I spent some time this afternoon publishing this install of DotText to our production hosting environment. It all went fairly well, but I experienced a couple of gotchas that I want to document for future reference. In hindsight, these seem like simple solutions, but it's usually the simple problems that end up taking the longest to solve, because in the back of my mind, I know they should be easy to solve... Anyway:

We host with Intermedia.net, a fairly decent provider who has served us well over the years. We have a shared hosting plan on a Windows 2003 box, along with a number of databases on a shared SQL server. Publishing .Net apps to their servers, however, has always been a PITA. After mucking with it time and time again, I finally came up with a way to publish sub-applications underneath our main virtual directory.

Converting from Single to Multiple Blogs
To give our employees the option of hosting their own blogs, I decided to go with the MultipleBlogConfig option. As you can see from the URL of this Weblog, I installed the DotText application on a virtual called blog. My first foray into DotText (having a non-alpha character in the name of the app (.Text) is kind of annoying, no?) was with the source code for version 0.95. I fired up the solution in Visual Studio, and began reading through the code and the DotTextWiki (which is a little weak on content). My first problem was that my initial trials with DotText were on localhost with a SingleBlogConfig. I grabbed the web.config sample Single2_Web config. When it came to publish to production, I had to convert from a single blog to multiple blog. Looking through the documentation, I made a few changes, including changing the BlogConfigurationSettings, Connection string, email settings, and Aggregate settings (thanks to Chris's post for some highlights). When I published to production and the jfk blog served up a blank page, I spent some time figuring out that the MultipleBlogConfig settings have different HttpHandler patterns defined. If you are going through a conversion from a single blog on a virtual to a multiple blog on a virtual, copy that section from Multiple2_Web.config over.

Problems with the admin area when deploying .Text
The next problem I had came from the way that I deployed the application to production. I used VS.Net to do a copy web to our production servers. When I submitted my login info to the site, I kept getting errors in DotText that indicated that the app couldn't find the requested page. /blog/jfk/login.aspx was directing me to /blog/jfk/admin/default.aspx. After FTPing to the prod server, I saw that there was no /admin folder under /blog or /blog/jfk, and the DotText.Admin.Web was also missing form the /bin directory.

It turns out that the DotText VS.Net project is setup with the /admin subdirectory as a class library in a separate project, which points to an excluded directory under the DotTextWeb folder. Because of this, VS.Net copy web doesn't work properly - you have to manually FTP out the aspx pages and the admin assembly underneath your virtual (/blog/admin, in my case) in order to get the admin area to work. Maybe this is documented somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

Anyway, now that this thing is installed and working (we'll see what happens when I submit this), I'm looking forward to capturing my discoveries in the world of .Net, and documenting the cool stuff I run across. Sorry, but I'll probably also be blogging politics, especially as the November election draws closer.