The BlogEngine.net, or there and back again.

Those of you who visited my blog yesterday might have noticed that it was down. I fixed problem with Subtext’s export to BlogML I blogged about recently, and I decided to take a plunge, leave Subtext behind and move to BlogEngine.net. As you may notice if you read it on the website, not as RSS, I ended up rolling back to Subtext.

BlogEngine by default does not use SQL database, but stores everything in XML. If I wanted to keep on using my database, I needed to do the following:

  1. Add connection string to web.config
  2. Change default provider from XML to SQL in web.config
  3. Login to my database, with SQL Management studio, and manually run provided SQL script, that created all tables and sprocs for blog engine
  4. Edit web.config and add providers for membership and roles
  5. Run aspnet_regsql and point it to my remote database
  6. Open blogengine.net in Visual Studio
  7. Run Management tool to create roles and users

Well, that more or less was it. However it was not everything. BlogEngine.net seems to be very tied to XML, and it still wanted to save few things in XML for example blogroll).

blogengine When I (after roughly two hours) set up everything, it was time to import my old posts from BlogML file. BlogEngine.NET uses Click Once application for that. However this app is not documented and I had to go through trials and errors until I made it work (partially). For example, can anyone tell me what’s the difference between, Path and File Path? When it finally ran, it imported only first half of my posts, and threw exception telling me that my login and/or password is incorrect.

Then I tried to figure out how to remove the “welcome” blog-post that was automatically added, and as it was 1am and I was getting really pissed off, I ended up rolling back to Subtext.

One good side effect of this all, is – commenting seem to be working again. Most people could not leave a comment on the blog, what was one of the main reasons I wanted to abandon Subtext. This hopefully is now fixed, so I’ll keep on using Subtext for now.

BlogEngine.net has many powerful capabilities, but I guess it’s still too young. However it’s worth keeping an eye on, because it matures very fast.

 

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