I have finally gotten around to start documenting my adventures in ASP .NET. Hopefully, some entries might be of some help to someone and I am not completely wasting my time.

Firstly, I was looking for a quick way to get some kind of blog up asap. Although I would love to use WordPress but I didn't have the time to get started with PHP. Not that I have anything against PHP but i just didn't have the time to start delving into another language. Anyway, i came across blogengine.net and was a breeze to setup. I downloaded the web version, extracted the files and fired up Visual Studio and immediately was able to launch it successfully on my browser locally.

I stuck with the default settings (please don't hack me) and stuck with using XML files as the data store instead of looking into setting up an SQL database to hold my entries. One thing that I didn't like was the themes that came with it. After a quick look around, I found iTheme. Someone, a Rob Van Meeuwen, managed to convert a WordPress theme into a BlogEngine theme. You just need to extract the contents of the zip file to /theme, and choose the iTheme theme under the "Settings" tab in the BlogEngine control panel. Everything works fine but i have a feeling the theme was for BlogEngine 1.3 because I can't seem to find the link to add widgets to BlogEngine anymore. I will have to have a look at this some other time.

To get BlogEngine up and running on your site, you just need to upload everything, .cs files and all, up to your site. However, I chose to add a web deployment project to the blogEngine solution and compile it into one nice big dll file. However, it will not compile nicely and you will need to change some of the page class names due to some overlaps. This should be easy enough .

 For more details, you can check out the BlogEngine.NET wiki.