BlogEngine has excellent extensibility model, core libraries expose any significant event you can think of to the outside world and you can subscribe to this events from your code and get access to the posts, pages, comments, files etc. And it does not take a lot to write extension – all you need is to decorate your class with [Extension] attribute. On application load BlogEngine uses reflection to lookup types in the compiled assembly and, if class decorated as extension, BE creates instance of this class. Here is a code from Global.asax that does just that: More...
Yes, I've heard about Ajax before - one would have to be hiding in the hole for the last year or two to avoid the buzz. I've read articles, seen videos and presentations, even used applications that utilize Ajax on a daily basis. So I’m not exactly a newbie. But somehow I managed to stay away from it - no projects I've been involved into for the last few years used Ajax. I decided it is a shame and I want to change it. Here is a plan: for starters I'll write two small applications ("gadgets", or user controls, for BlogEngine). The first one will be using "classic" JavaScript callback approach and the other one will be doing similar stuff the Microsoft way. Then I will compare experience. Sounds fair? More...
As you can read on official site, BlogEngine does support Ajax. The approach it uses - it relays on few simple helper JavaScript routines (can be found in BlogEngine.Core/Web/Scripts/blog.js) and hand-crafter JavaScript functions in the UI code to perform basic callbacks. BlogEngine does not support Ajax.Net (aka Atlas or ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions in its latest incarnation) out of the box, and for a good reason. Ajax.Net is a dependent technology. You can't just throw Ajax DLLs in the /Bin folder and hope it will work - most likely it won't. The reason is that Microsoft's Ajax libraries require full trust to run, and if this is fine on your local machine, where you can grant yourself all rights in the world, your host might (and should) be far less generous. More...
Code Formatter extension
For those who use BlogEngine as a technical blog (which is pretty common at this stage) code formatting feature is a must. Sure, you can squeeze your code in between “pre” tags and you are done – well, almost – editor will probably remove most of the white spaces and you’ll have to add some non-braking-spaces instead. But if you want coloring and nice formatting you’ll need more than that. There are several options to explore, and most obvious one is BlogEngine’s code formatter extension that comes with installation bits. To use extension you simply enclose your code within square-bracketed tags and specify what language you are going to format. If you do it from Tiny MCE rich box editor, it will add “p” and “pre” tags automatically for you, if you prefer doing it from HTML view you’ll have to add some tags manually, as shown in the picture on the right. Because Tiny MCE has a habit of re-formatting your HTML, based on your configuration results might vary and sometimes not be pretty. And you may not use Tiny MCE at all – if you replaced it with another editor. So you might run into problems using formatting extension, lots of people do (based on discussions in the BlogEngine's forum). No worries – there always more than one way to skin the cat! More...
Since BlogEngine finally got its extensions section up and running on the project’s home page, I put my Mp3 Player extension up there. Also I’ve been pointed on a small glitch this player has – in IE you have to click once to activate it and only after second click it will play. Not a big deal and I did not pay a lot of attention to it, mostly because pretty much every flash player I used so far has this same problem (see the picture). After short investigation I found out that reason Microsoft can’t fix this glitch is a legal one – there is a dispute over a patent going on. But MS (and Flash people) do provide works around “click to activate” problem, most of which comes down to writing “object” tag by JavaSript rather than embedding it directly into HTML code. Can be done in variety of ways for different situations and I think I found one that will work in my case. Needs a bit more testing, but looks like it should work just fine. More...
That was busy weekend – Saturday I went to see amateur AIBA World Boxing Championship, and it took almost all day (finals in all categories from 48kg up to heavyweights). I used to box (and kick) myself, so it was really exiting to dive into it again, it has special atmosphere around it I really like a lot, special sort of excitement. And I play soccer games on Sunday’s – so I was dragged out of cyberspace into reality for a wile :)
But I did manage to finish BlogEngine’s theme I’ve been working on lately, so you can download and try it if you are interested – I added a page for it in the menu bar, or just click this link.
Just read a great article at coding horror on becoming a good blogger. It says that it takes at least a year to even get noticed and main peace of advice is to keep punching and feel good about it. Well, it sounds… hmmm… encouraging. Thanks God I’m not aiming that high. Anyways, I decided to follow advice and throw a punch – even though my new shiny theme for BlogEngine is not quite ready yet and I was hoping this will be my next subject. Funny how it goes – takes about an hour to convert any CSS template into BlogEngine theme, this is how simple it is and how good ASP.NET overall and BlogEngine in particular implemented skinning. Almost too good to be true – and it isn’t. Dirty little secret is that it takes ten times more to polish it to the dissent “production” state, when it looks good in all major browsers and scales fine for reasonable range of screen resolutions. I’ve heard that there are about ten testers for every developer in Microsoft – totally makes sense! More...
When you provide downloadable content on your blog, you might want to keep track on downloads. With BlogEngine, it is incredibly easy to do – all you need is subscribe to one of the events exposed by core framework and log download information to any medium you like. For example, you want to log it in the tab delimited flat file so it is easy to export to Excel and do whatever kind of reporting you want to do.
First thing, we need More...
OOk, I'm not much of a blogger, but I did try several blog engines on Microsoft platform and beyond before settling my mind on BlgogEngine.net. I like it a lot for simplicity and elegancy of the code base. May be I'm an old school, but I do prefer applications which code I can comprehend in it's (almost) entirety - it gives me (false) sense of security. The other thing that I like about it is support for extensibility - so you can make that simple elegant code base bloated with tons of stuff that you can package so that it pretends to be an "extension". One problem though is that BlogEngine is relatively new player and there are not too many extensions yet present. So I decided to fix it a bit…
Jokes aside, one thing that BlogEngine is missing is multimedia support. Sure, it's not a core feature and it does belong somewhere in plug-ins directory. And I really needed audio support for one of my projects. After some looking around I found that there quiet a few free flash players you can use in HTML pages (may be Microsoft will come up with knocking-your-socks-off free SilverLight player some day and it will take over the world?). By far, the most popular and slim in-line player I came across is the one used in WordPress blogs. I decided that this is the best candidate for adoption and wrote a little wrapper around this flash player to hook it up with BlogEngine. Extension that I resourcefully named "mp3player" you can download here. There are also some instructions on how to install and use it, and all code is available for you to use and change at will. I intend to maintain and enhance it over the time so any feedback on bugs/issues or suggestions for improvement are greatly appreciated.
Below is an example what it looks like – most likely you’ve already familiar with the picture, which is another advantage of using this particular player. Just click an arrow to test it: