I am providing a "pre-release" version of my photo gallery control for BlogEngine. There were a few things I considered when making this control (and not going with other solutions that exist).

1. No third party assemblies (that means everything written from scratch).
2. Keep business logic and control logic inside one contained .DLL file.
3. The interface with BlogEngine will be through an extension.
4. Follow the BlogEngine method of abstracting data types and resource files.
5. Make the gallery control easy to setup and use.

With these goals in mind, I hope that my assembly + extension will be considered as part of the core of BlogEngine. If I do not accomplish this goal, well then I have a pretty kick arse photo gallery for my personal use. More...

The XBox 360 Widget that I use on this site was fairly straight forward to build thanks to mads and the team for making such an awesome framework for widgets. This post will run you through how to create such a widget.

It is fairly easy to create a widget as all you need to have is an edit.ascx to handle the edit fields and a widget.ascx to handle the display of the actual widget.

More...

The latest build of BlogEngine now supports multiple scalar extension settings. This is great news as now you can build a much more robust extension without creating a custom administration screen! I love the work that mads and rtur does with BlogEngine.

You can read more about it at http://rtur.net/blog/post/2008/02/25/Using-multiple-settings-in-Extension-Manager.aspx

Every time I go deeper into the BlogEngine code base I am caught off guard at how well thought out the abstraction layers are. The ExtensionManager is another layer that helps people who build Extensions have a place to administrate their extension. If you don't want to use the default Settings class holder, you can use a custom administration page.

http://rtur.net/blog/post/2008/01/Documentation-on-Extension-Manager.aspx

I am going to have to put this to good use with my RandomQuotes extension that I am trying to make work.

This BlogEngine instance uses the Asp.NET Membership Provider, and it was actually quite easy to convert. Big kudos to the team who has worked on this Blog software.

Comment out this code inside Web.config

<membership defaultProvider="XmlMembershipProvider" > <providers> <clear /> <add name="XmlMembershipProvider" type="BlogEngine.Core.Providers.XmlMembershipProvider, BlogEngine.Core" description="XML membership provider" xmlFileName="~/App_Data/users.xml"/> </providers> </membership> <roleManager defaultProvider="XmlRoleProvider" enabled="true" cacheRolesInCookie="true" cookieName=".BLOGENGINEROLES"> <providers> <clear /> <add name="XmlRoleProvider" type="BlogEngine.Core.Providers.XmlRoleProvider, BlogEngine.Core" description="XML role provider" xmlFileName="~/App_Data/roles.xml"/> </providers> </roleManager>

Replace it with this code

<membership defaultProvider="SqlMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="SqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="BlogEngine" applicationName="JwendlBlog" minRequiredPasswordLength="5" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" /> </providers> </membership> <roleManager enabled="true" defaultProvider="SqlRoleProvider"> <providers> <add connectionStringName="BlogEngine" name="SqlRoleProvider" applicationName="JwendlBlog" type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider" /> </providers> </roleManager>

Then you have to install the ASP.NET Membership SQL Registration program. Best described at this URL http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/040506-1.aspx

This was almost all you need to do to finish the conversion. The problem is that you need to now setup a default user of some sort. This can be easy, or hard depending on how the WSAT installed your instance. Please read up on ASP.NET membership before you attempt to convert over. I had to manually set the roles up on the proper application and user inside the aspnet_UsersInRoles table. After that, login with the default user and everything works just fine.

The reason why this works is because the XmlMembershipProvider class inherits the MembershipProvider class that ASP.NET provides. This means that all of the functions that BlogEngine uses for authentication are extensible to any custom membership provider that you can dream of.

Plain text can be downloaded from the attachment.

aspnetmembership.txt (1.41 kb)