Al Nyveldt

 Most Popular Posts Extension and Widget

-   Mar 02, 2008 -   BlogEngine.NET, Development -   blogengine.net, control, theme, widget

A few weeks back, I read a post from Damien Guard on his favorite WordPress plugins.  While reading over his list, I felt BlogEngine.NET really had them all cover and then I got the last one, WP-PostViews.  The plug in as you might guess, counts, post views and has a side bar widget for displaying the most popular content.  Damien writes: Another visitor-retention seeking effort. By presenting the most popular content in the sidebar I'm hoping to entice people to look at a couple of other posts and hit the magic RSS subscribe button. Well, I decided to whip up the BlogEngine.NET version which consists of an extension to count the post views and a widget to use in your theme.  The extension could certainly be more elegant, but it gets the job done. The widget is a little more complex, but not much.  It reads in the counters, determines the top posts, and displays them in a list.  You can control how many of the top post will display in the widget with the Top property (which is expecting an integer of how may posts to display).  There is also a ShowViewCount property which is expecting a true or false.  If you set it to true, it will show the world the actual post counts it is generating.  If you set it to false, it is only visible when you are logged in.  (Note: The top posts are cached and will only update on your site every 30 minutes.  No point in calculating these number too frequently.) To set this up, download the files below and unzip them.  The extension file (TopPosts.cs) needs to be placed in your extensions folder which is at App_Code/Extensions.  The Widget files should go in the theme you plan to add the widget to.  Once you have the widget files in the theme folder, you can go ahead and add the widget to the site.master file or wherever you'd like.  The correct syntax for the user control will look something like the following. If you have issues installing the widget, please see the Installing the Quote of the Day widget screencast.  The process is very similar. I put together a screencast on the creation of the extension and was planning to do the same for the widget, but they seem so simple and redundant, I'm not sure I'll follow through with completing them. Let me know if you are interested in these.  If there is enough interest, I'll make them happen. Downloads TopPostsExtension TopPostsWidget (for BlogEngine.NET 1.3)

 Quotes of the Day Widget Installation and Update

-   Feb 27, 2008 -   BlogEngine.NET, Development, Screencasts -   blogengine.net, control, screencast, theme, video, widget

Over the past few weeks, I've received a bunch of questions on using the Quote of the Day widget so I had been planning to put together a quick walk through screencast to show you how to use since I really didn't cover usage very thoroughly in my earlier post. Since I was working on a new theme earlier this week, it seemed like the right time to do this, but I also find a minor bug with the control when previewing themes so I made a small change to correct this.  It was a minor fix, but if you are starting fresh or feel like upgrading, I'll include the updated control at the end of this post. The screencast walks you through adding the widget from download to theme update.  I don't cover making changes to your CSS to make it look the way you want in your theme, but I've tried in in 4 themes already and haven't needed to do anything special to make the widget look right.  I'll include the register and usage line below so you can see them more clearly and don't have to copy notes while watching the screencast. Again, this widget works fine in 1.2 and 1.3.  I'll make an updated version when 1.4 gets closer.  You can download the QuotesWidget 1.0.1 here.