WeBlog 2.2 Released

I'm excited to join Alistair Deneys in announcing the release of WeBlog 2.2. You can review the full change log, and Alistair has written a bit about his updates, including a cool new entry summary pipeline.

My efforts were selfishly centered around updates needed to support Techphoria414 and You-Phoria, a music blog primarily maintained by a good friend. It functions well as a test bed for WeBlog because it features quite a bit of content. 

My first focus was on performance. I made changes to how the Blog Archive component builds its list of historical posts -- grabbing all posts and sorting them rather than querying by month. I also made some updates to enable HTML caching for sidebar components "by blog." Previously, components such as the category list and archive had to "Vary by Data," meaning they were built and cached for each page of the blog. This is because of the multi-blog scenario. By creating a new sublayout-derivative rendering type, I was able to allow caching to Vary by Blog, so that these components only need to be built once per blog before being cached. The overall result is that WeBlog will now perform much faster, especially for blogs of any size.

My second focus was allowing the use of different Entry, Category, and Comment templates on a blog-by-blog basis. This cool new feature allows you, for instance, to vary the presentation details for entries and categories for different blogs in the same Sitecore instance. You can read more about Template Settings in the the module wiki.

Download WeBlog 2.2 from Sitecore Shared Source

Hope you all enjoy the update. As always, you can provide feedback and feature requests in the WeBlog Forum on SDN.