BlogEngine.NET 2.0 was released just before Thanksgiving this year, and it includes a bunch of major changes, the most noticeable of which is the drastically improved admin dashboard.

There are also a number of external-facing improvements too such as jQuery out of the box, SEO improvements, and so forth. I contributed one small improvement to BlogEngine.NET 2.0, and that was the alternative captcha engine I wrote – Recaptcha causes as many problems as it solves and was rife with bugs in BlogEngine.NET 1.6 ¹.

SimpleCaptcha

SimpleCaptcha was inspired by the captcha engine Jeff Atwood used on Coding Horror for so many years, where he asked his bots to politely type in the word “orange.” In that vein I decided to follow in his footsteps.

The default SimpleCaptcha out of the box looks like this:

Simply stated, the end user is expected to be able to add 5+5 = 10 in order to post their comment. If they cannot, then the comment isn’t posted. Feel free to give it a try on this post if you’d like.

Of course you can modify the captcha prompt and answer in the extensions panel like so:

I released a small UI update for SimpleCaptcha this morning and committed the changes to a BlogEngine.NET fork (waiting for somebody to accept my pull request;) I recommend downloading it here if you’re already using BlogEngine.NET 2.0 and want to use SimpleCaptcha: SimpleCaptcha1.1.zip (3.07 kb)

Subscribe Remind

One of the things that happened in BlogEngine.NET 2.0 was a major refactoring of how extension settings are stored, so a number of really simple extensions like my Subscribe Remind BlogEngine.NET Extension were broken in the process.

I’ve released an updated version of Subscribe Remind for BlogEngine.NET 2.0, which you can download here.

Many other basic extensions may have been broken in the process of upgrading to BlogEngine.NET 2.0, so make sure you check your App_Code folder carefully when you upgrade. Virtually any extension that saved settings data has been subject to breaking changes.

New Theme – “NerdRage”

I’ve also updated this blog’s theme – I wanted a theme that I could call my own, so I hacked and hacked the Inove and Indigo themes until I had something I was happy with. My goal here is to try to maximize readability and I really need your feedback to make that possible, so please let me know if you find my blog difficult to read in any way, shape, or form.

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I finished this extension up last night but I was reluctant to deploy it to my own blog given that there was a major flamewar in progress on my recent post about Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups. Having actually tested this extension on that very post, I feel confident sharing my latest BlogEngine.NET extension with you: Footnotes!¹

Once you've installed it, all you have to do to add a footnote is to click on the new "footnote" button visible on your TinyMCE text editor:

Once you click it you'll see a pop-up window - just type in whatever you want² to include in your footnote (no special syntax required) and it'll automatically be inserted into your blog entry.

And this is what your footnote will look like once it gets rendered by the plugin: 

That's it. Pretty simple, no?

Modifying Footnote Styles

If you need to modify the default styles for your footnotes³, you can do so by modifying User controls/footnotes/be-footnotes.css.

Alternatively, you can also specify your own stylesheet location for footnotes if you wish via the Extension's settings:

Installation Instructions

The only special instructions for installing Footnotes for BlogEngine.NET are thus:

1. If you are already using the SyntaxHighlighter extension for BlogEngine.NET, make sure you grab the Footnotes 1.0 (SyntaxHighlighter) download below instead of the normal one - otherwise his handy TinyMCE plugin will disappear from your text editor!
2. If you do not have SyntaxHighlighter installed, grab the Footnotes 1.0 (Normal) version below - otherwise you might get an annoying JavaScript error every time you load up TinyMCE.

For both versions of BlogEngine.NET Footnotes: simply extract the folders onto the root of your blog and everything will slip into its appropriate place.

Downloads

Footnotes 1.1 (SyntaxHighlighter).zip (7.59 kb) [new:8/31/2010]

Footnotes 1.1 (Normal).zip (7.59 kb) [new:8/31/2010]

If you run into any problems with Footnotes, please leave a comment on this page and I will respond as quickly as possible.

Update:

Whoops! Fixed a bug which prevented BE.NET's syndication feed from displaying properly. This has now been fixed in the 1.1 release of Footnotes.

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