Update (2011-05-11): WordPress ecosystem just became better and better every year and I eventually gave up on BlogEngine.NET and migrated this blog to WordPress which right now is the best blogging platform available in my opinion. The Paperclip theme is still here and the source code is on GitHub, so fell free to improve it if you want.
When I decided to start this blog, I spent some time figuring out which CMS / blogging engine would be the best choice for me, and the main constraints was:
- It should be a lightweight system, to run reasonably fast in my mega-cheaper hosting provider.
- It should allow me to easily customize it and/or create extensions for it.
In the past, I had great experiences with WordPress and Drupal, implementing for some customers, and also creating the PDAExpert Community, which is totally based on WordPress. Therefore, going to WordPress would be the natural choice for me, but the thing is: WordPress is developed in PHP, and I’m not that fan of PHP. I certainly would prefer to create add-ins and implementing new features in C# or VB .NET for example, thus, I decided to include the one more constraint: It should be .NET-based. It’s a blog about .NET anyway… Why would I use any other technologies? 
.
After evaluating lots of good options like SubText, BlogEngine.NET, Community Server, among others, I realized that BlogEngine.NET would be the best choice for me. It’s simple, lightweight, and open-source. Community Server is, by far, the most powerful of them all, and I actually tested it for a few days, but besides being 3x slower than BlogEngine.NET (which is perfectly understandable, given all the features it supports that BlogEngine doesn’t), the idea of having the source-code, and being able to adapt it to do exactly what I need was perfect.
I’ve chosen BlogEngine.NET then, and started to look for a theme to use, and get the blog running. Although there’s good themes available for BlogEngine.NET, Community Server comes with this very nice theme called ‘Paperclip’, which has at least four variations: Cactus, Summer, Fall and Winter. If you are a developer, you probably have seen this theme, as it is used by most of the MSDN and ASP .NET Community blogger’s.
I decided that ‘Paperclip’ was the way to go, and then I adapted the theme to BlogEngine.NET, and finally I’m ready to run the blog with it, and also to share the theme with the BlogEngine.NET community.
You can download the four variations of the Paperclip theme below:
The source code is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/CaioProiete/Paperclip-BlogEngine-Theme
Subscribe
