Getting started with BlogEngine.NET

Apr 1, 2007

To getting started using the blog engine, there are a few things you should know.

Download

First of all you should download the blog.

It is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License. Basically it means that you can do whatever you want with the source code.

Set up users

After download, locate the App_Data/users.xml file and open it. This file contains login information about all the users of the blog. The user name is the name that is being used as the author of the posts, so remember to spell correctly. This is actually all you need to before you can log in and start writing.

Themes

Themes are located in the theme folder – each in their own folder herein. The name of the folder is also the name of the theme. Right now there is only one theme, the same as this website is using.

You can use all the pages and user controls you want in order to build a theme. The only rule is that it includes a site.master and PostView.ascx file. The PostView.ascx file must inherit from DotNetSlave.BlogEngine.BusinessLogic.PostViewBase. Other than that, anything goes.

Future updates

This is the first release of the blog engines, so there is going to be a lot more releases in the near future. When an update is available it has to be downloaded from this website and uploaded to your own.

All updates will not affect the content of the App_Data folder where all the posts, pages and files are located. Neither will there be a change to the file format that isn’t dealt with otherwise. It will not affect your custom theme either. However, if you have changed other parts of the blog, you should look at the update to see if any of your changes has been affected.

Extensions

Something soon, I will add a shared page (probably in an iframe) within the admin part of the blog, where everybody can add links to their own extensions and plug-ins. It will also get an RSS feed so that all owners of the blog engine can be notified whenever a new extension has been announced. The same goes with themes.

Suggestions and requests

If you have any features you’d like to have implemented in future releases, don’t hesitate to tell me.

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New features in the next BlogEngine.NETNews on the upcoming BlogEngine.NET 1.4 including microformats and support for the semantic webBlogEngine.NET 1.5 final releaseThe newest release of BlogEngine.NET is now available for download.Official release of BlogEngine.NET 1.0The official release of BlogEngine.NET 1.0 is announced

Comments (30) -

Kevin

4/2/2007 7:53:41 PM #

Dude! This is seriously sweet. I love how light weight it is. Great job! Hey.. what's the difference between a post and a page?

Mads Kristensen

4/2/2007 8:35:39 PM #

A page is like a post, but it is not part of the chronology like a post is. A page have a static nature on a blog. For instance, if you have an "about" page, then it isn't really a blog post. If you click the "More..." link in the top right box on this site, you can see an example of a page.

Eber Irigoyen

4/2/2007 9:32:13 PM #

I haven't seen any comments on the availability of the source code, do you plan to make this open source?

Harsha

4/3/2007 2:43:38 AM #

Just installed the blogs. Works fine but when I try to view the individual post it just freeze and try to download something. May be I have to fiddle and see what is going on. Is it due to CoComments?

Martin Knotek

4/3/2007 4:32:59 AM #

Hi try use Globalization when use DateTime.Parsing. Datatime format: "ma, 02 apr 2007 21:31:07 +0100" is not prety universal

Mads Kristensen

4/3/2007 6:03:04 AM #

Harsha, The coComments hang for a moment when you load a post. I'm working on a solution for it.
Martin, I'll format the dates properly. Thanks for the hint.

Mads Kristensen

4/3/2007 8:32:10 AM #

Eber, it will be open source and licensed under the Creative Common Share-Alike license. I'll put it on source forge soon.

Henk

4/4/2007 6:23:57 PM #

Hi Mads,

I just installed blogEngine and it looks very promissing.
I have a few comments:
- The Users.aspx contains the following redirect: Response.Redirect("manage_users.aspx", true);. However, manage_users.aspx does not exist in the project (the results is a 404). I assume this should be Users.aspx?
- Why are all the mail settints required in the settings.aspx page. I just want to use the localhost as smtp server and it doesn't require authentication.
- In the "About the author" (SidePanel.ascx) there's a Macro.SafeMail("henk.huisman@clockwork.nl", BlogSettings.Instance.Name) call which outputs a javascript call. In the third argument the blog name is passed. My blogname is "Henk's blog" (notice the "'"). This argument does not get javascript encoded and results in a client script error when clicking the "Email" link.
- The search does not appear to work (Context.Request.UrlReferrer == null in SearchOnSearch). Why not use Context.Request.QueryString to inspect the current querystring?

Keep up the goog work!

Henk

Mads Kristensen

4/4/2007 7:39:26 PM #

Henk, I've been made aware of a few "stupid" issues in the engine. Those issues are delt with and a new version (1.01) will be released in a few hours. The issues you describe will be fixed.

Mads Kristensen

4/4/2007 8:45:54 PM #

Henk, the SearchOnSearch has nothing to do with the in-site search field. It is a search that is triggered when the referrer comes from a search engine. When it does, a small in-site search result is shown to the visitor at the top of the blog to give him/her a more precise search result on the same search phrase given the referring search engine.

Daniel

4/14/2007 6:56:30 AM #

Excellent work on a (finally) good blog engine for ASP.NET

Pretty much all other blog engines I've found are php and while my primary blog engine is Wordpress, I've found the need in a couple spots for an ASP.NET engine, and this does the trick.

