Well, Sly installed BlogEngine.Net and he was pretty impressed with it so I though I would take a stab at creating a custom theme and copying the new skin from our site to see if I could get it to work. Long story short it was pretty easy and only took me a few hours to do.
Most of the BlogEngine themes had a top nav with home,archive,subscribe,login/logout. I wanted to put those links into a box in the right column and have our sites nav there. Not satisfied with just putting bit of HTML in the master file for the theme, I decided to make my own custom control for it.
First I created a file App_Code/Controls/BlogMenu.cs
using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Text;
using BlogEngine.Core;
namespace Controls {
public class BlogMenu : Control {
static BlogMenu() {
BlogEngine.Core.Page.Saved += delegate { _Html = null; };
}
private static object _SyncRoot = new object();
private static string _Html;
private string Html {
get {
lock (_SyncRoot) {
BuildHtml();
}
return _Html;
}
}
private void BuildHtml() {
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.AppendLine("<div id=\"blogmenu\">");
sb.AppendFormat("<a href=\"{0}\" rel=\"home\">Blog Home</a><br/>",Utils.AbsoluteWebRoot);
sb.AppendFormat("<a href=\"{0}archive.aspx\">{1}</a><br/>",Utils.AbsoluteWebRoot,Resources.labels.archive);
sb.AppendFormat("<a href=\"{0}\" class=\"feed\">{1}</a><br/>",Utils.FeedUrl,Resources.labels.subscribe);
sb.AppendFormat("<a href=\"{0}{1}\">{2}</a>",Utils.AbsoluteWebRoot,(Page.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)?"login.aspx?logoff":"login.aspx",(Page.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)?Resources.labels.logoff:Resources.labels.login);
sb.AppendLine("</div>");
_Html = sb.ToString();
}
public override void RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer) {
writer.Write(Html);
}
}
}
Then in the widgets folder, I created a sub folder called “Blog Menu” and put two files.
first, widget.ascx
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="widget.ascx.cs" Inherits="widgets_Blog_Menu_widget" %>
<blog:BlogMenu runat="Server" />
then the second, widget.ascx.cs
using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
public partial class widgets_Blog_Menu_widget : WidgetBase {
public override string Name {
get {return "Blog Menu"; }
}
public override bool IsEditable {
get { return false; }
}
public override void LoadWidget() {
// No action
}
}
That was it, I logged in as an administrator and could add or remove my Blog Menu widget/control and drag it around with the rest to reorder.
