Before completing one year of running this blog, I celebrate the last month of the first year of this blog by deploying my new theme create by JankoAtWrapSpeed.com. Thank you Janko.

Actually Janko created a lovely themes pack for BlogEngine.Net. He branded MosesOfEgypt.Net with his piece art theme. I like the dark theme especially that man standing front of the moon, I think Janko has a vision about it

Any way I hope you all like the new theme as I do.

Last week I found Peperclip themes of BlogEngine.Net. It was adapted by Caio Proiete. But they wasn't totally supporting version 1.4 as well as they had few CSS issues. Beside I wished for more wider area.

Thanks to Caio Proiete for providing these themes. I worked with them and tweaked them to support BlogEngine 1.4 and to provide more wide area for blog posts. You can download first 2 themes now (Cactus and Fall). Hopefully by next week I'll be done with the other2 themes. It worth to mention that I just modified the CSS, MasterPage and CommentView control.

Main CSS modification was around to support Widget Zone including Out of The Box Widgets. Beside fix few incorrect displaying styles

MasterPage modification was basically to provide WidgetZone. I also removed the Navigation section on the left menu and provide it as a widget which you can fine in the same download packages

While CommentView control modified to provide better comment adding form and better comment display with Avatars.

As Caio Proiete mentioned feel free to modify but don't forget to keep his credits.

Downloads:

• Paperclip-Cactus
• Paperclip-Cactus-Wider
• Paperclip-Fall
• Paperclip-Fall-Wider

Couple of days ago, I've walked through how to build simple BlogEngine Extension. Today I'll explore an advanced feature of BlogEngine Extensions which is provided settings your own extensions.

What is Extension Settings:
Settings are parameters user can provide to an extension to manage its behaviour. For example in my PostViews Extension, I'll provide settings that will allow user to exclude rage of IP addresses from accumulating any post view count. This setting is provided by the extension, and defined/filled by user.

Extension Setting Types:
I was able to categorize extension settings into 2 types:

1. Scalar Extension Settings:
   Only single value per parameter will be added. This will be reflected on the settings web form as one text box per parameter which will only accept single value. To enable this feature you should set ExtensionSettings.IsScalar=true
2. Multi Valued Extension Settings:
   Will allow multi value per parameter to be added. Just as Tabular settings. This will be reflected on the settings web form as list of values displayed on GridView. You can add new settings, edit or delete existing ones. To enable this feature you should set ExtensionSettings.IsScalar=false which is currently the default value.

PostViews Extension we are exploring now, has Scalar Extension Settings. The final results of your settings will be displayed as web from with simple text box entry fields:

More...

In this post and following one, I'll explore how to build BlogEngine.Net Extension. In my previous post I showed a simple Extension. Here I'll start again with how to build simple Extension to view total view counts of a post.

Step 1 - Create your class and mark it with Extension Attribute:
Just in the App_Code/Extensions folder, create your extension class and mark it with Extension attribute just as the following:

   1: [Extension("Counts and display number of views for a post", "1.0", "<a href=\"http://www.mosesofegypt.net\">Moses</a>")]

   2: public class PostViewes

   3: {

   4: }

The Extension attribute is very simple, it accepts 3 parameters, Description of the Extension, Extension version and the name of the Author who developed this extension. All are strings of course.

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If you are BlogEngine.Net fan, then you should heard or used BlogEngine.Net Extensions; the extensibility feature in BlogEngine.Net. My story with Extensionsstarted just last week. I enabled the comment moderation setting on my blog. And I faced a small issue, I wanted a page to view all moderated comments -waiting for approval-. I proposed that to my friend Amr, he suggested to me to have a look at BlogEngine.Net Extensions. 

The Story:
Well, the story was that I wanted to view all unapproved comments on my blog. There was only one solution in my mind before Amrsuggest to me to use BlogEngine.Net Extensions. That solution was to add new methods to exiting APIs or use the existing ones. I liked the idea of using existing ones, but the issue is that I will have to loop through all posts to find out if any as unapproved comments. And of course I didn't like the idea of adding new methods to existing APIs because it is just not acceptable at the time being, I am not one of BlogEngine developer's team, so will be hard for me to integrate my code in the upcoming releases.

The Extension Solution:
"Extensions allows you to write a class that can hook up to all the various events that are exposed in the application in a very simple manor" -Creating Extensions on BlogEngine Wiki-. Yes this sound like something to me. I need every time a comment is added to my blog to bookmark the post as it has pending comments waiting for approval. So I will handle Post.CommentAdded event and bookmark the post. Later, I'll build a page to view bookmarked posts and retrieve their moderated comments. To Bookmark a post, I just used simple XML file to store the unique identifier of the post.

More...