December 10, 2008
So Microsoft have released their own open source blogging platform called Oxite. The buzz around it seems interesting, not doubt as a result of the fairly poor showing of .net based platforms to date, so I just had to give it a whirl.
The first thing to note is that this obviously isn’t a full final release. It is only an Alpha, so I expect it to be in a half finished state. So should you. Secondly, as it’s from Microsoft, it runs on .Net MVC (which is still in beta). If you don’t do anything in .Net at the moment the installation process will require a little more work but for all those .net developers out there it could be a welcome alternative to trying to remember how the hell PHP works every time you want to fiddle with WordPress.
This will, and I have kinda done it in the post title, inevitably be looked at as a competitor to WordPress, but it really isn’t. Although the developers have included, or will include, everything you need for a blog they really intend it as a base layer to build web apps on top of. It isn’t even a ‘real’ Microsoft product, but an offshoot from other work.
We have no plans to make this anything but a really good developer sample that should be able to run any site you want.
That said, this is a community project now and if the community decides to take it a different direction, we won’t stop it. :)
It never hurts to understand the alternatives though so I shall still take a look. On first load up you are presented with the following page, this is the base theme.
After logging in it is clear how far this yet has to go before it is ready. Much of the underlying code is there ready to be used but the admin functions aren’t there to support it yet. You can really only do two tasks, add/change posts or pages. Doing those tasks is super easy though.
Once logged in single post pages give you an edit icon to access the editor. Pages have icons to add sub-pages, edit, or delete the page, and comments have a delete icon so they can be removed. The editor is very simple. It has only the very barest of features, which actually makes it really nice to use.
Templating also seems to be quite easy. The style of template language is closer to WordPress (html with inline code) but the the template files seem closer to Drupal in that there isn’t much differentiation between admin and front end and everything can be themed.
The following adds a list item with a link to a page I created to the main menu:
Simple enough right?
The underlying code also uses a hook like system, where it triggers events that can be hooked into, so plugins should be easy to build.
Summation
This post is short because there honestly isn’t a lot more to say. There could be a lot of hype around this, and probably with good reason, but right now the interesting thing is the approach and the underlying code, not the actual platform. Now it is out there though I expect a lot of .net developers to jump on it; with an easy to use, easy to extend, platform to build on I expect to see some interesting things come from this.
It certainly isn’t a rival for WordPress or Habari, but this could well be .Net’s WordPress in time.
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Erik Porter
Thanks for the really honest feedback everyone. Appreciate it and find it all very interesting (I'm one of the guys on the team that built Oxite).
Oxite is really focused on being a great example of ASP.NET MVC for devs, so to your points about it not being very usable for the masses…that is by design. As I mentioned (and was quoted above in the article), it doesn't mean we won't someday be good for the masses. We're definitely wanting to see where the community wants to take this.
Regarding deploying to commercial hosting, it is definitely doable. There are certain components of Oxite that require certain permissions so you have to deploy to a host that supports them (we're building a list of hosts to put up on Code Plex soon), but it is definitely doable. Two of us on the team are already running test versions on two different hosting providers and it's working well so far (we'll also update the list of sites running Oxite soon too since there will be a few more soon). ASP.NET MVC can run from the bin directory so there are no deployment issues there either.
If you have any questions I can answer, send me a tweet: http://twitter.com/humancompiler
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Andrew Rickmann
OK, I will give you that. It would be nice if it were more usable by the masses. I wouldn't have known how to deploy it to a web server and I don't think you could right now (on a commercial host) what with the framework being beta.
Hopefully when they have developed it further it will do that. Perhaps they want the community to set the direction so it isn't viewed as an MS project.
However it evolves it will be nice to have more competition.
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ringmaster
I agree that there are good and valid reasons to use .net, though I wish that .net developers would focus on ultimate results more than creating tools. As you concluded, “the interesting thing is the approach and the underlying code, not the actual platform,” it would be great if some of these open .net projects would result in applications that are out-of-the-box useful.
I don't doubt that Oxite will evolve into such a platform, especially having seen how it's applied to good effect on the Mix site and Microsoft blogs. It's just interesting to me how open .net code seems to evolve downward from high-concept approach to pragmatic implementation.
Look at .text as an example. It was completely unusable when it was released. I had trouble figuring out even how to obtain it because it was mired in then arcane .net repositories, just for the sake of using these new .net resources, not because they were useful for deployment.
Perhaps it's not fair to judge this new project by those old standards, but I see this phenomenon happening to many coders even these days. Ruby devs also have this problem. Lots of cool stuff in the language, but mostly only usable by people familiar with the tech to begin with, and not for the masses.
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Andrew Rickmann
I don't think that's a particularly fair characterisation of the developers who have released this, or of Windows Server devs. There are very good and valid reasons to use .Net and the guys who have released this aren't a program group, they just thought it would be useful to offer out the code they had used for a few of their own projects.
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ringmaster
As with most things in the .net world, the developers seem more interested in the neat-factor of .net than they do in producing practical working applications.
Windows Server users whose administrators won't install PHP or Apache would otherwise have suffered with a larger packages that don't do blogging specifically well at all. There's little doubt in my mind that Oxite will be a big player in the blog world for corporate users who can't (for whatever stupid reason) run a LAMP stack.