14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has made its Oxite blog engine available as a free download. The Redmond company is in fact offering the source code for Oxite via its Codeplex repository, in a move especially aimed to attract web content developers and designers familiar with ASP.NET MVC. On the official CodePlex page for Oxite, Microsoft refers to the open source project as a sample. Moreover, considering the Alpha label sticked to the the initiative, the early December 2008 release is just a taste of what the Microsoft content management system can do.
“Oxite provides you with a strong foundation you can build upon - pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting (with optional moderation), gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, support for MetaWebLog API (think Windows Live Writer integration made easy), web admin panel, support for Open Search format allowing users to search your site using their browser's search box, and more - so, you can spend time on designing a great experience,” reads an excerpt of the solution's official description.
Oxite is being developed by the team behind projects such as Channel 9, Channel 10, Channel 8, TechNet Edge, and MIX Online. Therefore, in this context, Microsoft is recommending the engine as capable of greater things than just blogging. In this regard, Oxite is a fully-fledged content management service, able to handle not only a blog, but multiple blogs on a single website, as well as large web properties in need of CMS capabilities.
“There currently aren't any big ASP.NET MVC example applications. Oxite is meant to be a good example to learn about ASP.NET MVC. At the same time, we think it is a useful sample to get a site of your own going too,” Microsoft's Erik Porter explains the need for the blog engine, adding that the general public is bound to find nothing for them in this release. “Oxite is targeted at developers who want to learn ASP.NET MVC. That said, if you're a devigner, you might really like Oxite too. We work well in Visual Studio Express. This is a community project. If the community decides to build this to work well for consumers down the road we won't stop it, and then Oxite would be for you.”