Blog.Web

A full-featured, RTL Persian blog engine built with ASP.NET Core 5, Entity Framework Core, and SQL Server — featuring a clean layered architecture, a public blog website, and a full admin panel for content management.

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📖 Overview

Blog.Web is a complete content-management solution for running a Persian (Farsi) blog:

• A public website (Razor Pages) where visitors browse posts by category, read articles, search, and leave comments — with a fully RTL UI based on the Mag template and the IRANSans font.
• An admin panel (MVC Area) based on AdminLTE 3 where administrators manage posts, categories, and users, with CKEditor 4 for rich-text authoring and image uploads.
• A 3-layer architecture that cleanly separates data access, business logic, and presentation.

Author	Mohammad Hasan Pirayandeh (@MohammadHasanp)
Stack	C# / .NET 5, ASP.NET Core (MVC + Razor Pages), EF Core, SQL Server
Language of UI	Persian (RTL)
Database	SQL Server (code-first with migrations)

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✨ Features

Public site

• 🏠 Home page — latest posts, special/featured posts, popular posts (loaded via AJAX), and a category navigator with post counts
• 📄 Post pages with SEO-friendly slug URLs (/Post/{slug}), visit counters, related posts, and a comment form
• 🔎 Search with filtering by keyword and category, plus pagination
• 📚 Nested categories (main categories + subcategories) with SEO meta tags & meta description
• 👤 User registration & login (cookie authentication, 30-day persistent session)
• 🛡 Custom error pages (404 / 500)

Admin panel (/Admin)

• 📊 Dashboard (AdminLTE 3, RTL)
• ✍️ Posts management — create/edit/delete with CKEditor 4 rich-text editor, cover image & in-content image upload, slug uniqueness check, special-post flag
• 🗂 Categories management — hierarchical (parent/child), SEO fields
• 👥 Users management — search, pagination, edit user info & roles (Admin / Writer / User), modal-based editing
• 🔐 Role-based authorization — the whole admin area is protected by an adminPolicy requiring the Admin role

Architecture highlights

• Clean 3-layer design with dependency injection everywhere
• Service interfaces + implementations (IXxxService → XxxService)
• DTO layer for all inputs/outputs, with dedicated mapper classes
• OperationResult pattern for consistent success/error results
• Reusable utilities: slug generator, MD5 password encoder, image validation, pagination helper, date helpers, file manager for uploads
• Soft-delete support (IsDelete) and audit timestamp (Time) built into BaseEntity

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🧱 Architecture

flowchart TD
    A[Blog.Web — Presentation<br/>Razor Pages + MVC Admin Area] --> B[Blog.CoreLayer — Business Logic<br/>Services · DTOs · Mappers · Utilities]
    B --> C[Blog.DataLayer — Data Access<br/>BlogContext · Entities · Migrations]
    C --> D[(SQL Server — Blog_db)]

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Layer	Project	Responsibility
Presentation	Blog.Web	Public Razor Pages site + /Admin MVC area, authentication & authorization, static assets (wwwroot)
Business Logic	Blog.CoreLayer	Services (Posts, Categories, Users, Comments, MainPage, FileManager), DTOs, mappers, cross-cutting utilities
Data Access	Blog.DataLayer	EF Core BlogContext, entities, code-first migrations, SQL Server configuration

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🛠 Tech Stack

Technology	Usage
C# / .NET 5	Target framework (net5.0)
ASP.NET Core MVC	Admin panel (Areas, controllers, views)
Razor Pages	Public website pages
Entity Framework Core	ORM, code-first migrations
SQL Server	Database (Blog_db)
Cookie Authentication	Login / registration, role-based policies
AdminLTE 3 (RTL)	Admin panel template
Mag template + IRANSans	Public RTL theme
CKEditor 4	Rich-text editor with image upload
Bootstrap · jQuery · Chart.js	Front-end assets

