Oxite

Nishant Kothary — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:23:07 GMT

Oxite

Oxite (alpha) is an open source, standards compliant, and extensible content management sample that can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online.

Download Oxite (alpha) from Codeplex but if you must, scroll to learn more

What's in the bag?

Everything you could ever want When you roll your own blog or web site, you are faced with a huge list of protocols and features that you need to implement, but all you care about is building the best web experience you can dream up. 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.

Create more than just blog posts. Oxite includes the ability to create and edit an arbitrary set of pages on your site. Want an 'about' page? You got it. Need a special page about your dogs, with sub-pages for each of those special animals? Yep, no worries . the ability to add pages as a child of another page is all built in. The web-based editing and creation interface lets you put whatever HTML you want onto your pages, and the built-in authentication system means that only you will be able to edit them. And if that's not enough, well, you have all the code, don't you?

We heart web standards. Web development isn’t easy. Oxite shows that you can build a standards compliant website, starting with design and markup and realizing that vision into a web application using ASP.NET MVC. The current iteration is an alpha release and we'll continue to ship periodic updates based on all the great feedback we're hearing. We’ve also made it open source so that people can look at the code and even contribute changes along the way.

Lone blogger, or part of a pack? Oxite includes support for multiple blogs on one site, as well as the ability to contain the data for more than one site in the same database.

Learn from MIX Online. We know how frustrating it can be to get going on building a great site on a powerful platform. We're providing a default template to get you started, but fret not if that's not enough. If you're anything like us, you learn best by sifting through code. So, we figured that we'd package up MIX Online codebase for your perusal. If nothing, it should give you a rockin' good start at building your own site.

Screenshots

Video

You need Silverlight to view this video. It’s fast, it’s free and it’s awesome. Click here to get it.

A Quick Overview of Oxite

In this video, Adam Kinney, one of the early cofounders of Oxite, talks to Erik Porter and Nathan Heskew about what exactly Oxite has to offer. Erik and Nathan take you on a whirlwind tour of everything in the Oxite bag. If reading is not your thing, this video is for you. (6m42s)

Other versions: MP4 | High Quality WMV

Be sure to check out our lab for more cool stuff.

Quick Links

You can download the Oxite source as well as check out example implementations of Oxite on CodePlex.
Got questions about the project? Check out the discussion forums.

Our First Labs Project: A Microformats Toolkit Called "Oomph"

Joshua Allen — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:16:42 GMT

Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit

< Back to lab main page

Microformats are about enhancing the web, representing data in HTML and moving that data around. Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit is for web developers, designers and users, making it easier to create, consume, and style Microformats. In short, Oomph makes consuming and producing content for the web just a little easier, more efficient, more fun.

You need Silverlight to view this video. It’s fast, it’s free and it’s awesome. Click here to get it.

Consume

With the Internet Explorer Add-in, web pages with Microformats light up. Want a cross-browser experience? Add a slick overlay that aggregates Microformats to any web page with one line of Javascript. Read More
Style

Written for the hCard and hCalendar Microformat specifications, this set of 14 CSS styles will make your Microformatted content look beautiful and stylish. Read More
Create

Do you publish content through a blog engine? Easily add Microformatted content to your blog posts with this Windows Live Writer Plug-in. Read More

Go Microformats!

The crew here at Mix Online believe in Microformats. But don't just believe us: look at the adoption of Microformats in the wild. There are over a billion web pages with content formatted to the hCard specification and nearly 100 million formatted to the hCalendar specification. Top web properties including Yahoo, LinkedIn, Eventful, Twitter and YouTube are using Microformats. At MIX06, Bill Gates, gave props to Microformats in his keynote: "We need Microformats and to get people to agree on them. It is going to bootstrap exchanging data on the web."

Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit

With the momentum of Microformats burgeoning, we decided to build Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit. Our main goal with Oomph is to make Microformats more accessible for developers and designers. Oomph is an amalgamation of applications: an Internet Explorer Add-in built in C++ that finds Microformats on a page; a cross-browser HTML overlay built using JQuery that aggregates Microformats; a set of beautiful CSS styles for Microformats; and a Windows Live Writer plug-in written in WinForms for inserting hCards. And, the entire project is up on Codeplex, ready for community contribution and extensibility.

Consume

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of Oomph is the Internet Explorer Add-in and the accompanying cross-browser HTML overlay. For those who install the Add-in, pages with Microformats will "light up" aggregating and mapping the content as well as providing options to export the data. Architecturally, the Add-in actually injects a line of Javascript into web pages with Microformats. This Javascript can also be manually added to web pages, providing a cross-browser experience. You can see an example of this here.

Style

Because Microformats are based on a standard set of HTML class attributes, styling Microformats with CSS makes a lot of sense. As such, we are providing a set of CSS styles that can be used to make Microformatted content look great, including even a grunge themed style!

Create

Before you can style or consume Microformats, you need to create them. With this in mind, we have built an hCard Windows Live Writer Plug-in for adding contact information to your blog posts. The great thing about WLW is that it targets most blog platforms, including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, Wordpress, Blogger and many others. As blogs are becoming the CMS systems de rigueur, adding Microformats to blogs certainly adds up.

Shout Outs

We would like to thank a whole range of people who have inspired and helped the project get off the ground:

Michael Kaply and his Operator Add-in for Firefox, which was inspirational.
John Allsopp, whose book on Microformats was essential reading for the whole team.
All of the folks on the microformats-discuss alias, whose passion for Microformats kept us invigorated.
The authors of jQuery, whose library we have fallen in love with.

Lab - MIX Online

Oxite

Oxite

What's in the bag?

Screenshots

Video

A Quick Overview of Oxite

Related Articles

Quick Links

Our First Labs Project: A Microformats Toolkit Called "Oomph"

Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit

Consume

Style

Create

Go Microformats!

Oomph: A Microformat Toolkit

Consume

Style

Create

Shout Outs

Related Content