Monday, May 14, 2012

Blogging for the .NET framework

A system I've been working on is based on the .NET framework. It seems that Mono and Apache on a web server is a pretty good combo, and I recommend everyone with a spare day or two to give it a try.

Anyway, I needed to run a blogging engine on that same server and have that blog support Hebrew and right-to-left languages. While there are several good blogging engines for .NET, not all would run on Mono and most doesn't do the RTL part good enough.
My first attempt was to use SubText, but getting rid of the SQL Server dependency and adding the RTL support became too much of a hassle. I picked SubText for it being notorious for its simplicity and elegance, but while I was ready to invest some customization time, it demanded too much of it.
My second attempt was BlogEngine.NET. What can I say - I fell for it almost immediately. The platform is versatile enough to support not only many RDBMS's, but it also allows storing the posts in XML files. Nonetheless, the translation to Hebrew wasn't complete and there was no RTL native theme for it. So I made one.

BlogEngine.NET is hosted on CodePlex and uses Mercurial for its source control. I had a fork of the project in no time, so I started making the required changes and created a new theme based on the default one. Since I don't want to maintain a fork of the project for eternity and since I want others to enjoy this new feature, I've sent a pull-request which was accepted yesterday. So starting from version 2.5.0.6, you can enjoy BlogEngine.NET for your Hebrew blog.

As always, it feels good to contribute back and to know that my code can be further enhanced by other developers.

Happy blogging.

1 comment:

  1. Excellent Post. Also visit http://www.msnetframework.com/#framework.php

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