Jeffrey Zhao

4/16/2007 10:57:05 AM #

Pretty cool, Mads!

I've extend the blog system a bit for my own use. When will you release the next version of that? I'm quite concern whether my extensions will be thown when you release the next version.

Buddy Lindsey

4/17/2007 12:24:03 AM #

The extensions stuff any news on how to start writing our own?
It would be cool if all you did was just add user controls or web parts as your extension for gui side of things.

Mads Kristensen

4/17/2007 4:59:24 PM #

Buddy, that is exactly what you do to build plug-ins. You can add all the user controls to the themes folder as you please. Further more, you can make HttpModules and HttpHandlers and register them in web.config just like you normally would for a custom website. Even further more, if you need to have an admin page for your extension, then just create an aspx page and drop it in /admin/pages/ and it will automatically be included in the admin menu. You can write to the file system in the App_Data folder - xml files, access databases or any other format. You are also free to use Isolated Storage if you prefer. You can create classes and add them to the App_Code folder if that's what you need. No extension needs to be compiled, just copied in.

Mads Kristensen

4/17/2007 5:00:47 PM #

Jeffrey, the next version will be released as soon as CodePlex get's back online or here on this site no later than May 1st.

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4/19/2007 6:47:04 AM #

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Buddy Lindsey

4/19/2007 12:47:57 PM #

Ok, That is cool. Now that I am finally moving beyond the very basics of asp.net I still have a lot to get used to on what you can do where.

Thanks.

Russell Latham

4/25/2007 4:56:04 PM #

Are there any instructions on how to setup this app. I keep getting an error message after copying the files to my web host. Just want to know step by step after download how to get this to work.

Thanks.

Mohamed Salem Korayem

4/27/2007 11:09:16 PM #

It's about time really that some effort is to be spent on creating an open-source ASP.NET 2.0 (and not any prior version).

You finally gave me the reason to start my real professional blog...thank you Mads.

Sam Tanner

5/3/2007 10:57:38 AM #

Hi Mads,
BlogEngine.net looks very promising!
I tried to set up on my local box, but it's just not working for me.
Extracted to inetpub\wwwroot and set as web site in IIS, set for ASP.NET 2.0, gave full permissions to ASP.NET user account and re-set the info in users.xml file, browse to default.aspx - but all I get is window's authentication screens. Did I miss something?

Adam

5/3/2007 1:49:57 PM #

Hi Mads,
Awesome work!!
The blog works great for me locally.
But, when I put it up on my server everything seems to be working except the authentication. Login just returns "Your login attempt was not successful. Please try again".
Is there anything you can think of that might be causing this.
It seems it is not authenticating against the xml correctly.
Thank you for such an awesome engine

De Vos TOm

5/3/2007 1:51:59 PM #

Hi,

i get the following error when trying to launch the site.

Compiler Error Message: CS0246: The type or namespace name 'BlogEngine' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Please help me
kind regards,

Tom

Mads Kristensen

5/3/2007 4:08:31 PM #

Sam, you probably need to allow anonymous access to the website in IIS.
Adam, it sounds like you just need to have write permissions on the App_Data folder.
Tom, could you send me the stacktrace or a screendumb of the error?

Sam Tanner

5/3/2007 4:41:57 PM #

Thank you, Mads. It's working beautifully now. I noticed there was no .dll in the /bin directory so did a compile and presto!
Hopefully I will be able to contribute themes in a while!

jecray

5/6/2007 4:09:01 AM #

where to download the project source ,there is nothing in codeplex

sulatech

5/7/2007 9:24:34 AM #

just trying out your blog features

Mads Kristensen

5/7/2007 10:31:14 AM #

jecray, you have to find the source under the source code tab at codeplex www.codeplex.com/.../ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

Vikram

5/7/2007 4:15:12 PM #

Keep the good work going.

Kevin Obee

9/4/2007 4:36:00 PM #

Just installed the 1.1 release of BlogEngine.NET on my Vista 64 IIS7 box.

I had a few configuration issues initially that were resolved by giving the IUSR and NETWORK SERVICE accounts read, write and modify priviledges on the directory tree where BlogEngine.NET was installed. This shouldn't be necessary if you're installing it under your %WEBROOT%.

One problem that I can't seem to resolve occurs when I click on the Settings tab under the Admin Control Panel. The BlogEngine.NET/admin/pages/Settings.aspx page loads in the browser window but all I'm presented with is half a page of binary characters. Any clues what's going on here?

Lloyd

7/22/2008 11:55:20 PM #

Hi,

I'm not really a web dev at all... I have a hard time debugging..
And here is my problem, I installed BlogEngine 1.4 on my website, but I can only see the posts when I'm logged!
If I log out, there is no post!

Any idea why is that? And how to make post visible to every one?!

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Getting started with BlogEngine.NET

Download

Set up users

Themes

Future updates

Extensions

Suggestions and requests

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