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You know, since .TEXT has officially become part of Community Server, it has really been sad, terrible. It is a great product, if only we (the community) could keep working on it or start a replacement. ;)

If you want your blogging tool to succeed, don't keep it to yourself, invite others to share ideas and implementation code that may be better than one person could pull off.

So, going OpenSource? I think that was .TEXT's down fall in the end; not going OpenSource that is.

Hi Adam... yes, I agree, OpenSource is definitely the way to go with something such as this. I'm planning to get a base product up and running and to create a roadmap before releasing the source code. I'll probably do it in a similar way to the way that I've done ProjectDistributor.

If you have any tips, hints, requests, etc. please feel free to send them through.

I just tried the new beta of communityserver and am impressed with it - I really would give it a try before coding your own. As a trial I have set it up for a new community (see link above) and had one minor issue setting up, had two blogs working right away and also forums and galleries which I dont really need as yet. Going to be a bugger to restyle but there has to be some work in it somewhere ;O)

You dont get the source code yet while it is in beta but seems very extendable and nicely thought out. Check out the cs.org forum to see how people are customising it - neat :O)

Hey Goth... yes, I know that CS is going to be cool - I've read all about it. Mind you, your own testimony seems to back up my feeling that this software is probably much more complex than what is needed for simple folks like me to manage my ramblings:

GOTH >> and had one minor issue setting up

GOTH >> and also forums and galleries which I dont really need as yet

GOTH >> Going to be a bugger to restyle

GOTH >> You dont get the source code yet


:-)

Great idea... I hope to see news about your project soon.

I totally agree with Adam. Open source is the way forward. That way, people from a wider background can help in creating the application. If you needed to do some work on the UI, you could ask for help and maybe get a top UI developer. If you needed some work in the db, you wouldnt have to rely on your in-house DBA who may not have the right experience.

One thing I have been looking at is building an open source platform where people can collaborate to create/manage a project. Think SourceSafe on the web with an additional user management layer on top.

It might be worth talking to John Lam... he recently wrote his own blogging engine. - http://www.iunknown.com

Good to hear. I put together a simple blogging engine for Classic ASP a while ago and it wasn't too bad - keeping it simple definitely helped. I agree that .TEXT may be a bit too clever for its own good.

I think a lot of weblogs.asp.net folks feel a bit trapped - jump ship to your own blog and lose the weblogs.asp.net traffic, or deal with the old version of .TEXT that hasn't seen an update for a long, long time. Do you intend to cross-post or move?

I'll probably move altogether I think once I have it completed, although I may cross post for the exposure. Not sure. One thing I am sure about is that I'll be writing some sort of migration tool to migrate from my Weblogs blog to my new app.

Hi Darren, what about the other well known .NET based blogging tool, dasBlog (http://www.dasblog.net)?

Though, that one uses XML files to store the data (not everyone likes XML :P).

I think perhaps the best way if you want to start from scratch is to implement just the engine, and have everything else as a plugin to the blogging engine. Then allow anyone to just create plugins for the blogging engine. Much like what MovableType (http://www.movabletype.org) and WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org) allow for.

That way you can ensure the blog tool will be as light as possible, while being capable of adding complexity if the user requires it via these plugins.

The great thing about the plugins is that even long after you've stopped actively developing it, others who find a need for it, will contribute plugins for it.

Or in the case of not too frequent releases, plugins can offer temporary relief for certain problems (eg: comment spam). Or if the user is not happy with the inbuilt comment spam method, they can implement their own plugin for the purpose, without having to modify the blog engine source code.

Nice to have this site