BlogEngine.NET 2.8 was just released to the public, and if you feel lazy going through the steps to upgrade, here is how to do it easier. Download little utility from the link in the end of this post, watch short video with example how it works and you should be able to upgrade without breaking a sweat. One thing that is not mentioned in the video is that this utility if it finds issue it will try to fix it and log this into log.txt in the same directory where you run it. You might want to check this log file to make sure it did a correction properly.
BeUpdater.zip (7.45 kb)
BlogEngine 2.6 release is out and you might want to upgrade your existing blog to take advantage of all the new features. You can read instructions how to manually upgrade your site or you can try updater utility I've been using lately to automate upgrades for my blog, it worked well for me and chances are it'll work for you too. It doesn't do database part, so you'll need to do some extra work to run database script and update web.config with connection string. For XML provider all you need is follow instructions below.
Lets assume you use c:\upgrade directory for this exercise.
- Download 2.6 release (web), unzip and copy files to c:\upgrade\be26
- Pull your existing blog to c:\upgrade\old using FTP client like FileZilla
- Download and extract BeConsole.exe to the same c:\upgrade directory
- Create new folder: c:\upgrade\blog
- Open command line, change directory to c:\upgrade and run this command:
beconsole -u c:\upgrade\old c:\upgrade\be26 c:\upgrade\blog
The c:\upgrade\blog now should have your blog upgraded to version 2.6 and ready to be uploaded to your host. I tested it upgrading from 2.0 and 2.5 versions and it worked quite well. Let me know if you run into issues and I'll try to improve it more. May be we can plug it into next BlogEngine for one click auto-update, who knows.
Post navigation in BlogEngine is a little hard to customize. By default it looks like picture below and that works fine with standard theme. Small problem is that those angle brackets and "|" in the middle not that easy to get rid of without some nasty CSS tricks because they baked into the core code that nobody likes to touch (or you'll have to remember to carry it over during upgrade). Good news is that you don't have to touch it and still modify navigation any way you like pretty easily if you follow this little guide. More...
Converting BlogEngine.NET to Web Application Project has been a popular exercise ever since Microsoft introduced WAP project template for Visual Studio. Without getting into nitty-gritty of arguing about advantages one has over the other, converting from web site to web application is easy enough for BlogEngine.NET community to have both models. It just makes sense to have WAP version in some way linked to “proper” BlogEngine.NET so we won’t be reinventing the weal but improve on the single code base instead. More...
BlogEngine 2.5 final release is ready for download, and most anticipated new feature is obviously ability to run multiple blogs on single code base. It's been a top request for a while, so hopefully it'll make lots of people happy. You can read in-depth about it on Ben's blog, I'm not going to repeat it here. Just want to say - don't dismiss it if you only going to run one blog, it can be helpful in many ways. I for one planning on little family "members only" site working as sub-blog and another used as private Wiki. All on the same code base, with single update cycle - can be a time saver. More...
Just got an email asking about how to install ELMAH on BlogEngine.NET 2.0:
I am trying to use Elmah with BE 2.0.0.40
Keep getting web.config errors one after the other.
Are you currently using it? Could you provide me a web.config for BlogEngine
Come on guys! Installing ELMAH by hand? It’s so 2010! More...
Go to hosting dashboard/content/IIS management and click “create” link. This is an interface GoDaddy provides you to create virtual directory for your ASP.NET application. Give a name for directory and don’t forget to check “set application root” – this is akin to “configure virtual directory as application” in IIS world, and this is exactly what we doing - installing ASP.NET application. More...
BlogEngine 2.0 is .NET 3.5 application, but you can use it with .NET framework 4.0 with little effort by compiling source code as .NET 4.0 assembly. You can do it with free Visual Web Developer Express 2010 which can be downloaded as stand alone or installed with MS web platform installer, whichever you prefer. Here is short walk through. More...
BlogEngine is a CodePlex-based project and uses Mercurial as source control. Most of described below equally applied to any CodePlex project that uses Mercurial. Here is step-by-step what you need to do to share your code on CodePlex. More...
Spam comments are annoying and sometimes looking at comment allowed by Akismet or some other anti-spam service you think – I’m sure I would do better. It is just so hard to get the plumbing in or I would made my very own solution. With BlogEngine.Net 1.6 it is not, you can easily implement your own anti-spam filter or add existing if you like it more than built-in Akismet. Here is how. More...