Getting up and running with Oxite

Having heard all about Oxite on the web over the past couple of days, I thought that I’d download it and take it for a test run to see what all the fuss was about.  I was hoping to look at both the architecture of the application as well as to learn a bit about how to implement an ASP.NET MVC style of application.  From an architecture point of view, I’m always interested to see what Web 2.0 style of features are being implemented by others and also how the code is structured and packaged.

Erik is the guy to follow if you want to enter into any decent sort of dialogue about Oxite.

Opening the box

First thing I did was to download the Oxite code from Codeplex and then I extracted the zip on my machine.  I then read the Getting Started page to read about what to do next.  I had to:

• download and install the ASP.NET MVC Beta bits
• download and install the VSTS Database stuff so that I could view the database project in VS (this wasn’t mentioned in the Getting Started notes)
• I had to install a version of SQL Server as I didn’t have one installed on the machine that I was doing all of this on as yet.  There wasn’t any mention of database versions in the notes that I could see but I saw an .MDF file in the root folder of the website, so I decided to go with SQL 2005 Express for now (fingers crossed)

After installing all of those, I loaded the solution into VS2008, set the OxiteSite project as the startup site and pressed [F5].  The solution failed because of an error in a DB script (Oxite.Database\Scripts\Pre-Deployment\Logins.sql).  I uncommented the code in the IF branch of that script and pressed [F5] again.  I got 2 more warnings but chose to proceed.

Success!

On getting the application to display, I logged in using the credentials that are shown in the World.Hello post (“Admin” and “pa$$w0rd”).  There doesn’t really appear to be any significant Administration section that I can find at this stage other than the ability to create pages and posts.  If you create a “post” entry then, by default it displays on the home page and in the Monthly Archives list.  If you create a “page” entry, then I’m not really sure where it shows.  I presume that a UI for adding navigation to pages is either a DIY or a WIP.  Here’s a view of the “Tasks” that exist when you are logged in as the Admin.

It’s worth mentioning the other user features that I could see.  When you view a post, a Gravatar is shown, you can enter comments, and you can subscribe to post updates.  Refer following graphic to see what this looks like:

If you are not logged in, then the UI for leaving comments appears different:

I’m not quite sure how you manage the application (other than publishing content), I presume that the UI for extended admin features will be developed by the community over time.  Oxite is clearly designed as a lean, clean content publishing engine and is still very much a WIP.  The UI functionality is very minimal and the installation process is also incomplete.

Anyways, this was just a brief post to explain my initial reactions to the surface area of Oxite.  What I hope to do next is to dive in and to take a look at the architecture, to see what API’s and services we have to work with.

 

Updates

[1] In the following forum post, Duncanma confirms the lack of admin functionality and describes the process for managing the app – [Link]

[2] There’s a better high level explanation of what Oxite is on the VisitMix.com website [Link]