Since I started writing my ASP.NET blog engine - BlogBlocks, a lot of other engines have been published based on ASP.NET 2.0.  Recently I brought online a pingback plugin for the library, which marked a key milestone for the project.  The library is starting to come to maturity.

I wrote my own blog engine because, at the time there weren't that many options around based on ASP.NET 2.0 technology.  Plus most engines weren't actually blog engines, but web site implementations, this still seems to be the case with the blogging projects out there i.e. they're not blog engines, they're blog web applications.  I really didn't like the idea of using any blogging technology that imposed a complete structure for a web site i.e. the menu's pages etc.

What I've written isn't a Web Application, but an engine for blogging, accompanied by controls that can be incorporated into any ASP.NET web site.  There is an administration interface for the blog engine which is an ASP.NET web application, however, the rest of GUI comes as plugins and controls that can be placed in any ASP.NET web site.

The current features supported by the engine include:-

• ASP.NET Membership integration - BlogBlocks does not implement user authentication or authorisation, this is handled by the ASP.NET membership API
• Abstracted persistence layer - currently only supports persistence using ADO.NET
• Support for multiple blogs
• Support for multiple authors for a single blog
• ASP.NET Administration interface
• ASP.NET Server controls
  • Blog entry list control
  • Blog entry view control
  • Reference list control
  • Comment input helper component
• Syndication plugin API with plugins including
  • Atom feed
  • RSS feed
  • Email notification
  • Pingback
• Configuration - allows details such as the provider of objects and persistence for the engine as well as the syndication plugins and their settings may be configured.

The road map ahead for this project is to eventually share it with the community as an open source project with the hope other people will come along and write new functionality which I can then use in my own site.  Before opening it to the public, I think I need to address a couple of issues, but I hope to have it out on Codeplex within a month or two.