BlogEngine 2.5 released

The next version of BlogEngine, version 2.5 is here!  Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release.  The new version can be downloaded here.  If you're upgrading from a previous version, here are the upgrade instructions.

ASP.NET 4.0

BlogEngine has been upgraded to ASP.NET 4.0.  This has allowed us to take advantage of new .NET 4.0 features such as Razor templating, NuGet package integration and other features included in .NET 4.0.  To install or ugprade to BE.NET 2.5, you'll want to make sure your website is at a webhost or on a web server that has ASP.NET 4.0 available.

Multiple Blogs in a Single Installation

It is here at last!  Multiple blogs in a single installation is supported for both XML and DB storage.  It's very flexible in that you can setup new "blog instances" based on a 1 or more pre-created templates, and you can configure each blog instance with a flexible URL system where a blog instance can be identified by the virtual sub-folder it is installed in, or by a unique hostname.  If you will be using the new multiple blog feature, and you have existing custom themes, extensions or widgets, it's possible those items may need to be slightly adjusted to be fully multiple-blog compatible.  Screenshots and details can be found here.

Razor Themes and Razor Pages

One of the perks of moving up to ASP.NET 4.0 is that we take advantage of Razor templating technology.  In particular, Razor themes are supported in BlogEngine 2.5, and a number of the admin pages in the control panel have been converted to be Razor pages -- including the Extension related pages, a new Theme settings page and the Dashboard.

BlogEngine 2.5 includes a Razor theme named Garland-Revisited which can be seen running live here.  If you are interested in creating your own Razor theme for BlogEngine, I recommend you take a look at the Garland-Revisited theme to see how that works.  You can use any Razor syntax and any Razor helpers, etc with your Razor theme.

Integration with the BlogEngine Gallery

If you haven't yet seen the BlogEngine Gallery, check it out.  At the gallery, themes, extensions and widgets can be downloaded (or uploaded) and installed into your blog.  The packages there you download are NuGet packages which work well because you can download a package and manually install it into your blog, or you can use Visual Studio to automate the install for you.

What we've done in BlogEngine 2.5 is allow you to view, search and install Themes from the BlogEngine Gallery directly into your blog, and you can do all of this while in your blog's control panel.  Under Settings in the control panel, there's a new Themes sub-tab where you can view all of your installed themes, and click a "Gallery" link (upper right corner) to switch to the available themes at the BlogEngine Gallery.

In the next version of BlogEngine we plan on having the same type of BlogEngine Gallery integration with Extensions and Widgets so those too can be installed directly from within the control panel.

Other Updates

Many other small improvements and important fixes have made their way into BlogEngine 2.5.  A complete list of features can be found here.

Download & Feedback

We're excited about the new features in this version.  If you have any questions or have any feedback on this release, the best place to pass that onto us is in the CodePlex Discussions.  Again, here is the Download link, and here are the Upgrade Instructions if upgrading from a previous release.  Thanks for your support.