by
Dave Burke
9. February 2010 17:28
Sueetie.com blogs are now powered by BlogEngine.NET 1.6, released only last week by Al Nyveldt and the hard working BlogEngine.NET core team. The Sueetie news blog and the Public Demo Group blog were upgraded to 1.6. BlogEngine.NET 1.6 is also powering my home blog at DBVT.COM. Woo-hoo!
The BE.NET 1.6 Release Notes are found at DotNetBlogEngine.NET. Some of the new features include Centralized Comment Management, Comment Spam Filtering with plug-in support, Multiple Widget Zones, several new widgets, a new logging system, unhandled exception handling and more. I swear, it also seems faster than 1.5, though there's no mention of that in the release notes. Then again, I think each new version of BlogEngine.NET is faster than the last, so I'm biased and cannot tell you for sure if that is indeed the case.
I made a few modifications, of course. First I need to mention that BlogEngine.NET integration with Sueetie was effortless as always. A few tweaks to the web.config and we're rockin' with the XMLProvider handling the blog data and the DBProvider handling membership data in conjunction with Sueetie's ASPNET Membership architecture.
I made one tweak to BlogEngine.Core to change authentication handling in the DBMembership Provider class for when posting from Windows Live Writer or other MetaBlogAPI source. In prior versions I used a hard-coded password in the app.config for user validation. That's gone away and replaced with comparing the user's ASPNET password with the SQLMembership Provider. This also opens up Sueetie Blogs to multiple WLW authors, where the previous logic limited it to a single author.
Something else I do with each BlogEngine.NET upgrade is to copy the BlogBasePage class to Sueetie.Blogs, then derive my blog pages from it instead of BlogEngine.Core.Web.Controls.BlogBasePage. This allows me to make any modifications in SueetieBlogBasePage as well as inherit from SueetieBasePage in Sueetie.Core and take advantage of the framework.
The blog post list on the Sueetie Blog is now displayed by post abstract rather than full post. I do the same here as I do on my DBVT.COM blog, which is make a copy of the PostView.ascx control as ListPostView.ascx which I load from default.aspx. Both default.aspx and post.aspx load PostView.ascx, so using two different controls allows me to modify the styling and contents of the Post View.
I now updated three blogs to BlogEngine.NET 1.6, but I still haven't spent quality time looking at the new features of BlogEngine.NET 1.6. Hopefully that will come next!
Dave is the founder of Sueetie and its Head Ice Cream Scooper. Dave has
been building online applications since 1994 when he installed his first
web server while an Assistant Professor at East Carolina University. He left Academia
in 1995 to focus in online development for business where he worked with both publicly
and privately held companies. Dave lives in Burlington, Vermont where he has worked
out of his home office as a freelance developer and online community consultant since 2000. Reach him at
daveburke@dbvt.com. You can visit his website at dbvt.com.
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