Mads Kristensen

My personal blog about everything tech

The new BlogEngine.NET is a major improvement to the 1.1 release. It is stuffed with new cool features that we’ve put a lot of effort into building. On top of that, the overall quality of the new version is also higher and has gone through more thorough testing on many live websites. The community really pulled through and reported every bug they found so we could fix it. Thank you very much for that.

New features

This is a list of some of the new features in the 1.2 release.

  • BlogML import/export
  • Extension model
  • Code syntax highlighting
  • ASP.NET SiteMap provider for static pages
  • Support for a static page to be the front page
  • Full comment RSS/ATOM feed (here's mine)
  • Intelligent error 404 page (try it)
  • E-mail notifications for future comments
  • Role provider
  • Extended in-site search capabilities
  • SLUG – the URL doesn’t change with the title
  • Attachments on the contact page (take a look)
  • Comment moderation
  • Much better Mono support

Website updates

The official BlogEngine.NET website has been upgraded to the new release and a few new pages has been added.

A video page is introduced to provide screen cast on various topics. There will be videos explaining the various features and there will be technical videos for people who want to modify and extend BlogEngine.NET.

An extension sharing page is also added (coming soon). From here you can share your custom extensions with the community and download other’s extensions. You can rate the individual extensions and sort the list by rating or date. This should hopefully get people writing cool extensions for anyone to use.

Reflection

It’s exactly 2½ months since the release of BlogEngine.NET 1.1 and it has been downloaded more than 20,000 times in that period. The initial 1.0 release isn't even 5 months old, so it’s still a pretty young product. However, I think that by this release it has matured a lot and has really become a general purpose blogging platform for the masses.

Even though we’ve come a long way in a short period of time, we are not going to slow down the development. We’ve already got a lot of new features on the roadmap for the next release just waiting to be written. For now, we need to take a step back and evaluate the last couple of month’s development so we can make a plan for the 1.3 release.

I hope you will enjoy this release as much as the team and I did building it. Now go download it.

UPDATE: If you need other events than the ones on the list, please tell me so they can be added. 

Because the next version of BlogEngine.NET has a build-in extension framework, we have exposed a lot of new events for extension builders. The more events that are exposed, the more power can an extension have.

You can write extensions that alter the rendered output of a post, block the download of a file or image, log all sorts of actions and a whole lot more. Here is a complete list of the events an extension can subscribe to:

  • Post.AddingComment
  • Post.CommentAdded
  • Post.RemovingComment
  • Post.CommentRemoved
  • Post.Rated
  • Post.Saving
  • Post.Saved
  • Post.Serving
  • Post.MarkedDirty
  • Page.Saving
  • Page.Saved
  • Page.Serving
  • Page.MarkedDirty
  • Comment.Approving
  • Comment.Approved
  • Comment.Serving
  • Category.Saving
  • Category.Saved 
  • Category.MarkedDirty
  • Search.Searching
  • Search.IndexBuilding
  • Search.IndexBuild
  • BlogSettings.Changed
  • ReferrerModule.ReferrerRegistered
  • Utils.EmailSent
  • FileHandler.Serving
  • FileHandler.Served
  • FileHandler.BadRequest
  • ImageHandler.Serving
  • ImageHandler.Served
  • ImageHandler.BadRequest
  • Pingback.Sending
  • Pingback.Sent
  • PingbackHandler.Received
  • PingbackHandler.Rejected
  • PingbackHandler.Accepted
  • PingbackHandler.Spammed
  • Trackback.Sending
  • Trackback.Send
  • TrackbackHandler.Received
  • TrackbackHandler.Rejected
  • TrackbackHandler.Accepted
  • TrackbackHandler.Spammed

43 events in total and then comes all the regular ASP.NET events like BeginRequest and ApplicationError etc. I hope this will get a lot of developers writing cool extensions and share them with the community. See how to write extensions for BlogEngine.NET - it's easier than you might expect.