Default admin interface for extensions in BlogEngine works fine in most cases and very easy to use. But sometimes you just got to get creative, right? That means, you want no limits. Obviously, some of simplicity will be lost – but still it is surprisingly easy to get along using plug-and-play BlogEngine architecture. Lets say, we ran into nice DHTML color picker and want to use it in the admin page for our extension. We want admin page look like this picture – it should allow us to enter a word, size and color. This values will be saved in the extension manager, so we don’t have to deal with databases or file system – usual BE stuff. And when you click “Color picker” button, nice color picker will show up and you can visually select value for a color. More...
Lets say we want to write an extension to track user activities on our site. Blogger should be able to set basic settings, for example choose to track posts, pages or both. Then every time user requests post or page, we increment corresponding counter by one. Look at the picture above. Its clear that we need two sets of settings: one for post/page options and another to list user activity.
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In the first part, we wrote simple extension that changes case in the post to lower. Let’s say, we want user to decide show post in the lower or upper case. For this, we need to be able to maintain variable and let blogger change it’s value through admin interface. Normally, you would need to add a data access functionality for extension to handle this kind of operation, create admin form etc. BlogEngine uses Extension Manager to help make job a lot easier. Take a look at the code below. In the constructor, we subscribe to post serving event and then call InitSettings. There we create ExtensionSettings object, which can hold singe value (scalar) or/and table of values. In our case, we want it to hold single scalar value, so we set settings to scalar. We call our variable “Case” and initialize it with default value of “upper”, then call ExtensionManager.InitSettings and pass name of extension and settings object. More...
This is the first part in the series of tutorials about writing extensions for the BlogEngine 1.4. I’ll start with simple “hello world” example and then gradually move to the more advanced techniques. You don’t need to have any previous experience with BE extensions to follow this tutorial. More...
A lot of "power bloggers", prefer to use Windows Live Writer instead of built-in web editor. No matter how good web editor is, desktop publishing is just too hard to beat, at least at the moment. I personally like WLW myself and use it whenever I can. But this is not the only choice you have on the desktop; another big one is MS Word 2007. I'm not an Office guru, but if you watch the video at the end of this post you can get ideas how easy and intuitive content creation can be when you have the right tool at your disposal. You can set it up with BlogEngine just as easy as WLW. Simply open new document and go to Publish/Blog in the office menu. More...
Preparing for BE 1.4 release, which is coming soon (although exact date not yet set), I started working on documentation for Extension Manager and changes it has compared to previous BE version. This is a short list I came up with. Obviously, I'll have to go into specifics and provide code examples for documentation be useful. This will be on the Wiki as soon as 1.4 released. More...
For Windows developers trying to diversify their skills and go Mono, setting up environment is probably the most painful experience. We spoiled by Microsoft tricked us into believe that setup and configuration done by repeatedly pressing “ok” button. It is not so in the wild world outside MS sandbox. For those bold and curious, as a first step I recommend another sandbox – VMware. Try it, see if you like it and, if not – not a big deal, just remove virtual image and pretend it never happened. No hard feelings. More...
Crafting CSS style sheet
This is the most time consuming operation in porting any CSS template to BlogEngine. If you like your design pixel perfect - that will cost you. These are some general tips that I hope will help make job a little bit easier. More...
Cool thing about open source is sharing. You give some - you get some. When it comes to themes, there are tons of great free designs out there on the web for applications like blogs.
Some of them are generic CSS templates, others specifically designed for popular open source projects like WordPress. This tutorial is about converting WordPress theme to BlogEngine, but most of it very much applied to almost any web template in the universe. More...
Chris Blankenship came up with an initiative to start email
subscription for administrators who have BlogEngine deployed on there websites.
This can be useful for anybody who wants to stay on top of any important news
about BlogEngine, not just sysadmins, so I would encourage folks to sign up.
This is purely community effort – which, in my opinion, is great. There is
going to be a new community site in the near future, but before it materializes,
I glad to see when someone stands up.
I see great potential here, BE need to push it harder to become
sort of a hub for each blog instance out there, not only providing services
like subscriptions by exposing set of APIs, but also letting people to interact
in p2p manner, using their blogs as part of BE network. We all can benefit from
this. If anyone has ideas and proposals in this direction – share your
thoughts!