I started thinking, again, about writing my own blog engine ever since Rob Conery threw out the challenge. He’s followed through on that himself too. My excuses are pretty simple and real: Don’t have the time and have too much other non-paid work already. Still, I keep thinking about it because I’m not completely satisfied with blogengine.net. It’s a fine blog engine, but it’s doesn’t integrate well with the rest of this site. Also, I’d like to see something handled differently; more that I could do by contributing to the project.
The thing is, it’s not really that hard to build a simple blog engine. As with anything, I’m sure it takes a little more to make it really good, but it’s just not that hard.
Think about it.. what entities do you need assuming this is database driven? Users, Posts, Comments, Categories, and some settings. You’d probably want a built in post editor; there’s also the fairly simple Metaweblog api which would let you support Windows Live Writer. I’d suggest supporting future posts; that’s just checking the publish date before showing a post. Support saving a post as a draft is simple too. It only gets more complicated with extra features like full-text searching, or roles for multiple authors.
So if someone just started a project, used FluentMigrator to manage the schema, and Fluent-NHibernate to wire up the models.. well.. you’re a fair ways to creating your own blog engine. Oh, and use Free Text Box for the built-in html editor to make it easy. I’m not necessarily going to do this; just thinking out loud.