Trying Out b2Evolution in 2026

Life is strange. Sometimes your most obscure blog posts are the ones that drive the most traffic. For example, this blog post that we wrote about B2evolution vs WordPress. It is one of our blog posts that draws many to our site. Most who bump into it are looking for information to do with b2evolution. We are not new to b2evolution. We once created a small blog using it during the heady days of PHP CMS competitions between WordPress, Nucleus, Zikula, b2evolution, Joomla, Drupal and a gazillion other scripts.

Let's get this out of the way first: b2evolution is dead: Link 1 and Link 2. If you are planning to use in the year of our Lord 2026 then you are looking in the wrong direction.

Now, b2evolution is one of WordPress' sisters. Both came out of the shell of the b2/cafelog blogging script. While WordPress stuck to its ideology of simplicity, b2evolution took an entirely different path. B2evolution evolved into a fully fledged CMS unlike WordPress which has remained a blogging script at its core to this day. To make it even more interesting, b2evolution styled itself as a "Social CMS". Out of the box it came with multiple blogs on a single codebase, polls, photo albums, forums, documentation modules to even an internal messaging system. It had a robust analytics engine, organizations to organize users under, taxonomy (tags) system and even a comprehensive email configuration system (WordPress does not even have SMTP support in its core to this day). 

We'll test b2evolution in this article; mostly its setup. A CMS' installation process is where a user makes the crucial "make-or-break" decision whether to use the script or not.

 To install:

1. We unzipped the latest b2evolution 7.2.5-stable and moved the files to out server.
2. Pointed our browser to the installation script at http://localhost/b2evolution/install/index.php (depends on what server you are installing on).
3. Followed the steps.
4. At the final step, b2evolution will provide us with the admin password to log into the administration area.

Installation was smooth all through. Logging into the admin area with the initial password was also OK. Everything just works perfectly.

Trying it on PHP 7.4.8 was also OK. Everything was fine. 

Now let's try installing it on PHP 8.1.27.

Oops! The deprecations have began.

Moving further in the installation failed. 

The deprecations on this PHP version have increased.

Moving further in the installation failed. 

Now let's try it on one of the latest PHP versions.

Now here things are way worse than before. The deprecations now pop up on the default homepage prior to launching the installation script.

b2evolution won't work here. 

b2evolution has lived up to its original philosophy; it is a truly Social CMS. It's features are robust. It provides us with the ability to create multiple blogs with their own authors on a single codebase - something like setting up WordPress MU (Multi User). It has more advanced features right out of the box than even WordPress itself. 

And its responsive.

The bad thing is that it cannot work on the latest PHP versions. It works on PHP 7.3.* and 7.4.* really well. Unfortunately, these versions are being phased out of the market. Even PHP version 8.0.* and 8.1.* are deprecated at this point in time. What is now recommended is to use PHP version greater than 8.2.*. Thus, if you are looking to use b2evolution in 2026 you will need to use hosts who have not phased out PHP 7.3.* and PHP 7.4.* from their servers. Alternatively, you can looking at VPS solutions but it will up to you to setup the server and secure it since older versions of PHP tend to be insecure.