Keyvan Nayyeri

[Update: I added a new list of features with annoucement of BlogML 2.0 here.]

After sending my thanksgivings to Darren for his kind words, I just want to shortly talk about new features I made into [BlogML] recently.  I'll discuss about code implementations and technical details later but for now it's worth to share ideas with others to get their thoughts.  We'll be glad to hear your comments about new features and get your suggestions.

So far I've applied these new features/changes to BlogML:

• Support for multi-author content: Blogs can have a list of authors in definition and individual posts can have an author from that list.  This new feature has been implemented both in Schema and .NET APIs.
• Support for post excerpt: Excerpt is a brief description about each post and some blogging tools support it.  Now BlogML supports this feature and each post can have an excerpt as well.  It has been implemented in Schema and .NET APIs.
• Support for extended blog properties: We had a discussion with Darren about this.  We agreed to use two kinds of extended properties for Blog object: Well-known properties and user-defined properties.  Some examples of extended properties can be blog comments moderation type, total blog posts, total blog comments, total blog trackbacks and similar properties.  We'll define some common properties as well-known properties and will leave others for users to define them.  This feature has been implemented in Schema but I'm working to find best implementation for it in .NET APIs.
• Support for reading post attachment MIME type in .NET APIs: Previously you could write MIME type of an attachment as an attribute into BlogML file but couldn't read it from .NET Reader APIs.
• Support for special post types: One of common special post types in .NET blogging tools is Article.  Now BlogML supports special post types (currently Normal or Article).  This new feature has been applied to Schema and .NET APIs as well.

I'm updating my Community Server BlogML converter for Community Server 2.1 and new BlogML specifications to test BlogML new features/changes.  Update of Writer is finished and it worked properly but I need to update Reader class. Good news is fortunately BlogML didn't have any bug.  We're going to release new version of BlogML after adding some statistical features soon.

This post's attachment is a sample file for new BlogML version.  I exported Community Server MVPs News blog but doesn't show Article post type and blog extended properties.