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Kas Thomas

Open Source blogging, the Oxite way

9-Dec-2008

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Evaluating SharePoint, Web Content Management, Implementation, Open Source, SharePoint 2010 WCM

If you're one of the many industry observers who's wondered why Microsoft hasn't created a decent blogging platform, stop wondering. The platform is out: it's called Oxite, and the source code is available for download. 

According to Microsoft's Jeff Sandquist (who blogs about it here), "Oxite began as a side project of Adam Kinney and Duncan Mackenzie and is a subset of the MSDN Channel 9 source code. When it was time to do a reboot of the Mix Online web site Duncan and his team created an experience where he could release the source code (a popular customer request of Channel 9) that used ASP.NET MVC to have 100% control of the resultant HTML."

Sandquist calls Oxite a "highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites." Paradoxically, the Oxite project site calls it something different, namely "a simple blog engine written using ASP.NET MVC." The latter seems more accurate, at this point. 

The code consists of around a hundred C# classes, plus some SQL Server tables, DBML and SQL files, and other artifacts. None of the source files contains any copyrights, but the code is provided under MPL (Microsoft's Public License), which basically says "no warranties of any kind are made" and absolves Redmond of any risk. For all intents, this is not a Microsoft project in any meaningful way; it's something a few Microsoft employees put together and are letting the public use at its own risk.

A couple of additional things to note: First, the code is quite elaborate for what it accomplishes (the same can be said for Java MVC projects as well, of course). Don't expect to do Hello World in a matter of minutes, unless you're an accomplished .NET web developer.

Secondly, the code is not internationalized. It's riddled with hard-coded English language strings.

Interestingly, the code includes the jQuery library.

As of this morning, the project (which was posted publicly on December 5) has seen around 3000 downloads.

Oxite has already become the darling of the blogosphere, eliciting effusive praise (it seems) wherever it's discussed. We'd caution that although Oxite's creators are to be commended for putting this project together, and although Microsoft has done a good thing in allowing the creators to make their code public, stamping something with "MPL" and throwing it over the wall hardly qualifies as an open-source strategy. If you decide to use Oxite (and by the way, we'd like to hear from you if you do), remember that you'll get no official support from Microsoft, and the project's direction isn't really set by the community. It's set by forces outside your control.