I’ve been using B2Evolution for a number of years. There are a couple of things that have bugged me about it, although not enough to sell my soul and switch to evil Word Press.

When writing blog posts there are a set of buttons in the middle which link to editing actions. WYSIWYG which switches the editor from text to rich text, Preview which opens a new window to give you a preview of the work so far, Save & edit which saves the page and re-presents the page (handy for saving work in progress), Save which saves the page but sends you back to the list of all the pages, and finally Publish! which puts the page live, visible to your fans and sends out pings to various article distribution centres.

My articles can take months or years to write depending on how much research I need to do. They are proof read and checked for accuracy and may under go a couple of rewrites before finally publishing them. I want to make sure the content I produce is of the highest quality. The Save buttons are so close to the Publish! button so occasionally I click it by mistake. Normally there’d be nothing wrong with doing that but there’s a bug in B2evolution that means it only sends the pings once on publish. However if it was a mistake and I return the article to draft status then next time I publish it won’t send out any pings. This is especially bad because the fresh publish has a new date and my urls are in a date dependant form (/yyyy/mm/dd/name-of-article). The pings that went out earlier are no longer valid because they point to an address that doesn’t exist.

The Publish! button is redundant anyway because one can change the status with the same effects by setting the Visibility / Sharing section to Published (Public).

Version 5 of B2evolution has addressed this issue, with options to allow (or disallow) various buttons on the edit screen. They’ve said they are not going to retro fit this feature into version 4 so I thought I’d let you know how to do it by editing the application source code. It’s quite simple, we’re just hiding the button using the cascading style sheets.

1. Edit <b2e-root>/inc/items/model/_item.funcs.php
2. Search for display: inline
3. Change it to display: none
4. Save the file

Easy! Good job you had the source code !