It's already mid-August and I just finished a round of BlogEngine.NET updates to take advantage of the new features in 1.4.5.x.  For a lot of folks, the need to Blog is what makes this platform so valuable.  But my clients, and my own interests also include adding Extensions and Advertising.  Now that there's  a Text box Widget, I can add simple ads like an Amazon link, Google AdSense, and affiliate links right in the Widget Zone without any special code.  Maybe this can be improved to target this medium, but I have to admit, if it works, I'm going to use it as is.  But there are a few things I'd like to see sooner than later.

Multiple Blog Support

What if I had 15 Blogs on different topics and some of them included overlapping authors?  I would like to support this configuration with One code base, One server or service layer, connecting to a Single SQL database or SQL Server farm.  I know I'd want this because I want it now and I have 8 Blogs, with 8 Web Apps, 4 AppPools, and 8 sets of XML Data.

SQL Server Express wouldn't cut it since my server started running into resource issues.  Not because of SQL Server but because I need 8 databases the way this configuration is setup.  Even if I upgrade my server (or hosting platform) to allow for more capacity, it doesn't scale.  Also, I will spend more time maintaining Blogs than writing for them.  So more Blogs = Less Blogging.  That's not a positive goal for me.  More...

I'd really like to see some more BlogEngine.NET themes take advantage of the new WidgetZone and cool features of version 1.4.  To that end, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to do this myself.  As a .NET architect and developer I haven't found myself doing a lot of css and UI interface work recently, but figured if I can do BizTalk, SharePoint, EntLib, SQL, WinForms and even ASP.NET development, HTML and css might be possible.  Besides, I'm only adding on to what other artists and geniuses have already done.

Here is my first attempt at modifying an existing BLogEngine.NET 1.3 theme to handle 1.4 functionality.  I went after one of my favorites: MWRT-002.

This is my update for BlogEngine.NET 1.4: MWRT-002-14.zip (23.24 kb)

Please critique, and let me know if you made any improvements that I had missed.  I'll be working on a few really nice themes from various locations over the next several weeks including one I'll be using on this site.  I'll try to show an example site soon.