Migrated Community Server Blog to Blog Engine

It was quite some time I installed Community Server (CS) 2.1 in my web space to host my web log. Community Server is one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS) available today on the .NET Platform without any doubt, but on the same time it is bit complex to customize as we need. At this point I found Blog Engine!

Blog Engine is an Open Source CMS which is really light weight compared to CS. Blog Engine can be run even without having a database. Sounds interesting I guess. It can store all the information needed in XML files. Anyway I thought of using a database since it is easier for me to backup things and upgrade it later on. Blog Engine’s control panel interface is not that good compared to CS but it is not that much of a problem. Hoping to improve it in the future.

This is how I moved my Web Log to Blog Engine:
 
1. Installed the Community Server BlogML application (plug-in) and got the BlogML output to an XML file. This did not work properly at the first time, I had to do some modifications to the code to make it work.
 
2. Downloaded Blog Engine source files from the web. 
 
3. Created a new database and the database setup script found under the setup folder was run. This creates the whole database structure for Blog Engine. So simple.
 
4. Blog Engine project was open in Visual Studio and the Web.Config file was modified and added Connection String properties.
 
5. Blog Engine project was run and the BlogML file was imported.
 
6. Now I have all the posts which had post in CS before in my new Blog Engine instance.
 
7. There were few issues found in the comments so I had to do some modifications in the CS S BlogML application. The username of the comment was set to http://” by default, so had change it to the correct username and the user’s url was set to null, so it was also fixed. I noticed that the tags in CS was not imported as tags in Blog Engine, all the tags were imported as categories in Blog Engine. I’m not sure why this has happened. I checked the CS BlogML code and couldn’t find a method inside the Writer class which does this. Have to fix this as well.
 
8. Downloaded a new theme and customized it as I prefer. Still I’m doing some changes.
 
9. Once I was satisfied with my local instance of the Blog Engine I uploaded the source files in my web host and the database was setup as I did in my local machine.
 

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Published:
05 Sep 08 / 4 PM
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