It’s about six years I’m blogging my life and using BlogEngineto publish my posts; because I believe it’s the best blog engine ever. As a matter of fact, BlogEngine is doing everything I need as a blogger and sometimes more than that. I highly recommend using it if you’re blogger!

But this post is not about BlogEngine itself! In this post I’m going to introduce a new theme for BlogEngine which is so cool!

Note: If you don’t know BlogEngine yet, please check out its website at: http://dotnetblogengine.net.

It was about five months I was going to change my blog’s theme to a new one that includes latest web standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 but I didn’t have time for that. Yesterday, I decided to change my blog theme and it took about 12 hours to create a new one. In fact, I didn’t create the theme from scratch!

The ELEGANTBLUE Theme

ElegantBlue originally designed by freecsstemplates.organd I’ve changed it a lot to get it compatible with BlogEngine. Here’s the list of things I’ve changed:

HTML5 & CSS3

Everybody is talking about HTML5 and CSS3 these because it’s awesome! It’s about a year that I’m using these in my projects. HTML5 and CSS3 give me lots of capabilities I didn’t have before and help me create user-interfaces like never before. Also, they help search engines to index your website faster than before! For example, with the new <header> HTML5 tag, search engines can recognize where your website’s header is. The ElegantBlue theme for BlogEngine is a HTML5 and CSS3 theme so search engines can find your blog contents faster and the user interface is much cooler!

Razor View Engine

In BlogEngine 2.5, you can create themes and extensions using Razor view engine. Here’s a brief explanation about Razor:

The Razor syntax is a template markup syntax that enables the programmer to use an HTML construction workflow and is based on the C# programming language. Instead of using the ASP.NET .ASPX markup syntax using <%= %> blocks to indicate code blocks the Razor syntax starts of a code block with Razor using a @ character and does not require explicit closing of the code-block.

I totally used Razor view engine in ElegentBlue theme for BlogEngine.

Note: In order to implement Razor view engine, BlogEngine has RazorHost directory in the theme folder of the application. RazorHost folder is like a default template for Razor themes. If you’re going to use this theme in your website, you need to change the DOCTYPE to HTML5 in “site.master” file because it’s set to XHTML 1.0 by default. Besides, I include this change in the download file at the end of this post.

Download

You can download the theme right from here.

 ElegantBlue.zip (352.05 kb)

Hope it helps.

It’s about 3-4 months I didn’t blog so much. It was because of some deterrent elements such as my grandmother, work pressures and more.

Fortunately, those stuffs finished probably and from now on, I’ll try to keep blogging up again.

As you know my previous domain stole from me by the company I bought the domain from. So I decided to register a new domain because I love blogging and my website is the only place I can share my knowledge with others.