Minor BlogEngine Customizations

I needed to make some changes to how BlogEngine.net serves up pages and posts. Basically, by default, links are like this:

blog-domain-name/page/page-name.aspx
blog-domain-name/posts/yy-mm-dd/post-title.aspx

I wanted to change them to look like this:

blog-domain-name/web/page-name.aspx
blog-domain-name/news/yy-mm-dd/post-title.aspx

I'm not a Visual Studio or .NET developer, I know enough about each to be dangerous really. So I started digging around in a couple of files with Visual Studio and foud out how to do it. All I have to do is edit the following:

Open the entire BlogEngine solution (BlogEngine.sln) and browse to BlogEngine.Core and then the Web/HttpModules subfolder. Open the UrlRewrite.csfile. Look for the line

url.Contains("/PAGE/")

and change it to whatever you want it to be. I'm going use bacon in my example so mine would look like

url.Contains("/BACON/")

Next, look for line 

else if (urlContainsFileExtension && url.Contains("/PAGE/"))

and change the word PAGE to whatever you changed it to above. In my example it would be

else if (urlContainsFileExtension && url.Contains("/BACON/")).

Now, still in Visual Studio, browse to the Web subfolder and open the Page.cs file. Look for the line

return string.Format("{0}page/{1}", Utils.RelativeWebRoot, theslug);

and change the word page to match what you used above. Mine now looks like

return string.Format("{0}bacon/{1}", Utils.RelativeWebRoot, theslug);

and then I save the two files. You must rebuild your solution or else the changes won't take effect. Links to pages will now look like this:

blog-domain-name/bacon/page-name.aspx

You can also make changes to the Post.cs file and Category.cs file the same way. Just make sure that you edit the UrlRewrite.cs file as well. Pretty cool huh!