This week, I decided to upgrade to 1.4, primarily because I want to try out some new theme kung fu and I wanted to do it on the latest and greatest version of BlogEngine. In short, the conversion was very simple. I ran into a few hiccups, some my fault, some not, but all very minor.
Changes in CSS
There were some changes in css elements that caused me a problem or two. The first issue was a collision with some of my own css classes being named "content", which is thrown around a lot in blogengine. This caused some floating issues with the sidebar and the widgets.
Changes in Related Posts
The related posts section, when you view a blog post, has been enhanced. And, I personally think it is better now. But, there are some issues with the new technique that I know the blogengine team have seen before, and I'm sure it wont be long till they are fixed up. The good news is that you can just replace the RelatedPosts.cs code file with the version from 1.3, and it works exactly the same way it did in 1.3. There is more info on codeplex where I created an issue.
Changes in Blog Links
This fix is actually better for all of man kind....except for me. Basically, I lacked the forethought of having "---" in your post slug, even though it was mentioned to me before. Not only is it kinda ugly (some think so), but it creates invalid html, which is terrible, right. Well, BlogEngine fixes that now, but I have lots of links to my posts with those three hyphens, and I didn't want to let that go, so I tweaked the code to continue to allow it. That's the beauty of open source, right there. And, just as a side note, when my posts were not being found, BlogEngine was good enough to do a quick search and provide the users with a link to the correct post anyway, so it's not like people were dead in the water, so kudos, once again.
Permission Issues
This one, I think, was caused by my host. But, on app_statup, BlogEngine attempts to write all the xml configurations for the extensions you have installed. The app has no issues writing to those xml files any time, other than on app_startup. If anyone else has that problem, or has a fix, drop me a line. For now, I just threw a try/catch around the trouble code, and everything is good to go.
Overall, the experience has been pretty painless. The only real reason for me to upgrade was widgets and their affect on themes, but its so simple, it may be worth doing just to keep recent. Just make sure you grab the comment security fix noted on codeplex before you do upgrade, though.
If you see anything else that is out of place because of the upgrade on this blog, please let me know.
Jesse