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...
Sometimes you might want to protect individual posts or pages with a password so that only users you sent password to can access this resource. Not exactly wide-spread scenario, which explains why it is not currently supported by BlogEngine. But when you need it you need it, and this extension should cover the basics. More...
I took a plunge and decided to run Windows 8 consumer preview as my main OS. I realize it is beta and expect lots of issues, it is given. If there are real showstoppers I might even go back to Win 7, will see. But for now it looks ok and I want to share experience in case someone else thinking about making a switch. More...
Let's start by creating new empty ASP.NET website and adding Default.aspx with minimal “hello world” markup. When you access your site and check it with profiler, you’ll see single get request for default page. More...
Tell me what you want, but CSS is twisted. Some simple basic tasks that should be no-brainer sometimes make you throw things and say words you later deeply regret. Usually people use IE6 as lightning rod, sadly even if you don't care about IE6 anymore CSS still will find ways to hurt you. Consider this simple scenario - I want DIV with some text and 3 little ones inside it alined right. More...
Lots of people use Google Analytics to track user statistics on the blog. If you one of them, there is another tool you might be interesting in – something called “Woopra”. Although Analytics are cool, Woopra excels in real-time tracking – it literally shows what is going on your blog right now. Just take a look at the picture below – you can see how many people are browsing through your blog, what pages they on, searches used to bring them in, referring sites and more. And it is all real-time, you can see people coming and leaving. Pretty fun stuff. More...
Creating NuGet Package
BlogEngine uses NuGet format for sharing extensions. NuGet package in a nutshell is a ZIP containing files you want to share with some metadata NuGet uses internally. The easiest way to create a package is to use Package Explorer. Download and install this small application on your local machine, then click to run as any regular Windows application. At the time of writing, I’m using Package Explorer version 2.0. More...
Data Persistence
What we need next is to save metadata for each picture used by every slider, and also we need to be able to add and delete all these records. Extension settings are standard way of doing it in BlogEngine - you declare what kind of data you want to maintain, set initial values and first time extension runs it will instantiate settings object and save it on the back-end. To maintain these data, blogger goes to admin/extensions and clicks extension link in the right sidebar. This will load auto-generated form where settings can be edited. The code below would be sufficient: More...