste like chicken? Be honest.

Honestly… I have no idea! Actually, I don’t know anyone in France who’s ever eaten frog legs. Though you’ll find them in some restaurants if you really look for them, they’re a lot less common than the stereotype wants to make you think. Worse than frogs though, some people eat snails… Don’t ask me how they taste, I don’t wanna know either!!

(Oh, thank God! *I’m a vegetarian*)

Where is your favorite place to vacation?

Well, now I’m actually going to be living in California, I guess I’ll have to find a new favorite place to vacation… hum… maybe France?

What’s one amusing stereotype the French think about Americans? For the record we think everyone in France likes moldy cheese and laughs funny

I believe the biggest problem with the US is that you can’t find any decent cheese anywhere. And when you tell people how sad it makes you feel, nobody laughs… Americans have no taste and no sense of humor! (no, I don’t really mean that!)

(lol Be prepared for hatemail…)

Can you say something in French and tell us what it means?

Of course, now I’d like to quote that citation that goes approximately like “On ne peut gouverner un pays qui produit plus de 400 fromages” which means “You can’t govern a country that produces more than 400 varietes of cheese”. However, I believe no one agrees on who said that first, nor on the actual number of varieties of cheese. But there’s a lot of them. And only half of them are moldy!

Oh well, maybe it would be safer to go with « L’habit ne fait pas le moine ! » Literally : “the clothes don’t make the monk” which I guess is the French way of saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”… or “don’t judge a man by looking at the monkey”…

LOL I won’t ask. Do you prefer email or telephone conversations?

Email for business and telephone for close friends. In between, it changes with the weather

Texting or talking?

Talking. I used to text a lot. But now my fingers will refuse to type on anything else but a full keyboard. Oh well, I’m definitely getting old…

IMing or texting?

IMing… with a full keyboard at hand!

And finally, if you could only visit one website for the rest of your life, what website would that be? (excluding b2, of course)

Google.com … they cache the whole web anyway !

Touché, Francois! Well, thanks sooo much for the interview! We over here at Lunarpages really love b2evolution and I’m excited to see all the new changes you guys have in store for future releases. Blogging has become such a huge force in the industry, and we like knowing you’ve got a lot to do with that.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Interviews, Issue 9 - April 2008, Newsletter Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.