Blog

For many years, I've been a happy BlogEngine user. However, recently my website was starting to expand in a way that wasn't flexible enough for the BlogEngine platform. Don't get me wrong, BlogEngine is a great blogging platform and it is without a doubt one of the best out on the market. But the capabilities and features Kentico provides made moving over to another platform an easy decision.

The future of my site needed something that would give me free reign and control on making full customisations myself in a solid framework, and Kentico seemed to fit this requirement.

Having worked with the Kentico platform for quite a few years now, I was impressed by how easy or complex I could make a site. Most importantly, the page perfomance of my site has got quite a boost. For a site that doesn't look like is doing much at face value, it is behind the scenes.

What was the migration process like?

Migrating all my BlogEngine content into Kentico did take some time, but the Kentico Import tool really does take the hassle out of getting key blog post information into the CMS. Just don't be expect tags and categories to be imported in the process. Migrating these facets is a manual job.

In addition, I decided to overhaul the friendly URL's used for my blog posts in keeping with the URL structure provided by BlogEngine. Even to this day, I'm not sold on the way Kentico generates it's friendly URL's for blog posts. For example:

/Blog/February-2013/My-Blog-Post.aspx

When it should be the following format:

/Blog/2013/02/03/My-Blog-Post.aspx

Luckily, it was pretty easy to write a Custom Eventhandler to add additional custom URL paths whenever I update or insert a new post (will add a post in the near future on how to do this).

I still have some additional features to add to this site (and dare I say fixes!) so watch this space...

Last week my blog was offline due to an unfortunate mishap. I won’t go into the details on what happened. I’d rather just forget.

After a lot of hard work, sweat and tears, my blog is almost back to its former glory. I was lucky enough to find a backup that was made a few months ago using BlogEngine’s BlogML export tool. Hooray!

Even though all my posts are back on display, I have unfortunately lost some user comments and ratings. It saddens me to know that I have lost this valuable information, since hearing your thoughts makes this blog a more exciting read.

There is still some work to do, but I am glad to say the difficult part is over.

I upgraded to the really cool BlogEngine 1.5 last week. I was surprised to find out that I was three versions behind. Nevertheless, the guys behind BlogEngine always know how the make the upgrade really easy!

When I tried to publish a blog posting using Windows Live Writer, I came across two problems. The first problem I had was the dreaded “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” error. I really hate this error! This has to be the most useless error message in .NET!

The second problem I came across was the inability to upload images and the following error occurred:

After some good old research on the web and reading various BlogEngine Discussion forums, fixing these errors is as straight-forward as installing BlogEngine.

To fix the “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” error all you have to do is create a new blog account in Windows Live Writer. Just updating your account configuration will not resolve this issue. You have to setup a new account. I think this will update the wlwmanifest.xml file in your site directory. Once you have successfully tested you can publish a blog post with your new account, delete your old account.

The image upload issue is caused by permissions restrictions to your App_Data folder. Make sure you have allowed read/write permissions to this folder. For some reason adding read/write permissions to the App_Data folder through my FTP client did not work. The only way I was able to set the permissions is through my Hosting Plan File Manager account.

I have to say that after using BlogEngine for my first couple of posts, I can't think of any other Blogging tool to use. However, the thing that really annoys me about BlogEngine is the HTML editor when I want to create my postings. I have found that the TinyMCE HTML editor rejects some HTML tags. For example, <code> and <iframe> tags.

I have been desperately looking through the BlogEngine forum posting's to see if there is anyway to fix this problem. There was no specific way of rectifying this problem.

However, I found a way to fix this!!!

You will need to make a simple change to the tinyMCE.ascx file located in the admin folder (/wwwroot/admin/). Find the following line:

extended_valid_elements : "hr[class|width|size|noshade],font[face|size|color|style],span[class|align|style],script[charset|defer|language|src|type]",

Now you will see in this line that there are tag elements listed as valid. All you have to do is add tags to this line in order for them to be accepted by the TinyMCE HTML editor. For example, I want my <code> and <iframe> tags to be accepted:

extended_valid_elements : "hr[class|width|size|noshade],font[face|size|color|style],span[class|align|style],script[charset|defer|language|src|type],code,iframe",

And there you have it!

Hope this helps!