Well, after several years of putting it off, I finally have a
blog up and running. My plan is to concentrate on the wonderful
language that is C# (and other .NET stuff from time to time) and
the last CMS you will ever need, Umbraco.
If you are a .NET developer and you have never heard of Umbraco,
you really should check it out. In fact, this
entire site is built on Umbraco and a modified version of the Blog
for Umbraco 4 package by Tim Geyssens.
If you are familiar with Umbraco and need to get a blog up and
running, I highly recommend starting with Blog for Umbraco 4. It
will save you a lot of time and energy. You can find it in the
Umbraco Package Repository.
I made some pretty major modifications to the Document Types,
Master Pages, CSS, JS and XSLT. I also created a new comment form
that better suited my needs. However, this was all extremely easy
thanks to the flexibility of Umbraco and Tim's rather open
architecture. Tim, if you ever read this, thanks a million for
sharing!
One modification I made that I would like to pass along is in
the XSLT for listing blog comments. Even though the current XSLT in
the package specifies a height and width for the gravatars, these
parameters are being ignored by the gravatar API because the XSLT
is generating double ampersands between them.
As you can see below, I wrote what I consider to be a pretty
ugly workaround.
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">
<![CDATA[<img class="gravatar" src="]]>
</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="BlogLibrary:getGravatar(data [@alias = 'email'], 30, '{your default image}')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">
<![CDATA[" alt="Gravatar of ]]></xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="data [@alias = 'name']" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">
<![CDATA[" />]]>
</xsl:text>
CDATA everywhere!
If anyone has a better solution, I am all ears!