dashCommerce

Hi to all.

I have been lookgin around for days to get an answer before I post here but could not find any.

I'm looking to add a blog to a dashCommerce site I have, but I can't get BlogEngine.NET to work. Has anybody tried that before? any luck? Any suggestions? Is BlogEngine.NET the correct solution or can you recommend some other blog software?

Thanks for any help.

Jose Guay

Hi Jose,

Actually, this is something I've been meaning to do.  I have a few sites using BlogEngine.Net.  Note that there is a BlogEngineNet ver. 1.3.1 that plugged a security leak.

When I do incorporate it, I am going to perform the following steps:

Create the base BlogEngine.Net 1.3.1 application using the SQL Server tables, build and test.
Add the database tables from BlogEngine.Net (tables starting with be_) to the dashCommerce database.
Copy the pages and directories to the dashCommerce Application (Except Web.config).
Merge the Web.config from the BlogEngine.Net app into Web.config of BlogEngine.Net
Create a BlogEngine Theme directory and create a theme similar to the existing site.

You may have to create a couple of roles (Ex. Administrator or Administrators and Editors).
Not sure which would be easier, having 2 themes (a dashCommerce 3.0 theme and BlogEngine.Net theme)  or trying to figure out how BlogEngine.Net will use the dashCommerce Theme.

There are a couple of very popular .PHP blogs such as WordPress.  I don't know if there is a better Blog Engine for .ASP.  I am happy with it.

Louis

 Hi Louis and everbody,

         I have tried merging blogengine.net1.4.5 with the dashcommerce , but there are many errors that need to be fixed, for example the "forms" authentication in blog engine and dashcommerce, how to go about with it and  Also the themes.Any suggestions would be greatly

appreciated. Thanks in advance

Hi Judef,

Yup, that's what I was afraid of.  The BlogEngine is like an entire application in itself along with Content Management.

I still have to look into it and download the latest version.  By default, Blog Engine uses an XML based user and roles type security system.  You should be able to play around with the WebConfig to see if it use the ASP.Net membership profile for security that dashCommerce uses.

Sorry, I probably will not to be able to get to this for a few weeks.

Louis

 I'd set up BlogEngine as it's own web application in IIS as a subdomain of the original site.

ie:  your DC site: www.Example.com would have the Blog hosted at blog.Example.com

This would allow you to deploy the blog with all the native settings, and even retain the web.config for it.  Then just skin the blog exactly as the main website, and the user is never the wiser.

The only downside is cross site communication.  You may loose the session variables stored for the main site when the user visits your blog, and (I'm not sure about this) you may also lose access to all the site cookies from www.Example.com.

There are workarounds you could do server side though.  Like store the IP and user information in the common database and check referers, date & times, and IP when somoe visits the blog.

I'm planning on doing this for the current DC store I'm working on.  I'll let you know how it all goes andf what type of snags I run into.

 - Jason MH Alvarado

Hey guys! Great posts!

I'm actually building DC on top of N2CMS (check it out). This would be a great starting point to do the blog engine.

With DC sitting on top of a CMS, You will be able to easily add any application and allow it to be editable/draggable via web parts

I should be done with it in about a month, at the most.

Thanks for your help Jason, Louis and also for your interest Paul. I have currenlty skinned the dash and blog exactly the same  and made them two separate applications under one domain. By using cookies in blog i could detect the user logged into dash via blogengine.

Regards

Judef