On Monday morning I found some spare time to work on my blog and here is the totally new BlogEngine. For many years I have used dasBlog successfully, but a brand new codebase, more features, better themes, better SEO and frequent releases are my main reasons for moving to BlogEngine. And here are some more from Mads’ release notes:
- BlogML import/export
- Extension model
- Code syntax highlighting
- ASP.NET SiteMap provider for static pages
- Support for a static page to be the front page
- Full comment RSS/ATOM feed
- Intelligent error 404 page
- E-mail notifications for future comments
- Role provider
- Extended in-site search capabilities
- SLUG – the URL doesn’t change with the title
- User control injection
- Attachments on the contact page
- Comment moderation
- Much better Mono support
So I downloaded and give it a try to import my old data from dasDlog. Here are my steps that resulted %100 successful:
- Setup BlogEngine on my local pc, just an easy pointing from IIS to the folder.
- Export dasBlog data to BlogML, hence dasBlog doesn’t have a BlogML export utility and has its own data model, I was planning to write some code for that conversion. But –for sure- it was already written by Paul and downloadable on this link.
With this nice tool it was so easy to convert my dasBlog content to BlogML.
- My images from old posts were in content/binary/ folder in the dasBlog. I left them as they were on the server. So I didn’t change any links or mapping in my posts.
- I had some improvements and additions on widgets and comment mail sender extender, I will post these changes soon.
- I did all configuration, styling, tracking scripts and all other settings locally.
- I deleted everything except content\binary folder on my hosting server and uploaded my new BlogEngine codes and contents.
- After a small setup on permissions (write permission to App_Data folder) my new blog was up and running.
That’s all.!
