Status on BlogEngine.NET

CodePlex have been having problems for more than a week now, so we haven’t been able to make new releases or use the source control. This has crippled our collaboration within the BlogEngine.NET team, but far from stopped the progress. Here’s a quick update of what have been done since CodePlex went offline.

MetaWeblog API

The MetaWeblog API has been implemented, so it now is possible to use Windows Live Writer, Word 2007 or other blogging tools that supports the API. It also enables cross-posting from other platforms such as Digg.

RSS

The RSS support is being greatly improved and will now feature RSS 2.0, ATOM 1.0 and OPML 1.0. It will also provide the ability for users to create rich blog posts that support the most common syndication extensions. Podcasting will also be supported along with other media extensions.

Trackbacks and pingbacks

The ability to send and receive track- and pingbacks has been much improved. Whenever a track-/pingback is received it is added as a comment and a screenshot of the sender website is shown instead of the Gravatar. It will be spam filtered using Akismet or some other mechanism.

New widgets

A lot of new widgets have been added to be used in the themes including a tag cloud, calendar, month archive list and recent post view. All the controls can be configured in many ways to allow theme designers the flexibility they need.

AJAX

The calendar widget is now AJAX enabled for a smoother flipping between months. Also the comments have been AJAX enabled so no postback is needed. If the browser doesn’t support AJAX, the commenting fall back on regular postback behaviour and the invisible CAPTCHA enabled.

Improved theme control

It is now possible to apply theming to almost every element on the blog. A theme designer has total control over the master page which contains everything the designer want’s to add including custom user controls etc. A post is also totally customizable including the comments. No special macro language is used - it is all native ASP.NET for total flexibility and control.

Comments

The comments have also been improved so they now contain the comment author’s national flag. It can be turned on and off in the admin settings page and customized by the theme. The live preview now auto-resolves typed URL’s for a more accurate preview.

Categories

A category admin settings page has been added to enable deletion and renaming of all categories. You still add new categories when you create a new post.

Referrer stats

I’ve always spent too much time in my old dasBlog referrer page. I loved it. That way it was easy to check who was linking to the blog and pay them a visit. Now BlogEngine.NET has a similar feature.

BlogML

In the very near future we want to add support for BlogML - both for import and export. It's an important feature because it allows you to move the content of an entire blog to and from BlogEngine.NET. It's a simple but very powerful feature.

Bug fixes

Other than adding new features, we have fixed a lot of bugs and made existing features better. The result is a much more stabile and full featured engine.

All in all, it is becomming a stabile blog engine with a lot of exclusive features.