Code Camp III is right around the corner so its time or organize my talk on Customizing dotText. The outline below is what I'm shooting for. Once I start hashing out the details and looking at the time requirements for various items there were probably be a few cuts. Content may also change depending how much quality time I get to spend with the CS:Blogs source prior to giving the talk.
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Customizing dotText Session Outline (Draft)
1. Why do you want to customize your blogging application?
a. This isn’t a marketing session, but its important to touch on the non-technical motives for customizing your blog before we dig into the technical aspects.
b. You’re going to be a better developer.
2. Now that we agree on the importance of being the Master of your Blogging Domain, why dotText?
a. dotText is an elegantly designed application that has proven itself as a robust, scalable platform
b. While dotText 0.95 may seem to have languished out in the field for, oh, about two years, there has been a very active dotText Mod community across the blogosphere which has been doing some great work and sharing lots of code and ideas.
c. The future of dotText, now Community Server Blogs, is bright.
d. Scott Watermasysk. ‘Nuff said.
3. Getting comfortable with dotText.
a. We’re going to look at some code in a bit, but our objective today is to get a feel for the dotText architecture and to know what’s what so we can load up dotText in Visual Studio and get down to business.
b. Overview of the projects and various components of dotText.
c. Getting started. A quick installation demonstration.
4. dotText modification examples with a look at the code
a. Multi-author support on a single blog
b. Email subscription services for companies who want to get into weblogs but don’t get or don’t want to employ RSS.
c. Podcasting support. RSS feed updates, displaying the attachment, file administration.
d. Supplemental categories. I’ve implemented Master Categories that were shared by all bloggers as well as child categories to dotText’s standard categories. Both are designed essentially the same.
e. Post subscriptions
f. Searching with Lucene as implemented in CS:Blogs
5. Advanced ASP.NET techniques in dotText
a. HttpHandlers
b. Providers, Interfaces, and the Data Access Layer
c. Business Objects and data transformations
d. Inheritance and Base Object Classes
e. XMLRPC and the MetaBlog API
f. Event Scheduling
6. Final Thoughts
a. As I said earlier, my goal today is to give you a general understanding of dotText architecture so you are comfortable enough to get started adding new functionality to your own blog
b. I also hope that you were able to appreciate the elegance of dotText and how it can improve your skills as a developer if you make the effort to study and…customize dotText.