Built-in Applications:  

There are only a few of the standard built-in applications listed for b2evolution and that’s just because it’s main architecture is still a blog so many of the CMS features you would expect to see won’t be found here.

Link management is included, but in a roundabout way. There’s no actual mechanism to add a blogroll to your sidebar, for example. You have to make a blog, add links as an entry then use it as a linkblog to your main blog. This is a bit quirky, but not necessarily a dealbreaker.

Management:  

You can stage and schedule your content with b2 from the main admin interface, which by the way, might be a dealbreaker for the less patient.

The admin panel interface has basically no context-sensitive help and it’s fairly sprawling and incomprehensible to begin with. The admin panel can accomplish the bulk of the management work, yet there is no mass-edit mechanism for removing/editing multiple posts or comments.

There are plenty of skins and themes to be found on the b2 main site, but again, you won’t be doing much customization beyond simple CSS if you don’t know the PHP language. We are not complete cretins and did attempt a simple PHP tweak in a template file and it was not pretty. The code used in the theme automatically generates its own XHTML counterpart so when we tried to do something as simple as remove the header code from the date display, it became a giant mess warring with the automatic XHTML. But as they say, patience is a virtue, and dedicated b2 users swear that patience pays off here.

Commerce:  

There are no provisions for commerce activities with this content management system software.

Ease of Use:  

Ease of use elements include friendly URLs, image resizing, photoblogs with thumbnails, UI levels, WYSIWYG editor, spell check and style wizard. These components are fairly straightforward and useful.