After one year I settle with Wordpress, I've decided to move to BlogEngine.NET. One of my motives to use this blogging engine is because it uses Microsoft .NET. Not that I have complain on using Wordpress, it's just that I prefer to use .NET more than any platform.
A year ago when I started to have my own domain name for blogging, there were no good blogging engine which utilize .NET (well, at least to my preference) and Wordpress was already quite mature. With thousand of user base, millions of theme and plug-in available and backed with my lazyness, Wordpress was the my right choice at that time. There were times after I installed Wordpress and using it in my site where I planned to create my own blog engine using .NET, but the plan is only a plan since I never found a good quality time nor mood to make my own blog engine into reality.
Then I saw BlogEngine.NET when I did my Codeplex browsing routine. Frankly I wasn't quite impressed, mainly because it only used XML instead of SQL Server nor any database server for data storage. Some people maybe prefer XML because it is easy to deploy and stuff but no, not for me. I'm really not the big fans of using XML as data storage.
Until last week, where I downloaded version 1.1 of BlogEngine.NET, installed as well as played with it in my machine and I was quite satisfy. Besides XML, they are also supporting SQL server now. I was actually in the middle of creating my own theme (this theme) for Wordpress. I was 90 percent done, where I then decided to port the themes to BlogEngine.NET.
Surprisingly, creating themes in BlogEngine.NET is really easy. It only took me several hours of work to port the layout that I prepared for Wordpress to BlogEngine.NET. Well, probably because I'm already familiar with the architecture of ASP.NET 2.0 where BlogEngine is based to. The documentation on creating custom themes is also pretty much intuitive on their site.
Creating custom control is also extremely easy in BlogEngine.NET. Take a look my "Recent Comments" side of the right for example, I was able to create it in no time by just reading the source code of the provided controls. I'll post the how-to-guide on creating custom control in BlogEngine.NET later.
My prediction, this piece of blogging software will go big in the future especially if they can improve several things such as better post administration, common data access for custom control, comment approval, and user configurable part of the post in front page. Kudos to the team behind BlogEngine.NET who creates such as wonderful software. Keep up the good work guys.