A single user SPA blog with a ASP.NET WebAPI backend and a Blazor front-end.
Download and publish with the .NET SDK. Use the .json files in wwwroot to configure and write articles.
Note that article dates are formatted to ISO-8601 (equivalent to .toISOString() from the JavaScript datetime object.) Navigate to /admin to get the current value.
It's a blog, not a CMS. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach will ensure that it works with just enough to get running, with more flashy features added over time. Will have support for core blogging functionality including RSS, an externally accessible API and multiple language support. With that said...
Additional features should be easy to add, allowing administrators to customise their blog as they see fit.
Support for themes and straight-forward tweaking of CSS files to style the blog.
Blazor is a Single Page Application (SPA) framework along the lines of Angular and React will ensure that MakoBlog is snappy. UI-Kit will provide the foundations of a responsive design to ensure that MakoBlog is usable on a range of devices.
The front-end should not be dependent on a certain backend. MakoBlog will be built with a .NET backend initially, but the front and back ends will be separated to allow other technologies to provide the backend. Furthermore, it should not be tied to any particular database.
Test Driven Development helps to mitigate bugs and regressions, as well as encouraging leaner code by only writing what needs to be written.
MakoBlog is built in VS Code, Microsoft's excellent lightweight, cross-platform, open source development environment. My machines run on Manjaro. Is pr'y excellent!
Instructions to install .NET can be found here. For Arch and its derivatives including Manjaro, it's in the Community repos.
Regretably, Blazor offers only rudimentary debugging through Edge and Chrome, and I'm a big Firefox fan. I'm looking forward to improved support in the future, but in the meantime, the application can be launched using the watch task.
Launch a browser, navigate to MakoBlog (port 5001 on https and 5000 on http), press Shift+Alt+D and follow the instructions to get debugging.
More details in the Microsoft Documentation: Debug ASP.NET Core Blazor.
Debug as normal. The API sits on port 6001 on https, and 6000 on http.
Tests are written in NUnit and span all aspects of MakoBlog. Write the tests before (or in parallel) with the functional code.
- Don't think of it as testing, instead consider tests to be specifications. If the test passes, your code adheres to the spec.
- Write the test before or in parallel with the code. Make sure the test fails before attempting to write the solution.
- Write only the code necessary to pass the test.
Each project with functional code has a corresponding Tests project. All deployable code lives within the src directory, allowing clear seperation from readmes, configs, build pipelines, etc.
Shared libraries that can be used in both Client and Server.
A shared library of code, including DTO classes, enums and other things that don't include code with processes.
Projects pertaining to the browser frontend.
The primary starting point for the MakoBlog frontend.
Projects pertaining to the server backend.
A WebAPI project that interacts with the database, file systems etc.