Last two weeks I’ve been nailed to my workstation almost 24x7 as we were on the finish line going live with large (6+ month in development) project. It’s over – I’m a free man again! That means, hopefully, that I’ll be able to spend a lot more time working on BlogEngine and blogging about .NET, BlogeEngine, extensions and all stuff related.
In the previous post I touched on new extension I’ve been putting together, it is basically my old download counter extension with admin panel and few small changes. You can download it using link below. Working on this extension I ran into well known limitation that Extension Manager has – it can have only one set of parameters (settings) that has to be either arrays of values (“tabular” settings) or single values (“scalar” settings). I new in advance that lot of scenarios will require both, and this extension could certainly benefit having two sets of settings, one for changing parameters like type or names of files to watch and another for showing logged data as tabular settings. Definitely something that needs to be addressed in future releases of extension manager. But, even limited as it is, you can surely benefit from this extension if you have downloadable content on you blog. Simply copy files in corresponding location and, when anybody downloads files from your blog, you’ll be able to see it in the admin panel.
DownloadCounter.zip (2.95 kb)
To comprehend the counter extension and update the merchant account, Its indispensable to keep an eye on the stipulations regarding cheap vps and dedicated servers.