Integrating my website with BlogEngine.Net

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I am developing a site (ASP.Net based) that, besides other features enables the users to blog as well. I am thinking of integrating BlogEngine.Net to my portal.

From whatever little I have analyzed, integrating at presentation layer will be far more challenging in comparison to doing so at business layer. That means (I guess) I will have to use the BlogEngine.Core.dll in my application.

I am looking for some sort of approval from the community, complimented with suggested do's and dont's. BTW, I find the business layer a bit intimidating (complex) as I want some basic & necessary features only.

Resignation answered 11/12, 2009 at 18:4 Comment(0)

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I recently did this for a client - note how I styled the blog to fit the main site design:

http://www.homenetdirect.com/

This was an ASP.NET 3.5 Web Application Project with master pages. I took one of the basic themes from BlogEngine that resembled what I was trying to get lookwise. Then I had all the elements that needed to be styled. Do the CSS gradually starting from the main container and work your way in (use Firefox dev toolbar). One more thing: I had to set up a subdomain for the blog - contrary to what a lot of people say, this will not hurt your SEO. SEO starts and ends with good content.

EDIT:

Creating themes for BlogEngine (Al Nyveldt's tutorials are worth watching):

http://www.nyveldt.com/blog/post/BlogEngineNET-Creating-Themes-Webcast.aspx

Ondrea answered 11/12, 2009 at 18:10 Comment(2)

Firstly, I think you've done a great job at homenetdirect. The integration is flawless! So you seem to suggest that the integration at presentation layer is more convenient. Is that so? My site will probably not have exclusive pages for blogs ... it will all be woven with other content. Further, my site will be big on AJAX. Next, my site will offer the capability of switching among many skins. I think this will make integration at presentation layer somewhat challenging. Do you BTW have any experience of using BlogEngine.Core.dll directly? What is your gut-feeling on that anyway? – Resignation 11/12, 2009 at 18:35

You should be able go the themes route with skins. The goal would be to make the blog look like it is part of the site - to that end I think I did an okay job but I was short on time. There is no reason why you cannot code against the blog DLL - but I would keep the rest of my site functionality separate. My gut feeling is that this will work out for you, even with AJAX :-) – Ondrea 11/12, 2009 at 19:2

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you can check out http://www.ajaymatharu.com/integrating-blogengine-into-an-existing-site/

Leatriceleave answered 14/1, 2010 at 4:13 Comment(0)

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I recently did this for a client - note how I styled the blog to fit the main site design:

http://www.homenetdirect.com/

This was an ASP.NET 3.5 Web Application Project with master pages. I took one of the basic themes from BlogEngine that resembled what I was trying to get lookwise. Then I had all the elements that needed to be styled. Do the CSS gradually starting from the main container and work your way in (use Firefox dev toolbar). One more thing: I had to set up a subdomain for the blog - contrary to what a lot of people say, this will not hurt your SEO. SEO starts and ends with good content.

EDIT:

Creating themes for BlogEngine (Al Nyveldt's tutorials are worth watching):

http://www.nyveldt.com/blog/post/BlogEngineNET-Creating-Themes-Webcast.aspx

Ondrea answered 11/12, 2009 at 18:10 Comment(2)

Firstly, I think you've done a great job at homenetdirect. The integration is flawless! So you seem to suggest that the integration at presentation layer is more convenient. Is that so? My site will probably not have exclusive pages for blogs ... it will all be woven with other content. Further, my site will be big on AJAX. Next, my site will offer the capability of switching among many skins. I think this will make integration at presentation layer somewhat challenging. Do you BTW have any experience of using BlogEngine.Core.dll directly? What is your gut-feeling on that anyway? – Resignation 11/12, 2009 at 18:35

You should be able go the themes route with skins. The goal would be to make the blog look like it is part of the site - to that end I think I did an okay job but I was short on time. There is no reason why you cannot code against the blog DLL - but I would keep the rest of my site functionality separate. My gut feeling is that this will work out for you, even with AJAX :-) – Ondrea 11/12, 2009 at 19:2

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I integrated BlogEngine.NET 1.4 on my website. The result is exactly ONE web application (not a web site). However, the task wasn't an easy one as I had to change the source code of both the presentation layer and the core DLL to fit my needs. Now there's already version 1.6 and I guess, I'm gonna have to do same work again some time.

Concurrent answered 9/2, 2010 at 9:3 Comment(0)

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