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Running AtomSite on Hosting Providers

With the recent release of AtomSite 1.4, we are working on making AtomSite install on more hosting providers. Our biggest change in this direction was the medium trust support.

I've personally run AtomSite on two hosting providers: AspNix and DiscountAsp. There was a huge difference between these two hosting providers when setting up AtomSite. With DiscountAsp, they have stellar IIS7 support and I was up and running quickly with a few tweaks in their incredible control panel. However, with AspNix, it required many back-and-forth emails with their (very helpful) support crew:

Enable full-trust (to enable write permissions)
Many back-and-forth on permission delegation for web.config (their permissions are too locked down for IIS7)
Please allow PUT and DELETE verbs in UrlScan

I was recently contacted by MaximumASP with the following info:

I was trying to get AtomSite working on our shared environment, but kept running into issues with the DELETE and PUT requests. The removing the webdav module got me half of the way there, but I had to full kill off webdav publishing to get it to work.
We also had to add this to the web.config:
<system.webServer>
    <webdav>
     <authoring enabled="false" />
    </webdav>
Once that was done we were good to go.

I've linked to this data from the troubleshooting page. Also, the support forum has some information about AtomSite hosted on Godaddy.

Posted by JarrettV on April 30 at 6:20 PM

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AtomSite 1.4 Update in Web Platform Gallery

AtomSite is now up-to-date in the Web Platform Gallery aka microsoft.com/web. This makes it incredibly easy to install AtomSite and have IIS7 configured. This is why on our new download page we have it marked as the featured way to download AtomSite.

When you install AtomSite using through the Web Platform Gallery, it automatically ensures you have ASP.NET MVC installed and that the file permissions are set appropriately.

Going forward, we plan to have more experimental versions. Each time AtomSite is at a stable point, we will push that version the Web Platform Gallery.

Did you install from the Web Platform Gallery? Let us know your experience!

Posted by JarrettV on April 15 at 5:32 PM

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AtomSite 1.4 Widgets Release

This release of AtomSite 1.4 contains a new widget management system that allows you to personalize your site with ease. We've also improved the AtomSite Manager in many areas.

Most pages and some widgets have customizable areas. You can include widgets into these customizable areas to alter the appearance and functionality of your website. The following screen allows you manage those widget includes.

You can manage the widgets at any scope. If you include a widget into an area at the workspace scope, it'll show in every collection within that workspace. Also, if you include a widget in a master page, it'll show in every child page. Pages and widgets are built to target certain areas.

Learn more about widgets

Widgets can also be included inline into the content of an entry. For example, you may want to post a poll or have a contact form on certain entries.

We have a new twitter plug-in that is included out-of-the-box. This widget can be included on any page. The widget can be configured to show X number of tweets. Also, you must choose a twitter user name that has a public feed. If you are running AtomSite in medium trust, you may need a special setting to allow outgoing web requests.

AtomSite now supports medium trust. One major change we made was switching the default logging subsystem. AtomSite will no longer write trace and error information automatically to a log file. If you are running in high or full trust you can enable log files.

How to configure logging

Finally, we greatly improved many areas of AtomSite Manager. For example:

Filter entries and annotations by category or quickly search them
Filter users by role
Create or update user
View role matrix
Improved support for multi-folder workspace mode
Improved dynamic links on entries and annotations
Better support for limited access by contributors and authors
Better IE7 support and support on small mobile screens
Install theme from zip file
Customized CKEditor
Auto-restart when changing certain settings
Choose file extension of blog pages (default is .xhtml)
Improved core plugin warnings

For a complete list of changes with this release, see the release page on CodePlex.

Download Release 1.4

Posted by JarrettV on April 01 at 5:17 AM

Comments (11)

Widget Management in AtomSite

I'm excited about the next release of AtomSite. The AtomSite Manager is maturing and the one area I'm most excited about is the new Widgets page. This page will allow you to easily customize the widgets that appear on your site. Here is a sneak peak:

This may not be the final layout of the page but the functionality allows you to control which widgets show in each area of any page. You can control this at any scope. The following areas are setup by default in all the current themes:

Theme Area Layout

For example, say I'd like to have my recent tweets show up next to my blog posts in my blog collection. But for the pages about my software, I want my latest GitHub commits. You can use this page to setup different widget includes for different collections.

You can look forward to AtomSite 1.4 this month (March 2010)!

Update

Posted by JarrettV on March 06 at 10:03 AM

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Inline Widgets and Contact Form Plugin

The next version of AtomSite will include support for inline widgets. An inline widget is a widget that is activated by placing a widget include into the content of an entry. This allows all sorts of new scenarios such as polling widgets, dynamic content widgets, and a contact form widget.

