Earlier this year I decided to switch Blog platform partly in an attempt to force myself to learn something new. I chose BlogEngine.NET. I chose it over anything else in the blog-app-sphere because it is open source, and appeared to be amongst the most popular and mature. It also met my #1 requirement that it had to be based on the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Soon after installing BlogEngine though, I realized that none of the included themes inspired me all that much. They all looked *ok*, but none looked quite complete to me.
A search for BlogEngine themes lead me to Henrik Stenbaek’s post where he discusses about his conversion of Michael Jubel’s Arthemia theme for WordPress to a BlogEngine.NET theme; this was exactly what I was looking for!
But wait, I don’t want my blog to look the same as many others who have decided to use this theme. It has to have to have its own personality. So after further research, I found Arthemia Premium (for WordPress), a more advanced version of the regular and original Arthemia theme. I decided to take Henrik’s excellent work and use it as an starting point. I updated Arthemia to more closely match the Premium version while giving it a little spice of my own; This gave birth to what I now call Arthemia PRO for BlogEngine.NET.
Some of the improvements made to the original theme are as follows:
- Optimized CSS
- XHTML Compliance
- Improved Comments UI
- Improved overall form element styling
- Added Twitter Extension
- Added an “About Me” section
- Added PimpThisBlog social bookmark, and cleaned up some others
Setting Up Arthermia PRO for BlogEngine.NET
Arthemia PRO includes improved CSS optimizations and XHTML compliance but it is also packaged with a few additional goodies that I think you will find useful:
Arthemia PRO for BlogEngine.NET was tested on BlogEngine.NET 1.4 and 1.5. I have not tested or verified its functionality on other versions. Please let me know if you can confirm that it works on other versions and I will update this list.
Installation
After downloading the package, simple extract the contents into your BlogEngine’s root folder. It is important that you do not extract the contents into the theme folder directly, just as you would with a vanilla theme – it just won’t work.
Setting Up Categories
Arthemia PRO supports the display of 5 top-level categories beneath the headline and featured sections on the home page. This is a hard limit. Adding more than 5 top-level categories will break the layout.
If you want to add more than 5 categories but not have them all display, then go to your category management page in your admin section and simply create categories with a colon (“:”) as the description. The category display UI recognizes the colon in the category description and will use it as a directive to simply skip it from display.
Setting Up the Twitter Feed
As I mentioned previously, one of the things I included in this theme is the Twitter feed extension.
You will need to add your twitter authentication details in the control (I’ll show you how below) in order to properly connect to your feed. If you do not do this you will get the following message:
To add your twitter authentication details open and edit Site.Master file located under the “Themes\Arthemia PRO\” folder. Go to approximately line number 129 and modify the Twitter control’s Username and Password properties as follows:
<blog:Twitter
ID="Twitter"
Timeline="User"
runat="server"
NumberOfStatuses="10"
Password="changeme"
Username="changeme" />
If you do not want to display the Twitter feed then simply remove the entire Twitter Sidebar section that encloses the twitter control shown above, as shown below:
<div id="sidebar-twitter">
... twitter control and other ...
</div>
Modifying the Theme
After installing the theme you will notice that I left the “About Me” section on the right-hand column. I also left all my details in there just to give you a template from which you can derive your own.
To modify this section as well as others simply open and edit the Site.Master file located under the “Themes\Arthemia PRO\” folder.
I hope you enjoy Arthemia PRO. Please do let me know if you find any bugs, I’ll try my best to fix them and update the theme.
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