Rainbow Portal Looks To Implement Subtext For Blogging

Apr 7, 2006 subtext suggest edit

Rainbow Eric Ramseur who works on the Rainbow 2.0 Portal project looks like he has made progress inimplementing Subtext as the blogging module for Rainbow. That is pretty sweet.

I have to admit I do not know much about the Rainbow system other than it is a Content Management System written in C# with versions for ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0. It definitely bears investigation to see how it compares and contrasts with DotNetNuke.

I am definitely interested in seeing how easy (or not) it is to integrate Subtext into another system. One thing I have been working on when I have time is to refactor Subtext to clean up some code and make it easier to understand the source. As a team, we also hope to make the codebase even more modularized. This stuff is fun.

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Comments

9 responses

Simone Chiaretta • April 6th, 2006
One year ago I was deciding if it was better to use DNN or Rainbow portal as CMS...
I installed both of them, and the I decided to go with DNN.. even if the rainbow portal has been started in Italy (and I'm italian :-)): it was much more complex to skin compared to DNN (or at least less easy to understand how to do it easily)...
And now I'm quite skilled in DNN... :-)
Once I was thinking on making SubText a DNN module... but the DNN module structure need most of the SubText code to be rewritten... so... I put that idea in the trashcan
Rahul Singh • April 6th, 2006
Thats why DNN sucks. It requires too much rewriting to integrate applications. It's easier in Rainbow.
I disagree about the skinning hardship of Rainbow. It's the same process for both systems. With master pages in Rainbow in the next release, this should solve that problem.
Phil, good to see that you've got Subtext out. The screenshots look good.
Eric Ramseur • April 6th, 2006
Thanks Phil for a great snippet. I hope SubText will be awesome as a new module. When we get going, I will also make a forum for subText Rainbow Integration.
To the above commenter: Rainbow 2.0 is now changing. We are keeping our template interface and have now added API's. It is now easier than ever to install and you can also install with SQL 2005 Express. This makes rainbow completly free seeing how it can also be run with mono on linux :).
We are making extension easier with zip file deployment in the works. As it stands, all you need to have is a user control and anything you can do with ASP.NET, you can do with rainbow. We even have copy/paste asp.net code funtionality. As in you can write asp.net code into the portal and it will compile in on the fly.
We also have areas where you can extend your own web apps into rainbow. Within 1 week, 1 developer was able to not only port YAF to .net 2.0 but stick in our latest Alpha 3 build.
We have ASPNETDB membership on the way [ already in alpha 3.1] and racing to the April-June deadlines of a core open source product. If subText also uses membership [ hint, hint], we could take sweet advantage of SSO.
Any questions : ramseur [at] gmail[dot] com
Steve Harman • April 6th, 2006
If subText also uses membership [ hint, hint], we could take sweet advantage of SSO.

Eric,
As of right now I belive that ASP.NET 2.0 (and with it membership & roles) is slated for subText v1.1 "Daedelus". We are currently working on v1.0.5 "Playground" which focuses mainly on bug fixes and a few developer targeted enhancements. I don't know that we have a solid date in mind for release (Phil?) but we'll then focus on getting Daedelus out the door.
Looking forward to hearing more about subText + Rainbow Portal!
Haacked • April 7th, 2006
Wow, your last comment exposed a problem with my CSS. Doh!
I've been real busy with a bunch of other stuff, but I know that Steve has been making good progress on 1.0.5. So I'll hopefully review stuff this weekend and try to set a release date.
Haacked • April 7th, 2006
Fixed the CSS issue.
simone • April 7th, 2006
I disagree about the skinning hardship of Rainbow. It's the same process for both systems. With master pages in Rainbow in the next release, this should solve that problem.

I tested DNN vs Rainbow portal in September 05...
if you say the problem will be solved with the next release.. it means that with the version I tested, it was not as easy as in DNN
Eric Ramseur • April 7th, 2006
<quote>I tested DNN vs Rainbow portal in September 05...
if you say the problem will be solved with the next release.. it means that with the version I tested, it was not as easy as in DNN</quote>
With Rainbow 2.0 release we will support ASP.NET 2.0 skins/themes as well as master pages. This will eliminate all issues with skinning and allow you to use other ASP.NET 2.0 skins [ as most define the common web controls] with ease.
Rainbow 2.0 Admin
community.rainbowportal.net
Chris vd Merwe • December 14th, 2007
Well at this point, it seems that DotNetNuke is still leading the portal game in terms of open source type portal developments.
Regardless of the fact that it's written in VB.NET (yuck!), it's still easy to extend, customize, skin, install and is constantly evolving to keep up with the times.
What is disconcerting about Rainbow is that it's in Alpha phase for .NET 2.0 compat while .NET 3.5 is already released?
Perhaps make it a proper open-source project to better DNN and get more developers on board to assist with making this the next best thing?