In the past month I was working on some cool new features to extend this blog engine:

  • Dynamic Pages - to add some basic CMS-like capabilities to Dexter.
  • Better Windows Live Writer experience - to manage more details in blog posts and in dynamic pages, you can now create, update and delete both posts and pages directly in WLW.
  • A Silverlight 4 Back Office project - I really don’t like to do data entry in Asp.net :).

The first two new features will be added to the Trunk shortly - they are currently under test in my own blog - so let’s give those two beauties a look, here’s how the lower property bar of WLW looks like when dealing with Posts:

wlw_lower_posts wlw_hierarc_cats

  • You can have a full hierarchical view of all the categories you have in your blog (and you can add new ones).
  • You type in the keywords/tags associated with a post in the keyword box (it has auto-complete support).
  • You can the specify a date for the post (even a future one, in this case the publication will be deferred).
  • You can specify the Slug (that will be used in the post address) or leave it blank and let Dexter auto-generate it for you.
  • You can specify an Abstract for the Post or let Dexter auto-generate it for you.

We now have support for creating/modifying and deleting Dynamic Pages directly in Windows Live Writer:

wlw_new_page wlw_lower_pages

In the lower property bar you can specify:

  • A parent page for the current page you’re editing.
  • A page order to decide how the pages are sorted in the same level.
  • The Slug (that will be used in the post address) or leave it blank and let Dexter auto-generate it for you.

To modify or delete a page just push the open button and select ‘pages’ in the Open dialog window; you can then select a page and edit it or delete it:

wlw_open_page

Here’s a screenshot of the new dynamic menu in action:

wlw_dyn_pages_menu

In this screenshot the tabs: ‘About’, ‘Resources’ and ‘Tools and Utilities’ are dynamic pages.

To check the full source code of this project navigate to our CodePlex page: Dexter Blog Engine

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