Is it time to upgrade from b2? Tonight I installed my current version of b2 (version 0.61), WordPress (version 0.7) and b2++ (version 0.7) on my laptop to run some speed comparisons.

The WordPress install went very smoothly. I notice there are a LOT fewer files littered around than there were in b2. Looks like there has been some serious under the hood cleanup, but I didn’t notice any signifigant speed improvements. Both b2 and WordPress rendered my blog home page in 1.4-1.8 seconds (my server machine is really slow).

b2++ has a much more complicated upgrade path. Actually, there isn’t really an upgrade path. From the docs:

To upgrade from standard b2
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This is a lot more complicated, but here’s a likely workflow.
1. Backup and remove your existing b2 installation.
2. Follow the instructions above.
3. Use the b2templates.php backend to edit the style sheets and templates.
4. After you’ve installed b2, copy the contents of your “posts” database table to the “posts” table your b2 installation created. You can do the same with other b2 tables as long as you haven’t modified field names.

That’s horribly simplified but there isn’t any easy upgrade path as using Smarty is completely different to the way b2 was configured before.

Since the Smarty integration is supposed to yield some serious speed improvements, I was willing to give it a shot. Unfortunately, after 2 hours of fiddling, I have an install of b2++ that I can’t log into.

I think after you install, it is supposed to e-mail you a password (Donncha?), but I don’t have e-mail configured with PHP on my local machine. I tried the password from the password column in the user table but that didn’t work. I’m just floundering at this point. I don’t want to write a script to get my old posts, commets, etc. into the new tables… I don’t think I’ll try to get this going again until there is an upgrade script from b2 (at least for the data).

Anyway, long story short – I’m sticking with b2 (version .61) for the time being. I’ll revisit WordPress on their next release, they are talking about adding Smarty support as well which may result in the same speed improvement b2++ is supposed to give. If b2++ comes out with an upgrade script, I’ll check it out again. I’m not sold on Smarty yet, but I’m interested to see how much difference the caching makes.