This thing called Oxite
I’ve been fiddling around with Oxite recently. Although I find it highly interesting and a lot of fun, it being based on ASP.NET MVC and all, it’s not yet mature enough to be an out-of-the-box blogging engine.
None of the shortcomings are show-stoppers as such, and it’s not intended to compete with the major actors out there—yet.
Most of the issues with Oxite are little things like lack of ready-made themes, plug-ins, statistics and the ability to post images and videos to the blog via the metaweblog API, instead requiring the user to mess around with FTP settings.
Despite the shortcomings, I’m quite excited. I’ve already picked it apart and put most of it back together (hence the lack of blog posts the past couple of weeks).
The first thing I did was create my own theme, tweak the styles and add menus and such. This required a whole bunch of CSS coding and some actual C# plumbing.
What struck me as a bit quaint, was that even though you can add your own content pages (applause!), those pages don’t automatically appear in any menus or anything. You actually need to hand-edit the C# code to add links to those pages in the menus.
One thing that I really like about dasBlog, is that it runs without a relational database engine, such as Microsoft SQL Server, or MySQL. It operates purely on disk-based XML files. That right there just cut off 50% of the hosting fee.
Luckily, Oxite has a lot of extension points. Adding a data provider that is based on XML files instead of Microsoft SQL Server, shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Thanks for checking out Oxite and glad you like it so far. As you mentioned we’re still missing some things. It’s still pretty early. You’ll be happy to know though that most of the things you metnioned is on our short list and currently being worked on (MetaWeblog file upload, dynamic menus so you don’t have to edit the html yourself for that, module/plugin model, etc). Sorry to say we have no plans (at least right now) to build an XML data provider, but like you said, it shouldn’t be too hard. If you build one and run into any troubles or need help, start a discussion ( http://oxite.codeplex.com/Thread/List.aspx ) and we’ll do everything we can to help you.
Your skin looks nice. If you’d like to share it with others, let me know. http://oxite.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=skins Our list is pretty short at the moment.
Thanks again for checking out Oxite and keep the feedback coming. We’re listening.
Cheers
I’ve written most of the XML provider, but I fear that I won’t have enough time to finish it within reasonable time. I’ll try and post it somewhere so others can contribute.
(Same for the skin).