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!

Widget is a special control you can add to the sidebar. What makes it special is that it is a member of the "zone" - area where you can add and configure these reusable components through the zone manager. It is similar to SharePoint WebParts - you can drag it around, set properties etc. And, in BlogEngine, you can build widget just in few simple steps. More...

For BlogEngine enthusiasts who like live dangerously and always update their sites with latest code from repository, in the latest build Extension Manager set to use generic data store layer instead of doing it's own thing as it did previously. The story behind it is that in the next release we adding Widgets and customizable Themes, and it makes sense to unify data storage for any kind of "extensions" to avoid headaches in the future. For Extension Manager, it means a bit of redesign. Most of it transparent to the users, but some requires your attention. More...

Quick follow up on enclosure support in the latest BE build. I made a slight change to make it easier to use and better play with multiple extensions – the media directory location setting has been deprecated. BE will turn your media file into enclosure no matter where you put it - as long as it is local to your server and valid (physically exists). More...

Enclosure support has been added to the latest BlogEngine.Net code base. Enclosure is a tag added to your RSS feed that let you publish podcasts on your blog. RSS readers like iTunes and others recognize this tag and let users subscribe to the media files you published. Here is how it works. More...

After giving it more thought, I decided to make some significant changes to the picture from the previous post. Main reason is that I wanted to make settings layer a thing on its own. Make it more generic and flexible. More...

You might think that BlogEngine 1.3 was released yesterday, but It actually been a while and it looks like people like it and want more. New version is under constructions and part of it, that I'm responsible for, is a new shared storage model. The basic idea here is to be able to use Extension Manager as a storage provider for any type of extensions. Today, if you look at Extension Manager from the 10 thousand feet, it looks kind of like Russian Doll: you have manager itself, it has collection of extensions, extension has collection of settings and settings have collection of parameters. More...

Most of the web applications will not let you use HTML as form input for security reasons. And this is why BlogEngine has BBCode extension - to provide you with ability to define which HTML tags you want visitors be able to use. But it has it's own limitations and can't handle some of the HTML tags without little overhead. For example, I wanted to let visitors to use images in their comments, so I went to extension manager/BBCode and defined [img] code. Problem here is that image tag has specific syntax and BBCode does not set to handle it. I had to modify Parse method to process image tag properly. All I did is added a check to see if code is "img" and, if it is, I use custom parsing. Otherwise BBCode uses default code processing. More...

BBCode extension is a part of standard BlogEngine distribution and since 1.3 it has admin interface that you can use to add or delete codes. That is cool, what is not cool is that updated codes will not show in the comment form; the values used there are hard coded. Makes no sense, so I decided to fix this little inconvenience. This is not hard, only ~/user controls/CommentView.ascx and corresponding code behind file need to be changed. First, open for edit code behind (~/user control/CommentView.cs) and add using directive and simple function that will pull data from settings object and format them for display: More...

This weekend I worked on incorporating one of the patches uploaded by Phil Garcia (thanks Phil!) that added SQL Server support to Extension Manager. Now you can pick your provider as usual and, if MS SQL Server is your provider, Extension Manager will persist settings to the database rather than XML file as it does by default. Personally, I don't use SQL provider for my blog; I'm totally satisfied with XML here. But I realize there are lot of people who feel differently about it and for whom database is a must. So I used this occasion as an opportunity to add test site to my hosting account and set it up to use SQL instead of XML to be able to try it in hosting environment. More...