Category Archives: Subtext

First Post – How to setup SubText

First post. To kick off this blog, I’m going to go into details on how to setup the Subtext blogging engine.

Today I was looking for a ‘simple’ blog engine to setup on my home server. After a little bit searching, I ran into the subtext project and decided to try it out. Apart from the almost non-existent documentation for installing this application, it’s not bad at all. You can checkout subtext here.

If you would like to know how to setup SubText on your own web server. Please do the following.
Note: I have complete control over IIS 6 and SQL Server, so please make any mental notes on how your configuration may differ.

  1. After downloading the source, open up the ‘SubtextSolution.sln’ file in the SubTextSolution directory. For my IDE, I’m using Visual Studio 2005.
  2. Set your build configuration to ‘Release’
  3. Right click on the project ‘SubText.Web’ in the Solution Explorer
  4. Click on Build
  5. Right click on the project ‘SubText.Web’ in the Solution Explorer
  6. Click on Publish
  7. In the ‘Publish Web’ dialogue screen, set your target location to a directory on your drive. In the copy options, set this to ‘All project files’. For some reason if you don’t do this, the ‘web.config’ file doesn’t get copied over.
  8. Click ‘Publish’
  9. Go to the published directory and do a search in the published directory for ‘*.cs’ files and delete those. Also delete the ‘*.csproj’ file.
  10. Create a database that stores SubText’s data.
  11. Configure the connection string in the web.config for your database. Make sure this owner can create, drop, alter tables and create Stored procedures.
  12. And now just zip up all the files in the published directory and you should be good to go.
  13. Copy and extract the zip file to your web directory that you will be using and that should be it. On your first run of the application, it will walk you through a wizard that sets up the database and the master user.
  14. In the website properties for IIS, don’t forget to set the ASP.NET version for the site to 2.0, set  execute permissions to scripts, and add the ‘Default.aspx’ in the documents tab.