Theme Selector idea for a Blog Engine written with ASP.NET MVC

Question

I have started to build a blog engine which is totally unprofesional and meant to be not used by anyone. So, in plain English I cannot tell that you go ahead and run this for yourself and you will be happy.

You may see the complete code I have written so far :

https://github.com/tugberkugurlu/MvcBloggy

While now I am working on DAL, I also try to lay down what I need to do. One point I am stuck here is how I can handle theme selection for the blog engine.

How should I start building the basics? Should I create a skeleton html and let others write the CSS and basically select that? Or something else?
In terms of ASP.NET MVC structure, what would be the best approach to handle this feature.

I am not sure any of you guys has ever done something like this so far. I would appreciate if you can provide a way.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 26 '11 at 15:23

I suggest you to look at NBlog temable blog engine

https://github.com/ChrisFulstow/NBlog

In particular, look at the class ThemeableRazorViewEngine.cs

https://github.com/ChrisFulstow/NBlog/blob/master/NBlog.Web/Application/Infrastructure/ThemeableRazorViewEngine.cs

using System.Web.Mvc;
using NBlog.Web.Application.Service;

namespace NBlog.Web.Application.Infrastructure
{
public class ThemeableRazorViewEngine : RazorViewEngine
{
    private readonly IThemeService _themeService;

    public ThemeableRazorViewEngine(IThemeService themeService)
    {
        _themeService = themeService;

        base.ViewLocationFormats = new[]
        {
            _themeService.Current.BasePath + "/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
            _themeService.Current.BasePath + "/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Themes/Default/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml"                
        };

        base.PartialViewLocationFormats = new string[] {
            _themeService.Current.BasePath + "/Views/{1}/{0}.cshtml",
            _themeService.Current.BasePath + "/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml",
            "~/Themes/Default/Views/Shared/{0}.cshtml"
        };
    }

    public override ViewEngineResult FindView(ControllerContext controllerContext, string viewName, string masterName, bool useCache)
    {           
        // bypass the view cache, the view will change depending on the current theme
        const bool useViewCache = false;

        return base.FindView(controllerContext, viewName, masterName, useViewCache);
    }
}
}

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 27 '11 at 01:35

Fully theming web application is a very complex problem. You should not even attempt solving it, before you have a functional blog engine.

A simple and reasonably easy to achieve customization, is allowing the user to pick the .css file, and making sure all elements within the page are easily addressable/selectable with the appropriate IDs/classes.

Theme Selector idea for a Blog Engine written with ASP.NET MVC

2 Answers2

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