Also, the next release of AtomSite will contain a contact form widget built-in as a core widget. This widget can be placed on every page at the workspace or collection scopes. However, with the new inline widget support, you can also place the widget on a single page.

I've detailed some of the development process as a Plugin Developments Basic Tutorial.

This widget can add an annotation (comment) to your contact page and/or send an email to you each time the form is posted. The settings can be configured for each workspace in the AtomSite Manager.

Note: most of the settings are only required if you are sending an email as it needs all the email server information.

Or, you can configure them directly in the service.config file under the atom:workspace node:

Contact Configuration

I've set this up on the contact page of the Vance & Sons Cabinets, Inc. website. I built the site (with AtomSite) for my family who creates the best custom cabinets in Fairhope, AL.

Posted by JarrettV on February 20 at 1:21 PM

Comments (4)

AtomSite 1.3.1 Release

This release of AtomSite 1.3.1 is a small refresh that fixes a few bugs and updates the javascript and DotNetOpenAuth library.

Updated solution file to VS 2010 RC
Fixed media uploads with Windows Live Writer
Fixed blog URL link in collection feeds
Fixed content encoding header of wlwmanifest, sitemap, and other xml files
Fixed read-only issue for accepts in AtomSite Manager collection settings
Updated jQuery to 1.4.1
Updated jquery.timeago to 0.8.1
Updated jquery.tools to 1.1.2
Updated jquery.single-ddm to 1.2
Updated OpenIDPlugin to use latest DotNetOpenAuth version 3.4.0.10015

We updated the default CDN locations and plugins with this version as well.

AtomSite 1.3 BlogML Release

This release of AtomSite 1.3 contains a new BlogML plugin that allows you to import and export from a BlogML file. We've also improved the AtomSite Manager Tools area to support more import/export tools.

BlogML Support

I've added support for importing data from a BlogML file. The support was added to both the setup wizard and the AtomSite Manager Tools section.

BlogML Wizard Support

BlogML Import and Export Tools

You can choose to import blog posts and articles into any collection that accepts entries. You can also choose a collection that supports media for image attachments. There are three modes of importing the data:

Import Mode	Description
New Mode	This mode is used during the setup wizard. It will replace the existing, blog, pages, and media collections with the data in the BlogML file. This mode allows you to choose the collection name. It will also create an about page and blogroll page if there are no existing articles with these names.
Merge Mode	This mode can be chosen from Import/Export tools page. It will import the data in the BlogML file into existing collections only updating when the data doesn't already exist.
Overwrite Mode	This mode can be chosen from Import/Export tools page. It will clear out any existing data before importing the data into the selected existing collections.

The export tool will write entries into a BlogML file. However, attachments are not yet supported.

Posted by JarrettV on September 13 at 7:57 PM

Comments (2)

Send in your Service.config File

The service.config file is where AtomSite stores all the configuration information about your workspaces, collections, pages, widgets, and plugins. I've posted some examples on the Service.config documentation page. These examples should show you the power of what is possible with AtomSite. We are working to expose all of this potential in the AtomSite Manager.

To help guide other users, please post your Service.config example so we can add it to the site.

You can send them to me (Jarrett):

Post a comment below with a link
Post it to CodePlex discussion
Email it to jarrettv@gmail.com

So far we have:

Posted by JarrettV on August 31 at 7:31 PM

Comments (10)

AtomSite 1.2 Settings Release

This release of AtomSite 1.2 has improved composite web site performance by allowing asset combining and minification. To support this new feature, we reorganized the folders where assets are stored.

Type	Folder	Example
Cascading Stylesheets	/css	/css/default/CommentWidget.css
Images	/img	/img/default/icon.png
Javascript	/js	/js/default/CommentWidget.js
Plugins	/plugins	/plugins/CommentPlugin.1.0.0.0.zip
View Files & Theme Info	/themes	/themes/default/CommentView.aspx

This new feature greatly reduces the number of requests made to download a page. The biggest performance improvements can be seen in the AtomSite Manager where each page contains many widgets. Not only does it make each page load faster, but development is easier as well. For example, a widget can have it's own stylesheet and javascript files making things easier to manage and locate.

Learn More About Asset Combination

This release also includes improvements to the AtomSite Manager. Many of the settings in the service.config file are now exposed on the Settings screen (see to the right). The screen shows different options for each scope: Entire Site, Workspace, Collection. These screen support:

Adding/removing administrators
Adding workspaces (in multi-workspace mode only)
Adding collections
Adding/removing authors and contributors
Changing which content types a collection accepts
Removing categories
Changing other settings

For a complete list of changes with this release see the release page on CodePlex.

Download Release 1.2

Posted by JarrettV on August 04 at 6:06 PM

Comments (5)

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