b2evolution is a great blog tool that includes all the features of traditional blog tools, and add cool stuff like file & photo management, advanced skinning, multiple blogs support, detailed user permissions and third party plug-ins!

FeedFlare is a way to give subscribers to you b2evolution blog easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

So, the question is, how do you get FeedFlares to appear in your b2evo posts? At this writing, no FeedFlare plugin is available for b2evo. So, I document here the method that I used to hack a b2evo skin to display FeedFlares. In my installation, I have multiple blogs running on one b2evo install. FeedFlare code is specific to each feed (i.e. each blog), so I needed a custom solution that would change the FeedFlare code depending on what blog was being viewed.

Note that these instructions apply to b2evo version 2.3. Your mileage may vary with other b2evo versions.

At the end of this hack, you should have FeedFlare links at the bottom of your posts when your readers are looking at the full post view (the one that shows the comments and trackbacks.) It does not modify the blog “multi-post” view. You could extend this hack to do that easily.

Here are the steps:

1. Burn your feed
2. Under the Optimize tab in FeedBurner (under My Feeds, select your feed), enable the FeedFlares you desire (for example, Digg, del.ico.us, etc.
3. Find your skin files. For this example, I am hacking the evocamp skin.
4. Make a copy your current skin directory. Call it something that makes sense to you. Let’s call it foo-skin.
5. Go into the foo-skin directory. Make a copy of the single.main.php file. Call it single.main.php.orig. This will be a backup for you, just in case. Read that file. You will see that this is php code that builds the single post page.
6. Find the code that inserts the post content. In my file, this is clearly labeled with —- POST CONTENT INCLUDED HERE —-
7. Find the end of that code block. In my file, this is clearly labeled. Look for the “?>” that indicates the end of the php code block. We want are FeedFlares to appear right after the post
8. Insert the following code (below) after the end of the post content code.
9. Edit the code below to match your feeds and your blog IDs.
10. Wait for FeedBurner to resync with your feed. This can take a while, but will go faster if you ping them.

Hope this helps. Feedback is welcome.

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// code to add FeedFlares to the end of the post
// works for multiple feeds (that is what the switch case is for)

// Find the blog ID
$items_blog = $Item->get_Blog();
$items_blog_ID = $items_blog->ID;

// Watch out for blogs without flares
$do_flare = 1;

switch ( $items_blog_ID ):

//Blog ID = 4
case 4:
$fb_src = “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/MasonWorldTestBlog”;
break;

//Blog ID = 5
case 5:
$fb_src = “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/FightinTexasAggieGoodBullBlog”;
break;

//Blog ID = 7
case 7:
$fb_src = “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/Masonworld”;
break;

//Blog ID = 8
case 8:
$fb_src = “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/CochlearWorld”;
break;

//Blog ID = 9
case 9:
$fb_src = “http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/eBookMoneyOnline”;
break;

//Yikes, our blog is not set up for flares
default:
$do_flare =0;

endswitch;

if ($do_flare) {
echo ‘‘;
};

// END code to add FeedFlares to the end of the post
?>