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Subtext,
Open SourceIf you are looking for a free .NET based open source blogging application, Subtext may be for you or your company. It’s a mature and established blogging framework founded by MS employee Phil Haack. My site is using Subtext and I’ve been very happy with it as compared to solutions such as Telligent Community Server which are not free and are quite heavy and complicated just for running a simple blog for you or your company.
Here is the rundown of its current benefits as I’ve experienced:
> Free
> OpenID integration
> Constantly changes for the better
> Source Code behind it is pretty solid, easy to work with
> Can get it up and running over SQL Server in minutes
Excellent wizard walks you through the entire configuration process after you get the web.config database key setup to match a new DB you create in SQL Server. The wizard just takes that DB you create and rolls with it and configures the rest for you through their nice online wizard that fires the first time you compile and run the solution
> Admin interface rocks…full and full of features for you or your company blog
> Currently it is based on the .NET 2.0 framework but compiles in 3.5 (just use the VS 2008 conversion tool & it works fine)
> Works with Windows Live Writer
> Decent support / timely feedback in forums
> Phil Haack writes a decent amount of updates on the versions and How-Tos
> Ability to edit your post slug to make it URL friendly for SEO
> Easy to edit skinning engine
> JQuery integration
> Directly edit the CSS & easily move around custom .net controls..total flexibility on placement (calendar, tag cloud, etc.)
> Great templates out of the box. Just take one and fly with it or tweak it to your heart’s desire
> There is a current push to provide better documentation…but not much needed really, this thing is easy to setup and support
> Unit testable with unit tests already integrated into the solution
What could be improved?
> Push for community to contribute more templates…however if you have an in-house graphic designer, there are enough templates to choose from currently and have he/she run with one of the layouts already
> Documentation, however subtext code is so easy to work with as well as out of box functionality so you don’t really need much documentation unless heavily customizing it
A rundown of potential future enhancements coming:
(that are being mentioned or were mentioned on the Subtext site or by Phil Haack)
> ASP.NET MVC recode / version of Subtext
> Some kind of Flickr integration
> Spell Checker
> Improved Spam filtering
.NET Blog Competitors to Subtext (pay or open source):
While there are others such as presstopia, they really are not good enough to compete (feature set, support, etc.) therefore I left them out.
> Telligent Community Server (this is nice, it works, but is a beast to work with..so beware. There will be some pains)
> BlogEngine.NET (this is fairly new but my loyalty right now is with Subtext). They are a bit behind features as compared to Subtext in some areas
> dasBlog (drawbacks: only an XML datastore, no SQL Server. Templates kind of suck out of the box as compared to Subtext and others)
Here are some print screens of it’s awesome Admin UI:
(click on images below to see original size pics)
Posts Tab
Articles Tab
Feedback Tab
Links Tab
Galleries Tab
Stats Tab
Options Tab
Import / Export Tab
Credits Tab
Here are some example websites using Subtext:
VanessaBrooke.net
Veloc-IT
StevenHarman.net
Recommendations / Tips:
> Always implement Google Feedburner for your RSS solution
> Use Windows Live Writer as your tool to write new posts
> Implement Google Analytics on your blog
> There are some controls that show up in some templates that do not in others. So take a look at all subtext skins so you can see what widgets are available. For example, I had to pull the tag cloud control from another skin. It was easy but did not know the tag cloud was there until I checked out some other skins.
