With BE.NET 1.5 release candidate out of the door, it is a good time to look at some of the new features. Most of them are small and incremental, but nevertheless are interesting. One such feature is support for compiled extensions. There are several reasons you want to compile extension rather than provide source code, such as security, protecting intellectual property, simplifying deployment (for large extensions) etc. If you find a reason to choose this route, this guide is for you. More...

Feedjit is a service that provides live traffic feed for your site. It is easy to set up – you copy chunk of HTML and insert it into your blog’s markup. That is, if you know HTML and used to editing files in your blog, which shouldn’t be a requirement for average blogger. This is why popular blog providers supply Feedjit widgets – so that blogger does not have to edit files by hand and FTP them to the host. In this little exercise we create such a widget for BlogEngine. More...

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.

More...

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...

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...