As I already stated in my previous post, I’d like to have a WYSISWM editor instead of the WYSISWG editor (tinyMCE) shipped with BlogEngine.net. I’m also planning to add client side code syntax highlight, but this will come later. Here are the few steps I want to achieve:

1. Switch BlogEngine.net to raw text editor mode to be able to write my post in Markdown
2. Add TextFormatter extension to convert my posts to HTML
3. Improve BlogEngine.net’s raw text editor using markItUp!
4. Add live preview with Showdown
5. Add code syntax highlighting with google code prettify

And I’ll try to do with with minimum changes in BlogEngine.net code. In this first part, I’ll do the easiest and most important steps (1 and 2).

More...

The blog installation is finished but I’m not yet satisfied with the result. I’m using the latest version of BlogEngine.net which I first installed from the web archive. A problem quickly popped-up when I tried to use the raw HTML editor and I must say that I’m a little bit disappointed here. The web archive was released on August last year, the bug was raised one week later, fixed another week later and nearly 8 months after that… nothing. No new release, you still have to fix the code yourself or download and compile the latest version from the repository. Ok, I’m overreacting, this is a very low impact bug and the fix is very easy to apply. Fortunately, among the 101 issues fixed since last release, there is no high impact bug (actually, all fixed issues had a low impact) but I still think that 101 fixes may justify an up-to-date web archive. For me and for many other developers using BlogEngine.Net, there is no major problem as it takes around 15 minutes to download, compile and deploy the latest version but if the Blogengine.net team targets a larger audience than the .Net community, I think that an extra effort is needed.

More...