Bloggers often have a few words they like to say about themselves. With BlogEngine.NET, there are a few ways to achieve this. In the default BE.NET installation, a TextBox widget titled "About the author" is already in the blog's sidebar. The author can just click 'Edit' and quickly describe themselves using the WYSIWYG editor. BE.NET users will find the TextBox widget is a very powerful widget because it's generic enough to display virtually anything.
Another option for About Me is to create a Page in BE.NET, and add a link on your blog to the About Me page. The main difference with this 'Page' approach is the About Me content is only seen on the About Me page, rather than the widget approach where the About Me content is shown on every blog page in the sidebar. With the Page approach, you also get a lot more room horizontally which is nice if you have some pictures or other space consuming content. I'm currently using the Page approach for the About Me page on this blog.
A third approach which is very similar to using the TextBox widget described above is to use an "About Me" widget. BE.NET allows each editor/administrator to create their own profile on the Profiles tab in the control panel. On the Profile page, each editor/administrator can enter details such as their Name, Phone Number, Address, a Photo image, and last but not least, About Me! The About Me box is a WYSIWYG editor. Currently, profile information entered is hardly used anywhere within BE.NET. The information is available, however, through the AuthorProfile class in BlogEngine.
The AboutMe widget displays the About Me text entered for a user on the Profiles tab in the control panel.
If multiple editors/administrators have been created on the Users tab in the control panel, a separate profile can be created for each one of these users on the Profiles tab. Because multiple profiles may exist, the AboutMe widget needs to know which profile's About Me content it should display. The edit control in the AboutMe widget allows the user to choose the profile to display the About Me content for. Because the settings for each widget are stored independently of one another, multiple AboutMe widgets may be added to the blog -- one AboutMe widget for each profile.
The AboutMe widget consists of the 2 required files you find for widgets -- widget.ascx, widget.ascx.cs. The edit control is made up of edit.ascx and edit.ascx.cs. A download link for the entire widget is available at the bottom of this post if you are interesting in trying it out in your own BlogEngine.NET installation.
widget.ascx (view code)
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="widget.ascx.cs"
Inherits="widgets_AboutMe_widget" %>
<asp:PlaceHolder runat="Server" ID="phAboutMe" />
widget.ascx.cs (view code)
#region Using
using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using BlogEngine.Core;
#endregion
public partial class widgets_AboutMe_widget : WidgetBase
{
public override void LoadWidget()
{
string CacheKey = "widget_aboutme_" + this.WidgetID.ToString();
string ProfileUserName = (string)HttpRuntime.Cache[CacheKey];
if (ProfileUserName == null)
{
StringDictionary settings = GetSettings();
if (settings.ContainsKey("UserName"))
ProfileUserName = settings["UserName"];
if (ProfileUserName == null)
ProfileUserName = string.Empty;
HttpRuntime.Cache[CacheKey] = ProfileUserName;
}
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ProfileUserName))
{
// Find the first profile with About Me content.
foreach (AuthorProfile profile in AuthorProfile.Profiles)
{
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(profile.AboutMe))
{
ProfileUserName = profile.UserName;
HttpRuntime.Cache[CacheKey] = ProfileUserName;
break;
}
}
}
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ProfileUserName))
{
AuthorProfile profile = AuthorProfile.GetProfile(ProfileUserName);
if (profile != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(profile.AboutMe))
{
phAboutMe.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(profile.AboutMe));
}
}
}
public override string Name
{
get { return "AboutMe"; }
}
public override bool IsEditable
{
get { return true; }
}
}
edit.ascx (view code)
<%@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="edit.ascx.cs"
Inherits="widgets_AboutMe_edit" %>
<div>
<h3>Select the Profile to show About Me for</h3>
<div id="noProfilesAvailable" runat="server">
No profiles have yet been created.
</div>
<asp:RadioButtonList ID="rblProfileToDisplay"
runat="server"
DataTextField="UserName"
DataValueField="UserName">
</asp:RadioButtonList>
<br />
<div>
Note: Make sure you have entered About Me content for
the selected user above. This content should be
entered on the Profiles tab in the Control Panel.
</div>
</div>
edit.ascx.cs (view code)
#region Using
using System;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
using BlogEngine.Core;
#endregion
public partial class widgets_AboutMe_edit : WidgetEditBase
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
string SelectedUserName = null;
StringDictionary settings = GetSettings();
if (settings.ContainsKey("UserName"))
SelectedUserName = settings["UserName"];
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(SelectedUserName))
{
if (AuthorProfile.GetProfile(SelectedUserName) != null)
rblProfileToDisplay.SelectedValue = SelectedUserName;
}
rblProfileToDisplay.DataSource = AuthorProfile.Profiles;
rblProfileToDisplay.DataBind();
noProfilesAvailable.Visible = rblProfileToDisplay.Items.Count == 0;
}
}
public override void Save()
{
StringDictionary settings = GetSettings();
settings["UserName"] = rblProfileToDisplay.SelectedValue;
SaveSettings(settings);
HttpRuntime.Cache.Remove("widget_aboutme_" + this.WidgetID.ToString());
}
}
AboutMe Widget Download (2.4 kb)