Hello.. I have this dilemma between choosing LifeType (formerly called plog) and b2evolution for a new blog service on my site (replacing the current old and featureless one ). I've searched through forums and noone has yet done a "versus" thread for these two while they do look like two competing solutions. From what I've concluded so far b2evolution has somewhat better administration interface and more features, but LifeType seems to be less troubled with spam, is faster (as far as I gathered) and has better support for subdomains and custom url's.. So far, LifeType does look more attractive to me, but before I choose I would like your opinions on both and what would you choose between these two if you would do a blog hosting service. In the end, what I'm looking for is a system that supports all the blogging standards, is fairly easy to manage by users (bloggers) and isn't a big spam target and/or easy falling victim. Thank you Daniel
Well, I gave LifeType a spin on my site (in subfolder) and it sure looks and works pretty good, has all the features I would need and is fairly speedy.. However, setting up subdomains didn't proove to be without trouble even though trouble in my case was due to external issues to the LifeType. For LifeType subdomains to work you have to have subdomain wildcard enabled on your server which basically gets any subdomain including even those not existant to point to the site's homepage at the same host. So, with wildcard enabled (ServerAlias *.domain.com domain.com) whatever you type in the form of anysubdomain.domain.com you'll get the homepage. LifeType uses this "trick" to refer subdomains in form of username.domain.com or blogname.domain.com to the corresponding blog. The problem is in that I already had some subdomain redirects on my site which are effectively dropped by enabling wildcards. In the end, I had my host turn wildcard feature off and for now, unless I find an alternate solutions I probably wont have subdomains with LifeType except for mere subdomain redirects to the full blog address.. I could live with that actually, but considering an alternative which is b2evolution and which seems to be getting closer to better subdomains support in the future which actually wouldn't require this "wildcard" feature I still haven't made a definite decision on which should I choose. In summary, both tools wont give me proper autogenerated subdomains so I should probably compare them in other features where they pretty much match up more or less. b2evo does seem a bit more featureful (I could be wrong), but it seems to have a bad spam related reputation which worries me (even despite the pretty cool antispam tool that it has). It might be that it improved on that in the latest versions, but they still have a stats program showing refferers which is a sort of spam magnet as I understand. That said, maybe LifeType with only slightly less features, but more spam-security is still a better option? What do you gather, after this rant? What do you think? Thanks Daniel
never used lifetype but b2evo but be a really good blog if you use its full abilities, and stretch, modify and whatever else as much as possible.
Bumping this cuz I need to make a decision and am still stuck. My main interest is the multi-user feature. I want to set up an affiliate marketing community blog. Already have the domain - AffiliateMarketingBuzz.com. Also interested of course in security and spam stuff. Anyone else have feedback or opinions?
Hi Daniel, In searching G for comparisions I found your forum and see you decided to go with LifeType. Are you happy with your decision?
Yes, LifeType is my choice. To be honest I don't find either of these two solutions to be a perfect match, but what scared me away from b2evo is a really bad reputation with spam that they don't seem to be able to get rid of (both the reputation and spam). I just don't want to risk it and I think LifeType will have less problems. It doesn't have such a bad reputation and it doesn't have a public and comprehensive stats feature like b2evo.. As for all the features it's actually pretty good. I didn't get to set up subdomains just the way I wanted because it required subdomain wildcards to be set in the server which conflicts with my existing subdomain redirects, but it actually isn't a problem because I can use those same redirects to create subdomains that point to real blog url's and those can be customized almost without limits with "custom url" feature. In that sense it is awesome. The LifeType interface at first seems to be confusing, but since it uses smarty templates it was fairly easy to insert hints that help users get around and familiarize themselves. I can say it's no longer an issue. Setting up new users and blogs is also easy. People can register themselves and make their blogs right away or admin can do that, either way it's pretty straightforward. Managing blogs is rather easy as well, once you familiarize yourself.. All in all I wouldn't say I regret it. It isn't "perfect", but it's good and it will get better with 1.1 release in the future when some of the lacks will nicely be filled. In the end, feature-wise I don't think LifeType is much better, except for the fact that for templating it uses smarty which if you know some php is easy to manage (b2evo seems to be using a non-standard templating engine), but since it has a better spam reputation (or doesn't have a reputation) compared to b2evo I think it's a better choice. Hopefully this rant helped.
hey 5staraffiliates, my vote: lifetype. BY FAR. i've tried both, and lifetype is better designed to be a blogging network. it's not perfect, but i like it a lot, and it's a lot better than anything else i've seen. it's also well-designed, so if you need a programmer to come in and customize/extend it, they should be able to do so without too much of a problem. best of luck with your site!
Cool thanks so much you 2 for the replies. My blog programmer is a WordPress moderator and developer and heavily into that platform. He's never even heard of LifeType or Plog but I'm sure he can figure it out. I thought about going WPMU but he won't even touch it. Said he would need to refer me to someone else. Out of curiousity had either of you looked at MU and considered it? What made you decide it was not a contender? Too new? Bugs? Lack of documention? Too complicated?
I've tried to install it, but it didn't go quite so good. It has some requirements that I couldn't meet. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I think you'd be better off installing it to a server that you have complete control over (like your own or dedicated hosting), not on shared hosting. Aside from that there are no stable releases yet, just nightly builds clearly marked unstable (see http://mu.wordpress.org/nightly-builds/ ). So I'd just say it's too new and therefore too immature. Still, there already are some sites that have implemented it and seem to be doing good, like www.blogsome.com , but it's likely they have heavily modified it for their needs with the help of professional programmers or they are professional programmers themselves. For us who just want something to put up and work with it without much hacking it's probably not ready. Good luck with your project.