I promised the BlogEngine.NET team I'd put together one more theme before the next release.  I initially picked out about 8 possible starting templates earlier in the week and tonight I picked Dirtylicous by Arcsin as the next one I'd make.

The process really is a snap.  I easily spent more time deciding which one to do than I did actually creating the theme.  I'll likely do a more colorful one next but Dirtylicious is a nice, straight forward blog template.  It seemed like BlogEngine.NET should have a starter one like this so I made it.

If you are interested in trying out this theme, get the latest version of BlogEngine.NET (changeset 1622)..

The theme creation process has improved since I did the others. Mads has change the way controls work and given more control in the admin section verses making direct changes in the theme.  I've also promised to get some documentation on the process together and will be making it available soon.

While I was theming, I decided to clean up my site a bit more.  A few changes to the indigo theme were made making the BlogEngine.NET Indigo theme a bit more like the original version.  (The Indigo changes are not posted in the code repository yet.)

 

I've been testing out the MetaWeblog API of BlogEngine.NET a lot over the past week.  It seems most of the tools I have tried have slightly different implementations of the API which have required some minor tweak to the code in one way or another.

So far I've tested with the following:

• BlogJet
• Digg (Blog it functionality)
• Windows Live Writer
• Word 2007
• Zoundry

Other than Digg, the others are all full fledged desktop apps for blogging.  They all have their good and bad (to me anyway).  The best after my initial review were BlogJet and Windows Live Writer.  I have not used Word 2007 as much as the others since it is not on my main BlogEngine.NET development PC.

BlogJet has the most polish of all the desktop tools I tried.  I like the way it handles images and the layout of the application.  It has a nice auto replace feature that I missed elsewhere.  The only drawbacks were that it does have a price attached and I had an odd problem with it importing some posts in the test blog.  The test blog posts however may be at fault.  I've had no problems with my live blog or newly created test posts using any method.  The problem is so minor that if it weren't for the cost, I would likely have ended up using this program moving forward.

Windows Live Writer is almost as polished and seems to have similiar features.  The layout is not as nice, but I think the price (free) helps makes up for it.  I also know that WLW has a community writing plugins to extend the functionality.  (If BlogJet has this, I'm unaware.)  Hopefully, I can find a code snippit plug in to my liking.

All this leads to 2 questions on my mind.

1. What other tools will people use that take advantage of BlogEngine.NET's MetaWeblog API?  (I'd like to know what else to test and take advantage of myself.)
2. Since I'll be working with Windows Live Writer moving forward (unless someone can sway me into purchasing BlogJet), what are the best plug ins you've used?

I have been working on the MetaWeblog API implementation for BlogEngine.NET over the past few days.  It is coming along very nicely and while not yet complete, very workable.  This is the first live post using the API.

There were a few issues I ran into with Windows Live Writer (WLW) specifically that had me baffled until I ran across 2 posts from Wictor Wilen.  Apparently, WLW has its own special implementation of metaweblog.getCategories.  It expect much different results than what the actual MetaWeblog API specs describe.

Hopefully, CodePlex will be back up early this week and I can get changes integrated into the system so BlogEngine.NET users can start to take advantage of great blogging tools like WLW.

I've spent a few hours the past 2 days making themes for BlogEngine.NET. Overall, the experience is a good one. There are a few things I'd like to see changed over the coming releases to make theming easier and more flexible, but I really can't complain.

The first one, Leaves, is included in the existing release 1.03. It is adapted from the Leaves template at oswd.org. It is very simple as you can see, but very functional. It can be easily modified to change the colors and add/remove sidebar items. It has not stood the test of time however. It worked fine in the few pages I put it through, but expect there will be areas where it will have issues. If you decide to try out this theme and run across any problems, please let me know by posting them on the BlogEngine.NET site.


The newest one is called Indigo. It is also adapted from a template (named indigo curiously enough) at oswd.org. (I'm a fan of that site in case you hadn't figured that out.) I just completed and posted this theme to the project. Again, it has not been throughly tested, so if you find bugs, please let me know by posting them on the BlogEngine.NET site.

(Note: You can click on the pictures to see a full view of them.)

Of course, I have an "ant" theme on my site now, but it is the most incomplete of the 3. It needs some serious work on the sidebar and post view, not to mention browser compatibility. (It just looks a bit different in IE.) I'll work on cleaning that up later in the week. (It is not included in the project at this point.)

I also made some notes about the theming process and have more stuff floating around in my head about it. I'll likely try to work up a more detailed post about the process late this week.

Update: I switched my personal theme over to Indigo. There were some issues with my ant theme and I figured I'd 'dogfood' indigo until I had a chance to work on themes again. Also, I've added a zip file for the indigo theme as requested.

indigo.zip (15.68 kb)

It seems I have a thing for blog engines. I started building one that I used for a while. It worked well, but I only had some of the many features I wanted and I had limited time to work on it. I moved to Das Blog and then last week to SubText after changing hosting providers to get better SQL Server support. Then, on Wednesday, I ran across BlogEngine.

BlogEngine is a new open source .NET based blog project lead by Mads Kristensen of .NET Slave fame. It is entirely based on ASP.NET 2.0, it is very lightweight, and I'm really excited about it. It reminds me of my original blog a lot, but further along and nicer. The feature list is not as complete as other blog projects out there, but what is here seems well done and I believe it will add features quickly.

I upgraded everything over to BlogEngine this weekend and converted my old blog theme it to work with BlogEngine. I really like it and look forward to the future of BlogEngine.

It is a great code project to download and read if nothing else. You can learn a lot just from the code itself and the project isn't so huge you get lost trying to find your way. It is XML based so no database is required. Simply download, open it and run.