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!
Did it ever happened to you? You have a problem and, after research and brainstorming, finally come up with this nice elegant solution. Two month (and hundred problems) later, you are staring at the screen with basically the same task in front of you.
I planned to update documentation on WIKI site to include section on Extension Manager, but for some reason site was down this weekend. So I decided to publish it here for everybody who are interested to be able to take a look before I move it under WIKI when WIKI will return back in business.
There is a new version of Mp3 flash audio player extension for [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) 1.3 available for download. Please note that it will not work with BE 1.2 because it uses Extension Manager. The new in this version is an admin page that will let you to change how player looks.
BlogEngine 1.3 has been released this weekend, so now I can take a deep breath and relax a little. Last couple of weeks I've been torn between two deadlines, one on Extension Manager rushing into 1.3 and another on my day job.
As APIs for Extension Manager finalized, I decided to put together a few simple examples explaining how you can take advantage of them. Consider situation when you have an extension that uses couple user specific variables.
And I’ve listened. There are two big changes in the latest Extension Manager version – you can bring in your own admin UI and default settings page provided by manager became dynamic. Now it is not just two predefined boxes, you can add as many parameters as you like.
It is subject to change based on input I’ll get, but here is how you can use Extension Manager that is in the [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) build 8474 when you write extension.
First of all, Mads asked me to join [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) team and contribute by implementing Extension Manager as a part of BE core functionality, and I’ve agreed.
Quick update: for those using mp3player, I noticed that it throws NullReferenceException in the latest [BlogEngine](http://dotnetblogengine.net/) builds. To fix it, go to extension source code (/App\_Code/Extensions/mp3player.cs) and change from
By now we have simple and functional admin interface for extension management. Let’s go beyond basics, how about default settings page that extension writers can take advantage of?
You might say – editing source code is easy. Just open Visual Studio and start typing. Not so fast – what if I want to do it online, the way WordPress plug-in manager does it?
