Today, I am proud to announce the next version of BlogEngine.NET is being released to the public. A lot of new features and improvements have been added along with new cool themes.

The BlogEngine.NET team and I are very pleased with this release, because it marks the continuous evolution of the project. Both the community and the team have been very innovative and have created a solid solution together. The community has done so much work on the project since the first release and it is only because of that we can release this soon. Truly amazing.

The performance is much better, the whole application is more stable and secure, and a lot of features have been added. A lot of small things have also been added or improved such as all the themes are 100% XHTML compliant and supports various microformats out of the box.

You can read the release note on the BlogEngine.NET website and you can download the new release from CodePlex right now.

BlogEngine.NET is designed to be simple and transparent, so that anybody can use all the features in their theme design or extensions without looking to hard for them. All the events can be subscribed to and all properties are exposed on every page or user control in the themes.

However, there is one little feature that hasn’t been announced anywhere – one that most people don’t care about but can mean everything to others.

JavaScript conversion events

A conversion is when a visitor performs an action you would like them to do. In a blog platform it usually means that it is when someone writes a comment or rates a post. Many different web analytics applications such as Google Analytics or Headlight can collect and analyse those conversions by calling a JavaScript function.

When a comment is added or a visitor rates a post, then two different JavaScript functions are called if they exist. The two functions can be added directly to the theme’s master page or added in the tracking script textbox in the admin section.

Adding the functions

To be notified when someone adds a comment, just add this method anywhere in the theme’s master page or in the tracking script textbox under settings in the admin section.

function OnComment(name, email, website, country, body)
{
   // Do something… 
}

And to catch when someone rates the post, add this method:

function OnRating(rating)
{
  // Do something…
}

This is not part of the BlogEngine.NET 1.0 release, but it had been part of the source code for a couple of months now. So, if you have the latest source from CodePlex, then you can take advantage of this feature already today. If not, wait a week for the next official release.