In my post about migrating from WordPress to BlogEngine.net, I mentioned some migration issues I was having but I really didn’t go into any details about BlogEngine.net itself. So I thought I should follow up with my experience and enjoyment of BlogEngine.net as a blogging platform. I first found out about BlogEngine.net from Brian Sullivan and Tim Franklin. Brian had good experiences with it compared to dasBlog and Tim Franklin settled on it and made it look and function very nicely as a total content solution.
Probably the thing I love most about BlogEngine.net is the simplicity of it. Everything from the layout and feature set to the storage of data in XML, things are just simple and intuitive. There are not pages and pages of configuration options, but everything I needed was still available and configurable. It comes with the all of the blog functionality I need without the need for plugins or post-install additions.
Probably my largest annoyance with WordPress was that it doesn’t come with a “contact” page. I found a few plugins that supported it, but they used phpmail, which is marked as spam by many ISP’s, including gmail. This made all my blog comments or emails come in as spam in gmail, which is not good.
BlogEngine.net is actively developed and there is a good community around it, even though it may not be as large as WordPress or other blog/cms platforms. I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience with BlogEngine.net and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a blogging or cms platform, as long as you have an ASP.NET web host.