Integrate BlogEngine AND Yet Another Forum [YAF] with your Existing website in
asp.net 4.0
It is a very basic need to have a forum and a blog on a single website these
days. If you already have a asp.net website and are looking to set up a forum and
a blog, then you can cretainly use open source softwares to get the functionality
FREE of cost.
There are the one of the best options that I have found and have been using for
some years now.
They both are open source applications written in asp.net and C#. They can be
easily integrated with your current asp.net website to provide the blog (writing
articles) and forum discusions facility to your website users. You can go through
their web pages to know about the featrues they support.
We also use the same Blog application and forum to power our community on this
site here.
They both can be used independently or can be integrated with your existing
website. We are going to talk about the integration with existing website in this
article.
Structure
The best and most clean way to set up forum and blog is to set them up in
separate sub folders under your root website. We are going to do the same and
this is what is going to be our final folder structure:
If your website code is placed at
YOURWEBSITE.com (called root), then we
should set up forum at
YOURWEBSITE.com/Forum. The word
Forum can be
anything of your choice.
YOURWEBSITE.com or
~/ --> Stores all your website code. May
contain some other folders too.
YOURWEBSITE.com/Forum/ or
~/Forum/ --> Stores all your YAF Forum
code.
YOURWEBSITE.com/Blogs/ or
~/Blogs/ --> Stores all your
BlogEnginecode.
The steps to set up both YAF and BE with existing site are too long to be covered
in a single article. Hence, I have broken them down into two separate articles
dealing individually with YAF and BE.
Here are the references to the same. I would suggest you to first set up YAF and
then BE.
- Set up Yet
Another Forum (YAF) with Existing asp.net website
- Set up BlogEngine (BE) with Existing asp.net website
That is it. Good luck. If you face any issues, ask in comments and i will be glad
to help you.