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)
This real-time customer analytics service just released public beta 8.0 and I tested it with BlogEngine.NET to make sure they still work great together. If you a fan of statistics then you might like it a lot, this service provides functionality similar to Google Analytics with a stress on real-time activity. It is done very well and works great, and with Google dropping services (yep, I’m going to miss Reader) it is not a bad idea to have a plan “B”. I would not recommend to run both at the same time, this might generate too many service calls – although I did it for some time without noticeable downsides. The way it works you create account with Woopra and they give you a script that you add to your admin/settings/custom code/trailing scripts. Then you just go to Woopra site and log in into your dashboard. More...
This new extension for BlogEngine will let you save images for multiple albums and display any album in carousel-like fashion in your posts and pages using jCarousel plugin for jQuery. It is light-weight and pretty easy to use. I reused code from NivoSlider as foundation, making few improvements and adding ability to create thumbnail images on the fly. You install it from dnbegallery.org and access extension UI under admin/appearance where you should see "Jcarousel" in the menu list in the right side-bar. There you can upload images. To display album on the page as in this post, you add "CAROUSEL:AlbumName" to the post, substituting quotes with square brackets. More...
Beta (or RC) version of BlogEngine.NET 2.7 has been released this weekend with some cool new features like extension-less URLs and lots of small improvements and bug fixes. If you want to test drive it, head over to Codeplex site and download the latest. More...
I have updated NivoSlider extension this weekend to support edit/re-upload functionality which can be helpful if you maintain large number of images and sometimes need to make changes. Below is a short screencast that demonstrates installing NivoSlider, adding it to the post and adding new image to the slider. It is about 3.5 minutes long with no audio, I used captions instead as explaining amount is minimum. I've just started learning video editing, so quality is not great but I hope it will help someone having questions on how to install and run NivoSlider. More...
In the previous post we’ve got dead simple OpenID authentication working with ASP.NET WebForms application. Lets push it further and make more real world example you can actually use in your project. To make it less work, we will use Javascript OpenID selector – handy little library to display providers and handle user input. It is just two small scripts and one CSS file, very light and easy to modify if needed. More...
Implementing OpenID can be challenging, because of large number of scenarios and parties it can be used for and by. So any decent implementation includes lots of stuff you don’t particularly care about and it is hard to parse information to find exactly what you need. To save you some reading time, here how it works with ASP.NET application in the nutshell. More...
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...