Hidden feature of BlogEngine – conversions

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.