As mentioned in the previous post, I've begun development of an open-source project which is hosted at CodePlex. The project's aim is to make it easy for bloggers who are beginning to use BlogEngine.Net as their blogging engine.

I got the idea for BlogEngine.Net Exporter when I realized I was really impressed with BEN. Mads has done such a good job and appears to be building quite a lot of supporting bloggers. All the other engines I've used are so complicated, and BEN seemed to offer the best feature set while keeping true to the open source ideals I admire. I loved MovableType, don't get me wrong, but when I upgraded to the 4.0 version and all hell broke loose I kind of had to make a decision on a new tool, and BEN seemed to be perfect.

The problem, of course, lies in exporting my MT posts into BEN's XML format. I decided this was a good opportunity to code for fun, so I worked up a quick sample. Thinking only of MovableType users just wouldn't do, and with my Provider Hat on, I set out to create a pluggable model that would - or could, if people will help write new providers - export any existing blog into the BEN format. Right now I'm supporting only the XML file provider, but welcome any input. 

As previously mentioned, you can find the BlogEngine.Net Exporter project at CodePlex, specifically, it's own project page.