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📁 Project Structure

Blog.Web/
├── Blog.sln                     # Solution (3 projects)
│
├── Blog.Web/                    # 🖥 Presentation layer (ASP.NET Core 5)
│   ├── Program.cs / Startup.cs  #   Host, DI registrations, auth & routing config
│   ├── Pages/                   #   Public site (Razor Pages)
│   │   ├── Index.cshtml         #     Home page (latest, special & popular posts)
│   │   ├── Post.cshtml          #     Post detail + comments (slug-routed)
│   │   ├── Search.cshtml        #     Search by keyword & category
│   │   ├── Auth/                #     Login / Register / Logout
│   │   └── Shared/              #     Layouts, header, footer, partial views
│   ├── Areas/Admin/             #   Admin panel (MVC area, Admin policy)
│   │   ├── Controllers/         #     Home, Post, Category, User, Upload
│   │   ├── Models/              #     View models (create/edit)
│   │   └── Views/               #     AdminLTE views + editor templates
│   ├── Controllers/             #   ErrorHandler (custom 404 / 500 pages)
│   ├── TagHelpers/              #   Custom OpenModal tag helper
│   ├── appsettings.json         #   Connection string & logging config
│   └── wwwroot/                 #   Static assets (css, js, images, CKEditor, AdminLTE)
│
├── Blog.CoreLayer/              # 🧠 Business logic layer (class library)
│   ├── Services/
│   │   ├── Posts/               #   Post CRUD, filtering, slugs, visits, related posts
│   │   ├── Categoryes/          #   Category CRUD & slugs
│   │   ├── Users/               #   Register, login, edit, filtering
│   │   ├── Comment/             #   Comments CRUD
│   │   ├── Mainpage/            #   Aggregated home-page data
│   │   └── FileManager/         #   Save/delete files & images on disk
│   ├── Dtos/                    #   Data-transfer objects per feature
│   ├── Mpperes/                 #   Entity ↔ DTO mappers
│   └── Utilities/               #   OperationResult, pagination, slug & date
│                               #   helpers, MD5 encoder, image validation
│
├── Blog.DataLayer/              # 🗄 Data access layer (class library)
│   ├── Context/BlogContext.cs   #   EF Core DbContext (Posts, Users, Categories, Comments)
│   ├── Entyties/                #   User, Post, Category, PostComment, BaseEntity
│   └── Migrations/              #   Code-first EF migrations
│
├── Mag/                         # 🎨 Original "Mag" HTML template (public theme source)
└── admin/                       # 🎨 Original AdminLTE HTML template (admin theme source)

ℹ️ Mag/ and admin/ hold the original static HTML templates the site themes were built from; the compiled assets actually used by the app live under Blog.Web/wwwroot/.

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🗃 Data Model

Entity	Description
User	Username, full name, password (MD5-hashed), UserRole enum (Admin / Writer / User)
Post	Title, slug, description (HTML), cover image, visit counter, IsSpecial flag, links to author, category and optional subcategory
Category	Title, slug, SEO meta tag & description, optional ParentId (self-referencing hierarchy)
PostComment	Comment text, linked to a user and a post
BaseEntity	Shared base: primary key, creation Time, IsDelete soft-delete flag

All foreign keys are configured with cascade delete.

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🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• .NET 5 SDK
• SQL Server (LocalDB or a full instance)
• (Optional) Visual Studio 2019/2022 or VS Code

Setup

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/MohammadHasanp/Blog.Web.git
cd Blog.Web

# 2. Check the connection string (Blog.Web/appsettings.json → "Defualt")
#    Default: Server=.;Database=Blog_db;Integrated Security=true

# 3. Create / update the database from the code-first migrations
dotnet tool install --global dotnet-ef        # if not installed
dotnet ef database update --project Blog.DataLayer --startup-project Blog.Web

# 4. Run the app
dotnet run --project Blog.Web

Then browse to https://localhost:5001 (public site) or /Admin (admin panel).

🔑 Getting admin access

There is no seeded admin account. To gain access to the admin panel:

1. Register a normal account on the site at /Auth/Register.
2. Promote it to the Admin role in the database:

UPDATE Users SET Role = 0 /* Admin */ WHERE UserName = 'your_username';

3. Log in again and open /Admin.

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⚙️ Configuration

Blog.Web/appsettings.json:

"ConnectionStrings": {
  "Defualt": "Server=.;Database=Blog_db;Integrated Security=true;MultipleActiveResultSets=true"
}

Uploaded post images are stored under wwwroot/images/posts (content images under .../posts/content) — see Directories.cs in the CoreLayer.

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🗺 Roadmap / Ideas

• ⬆️ Upgrade from .NET 5 (EOL) to a supported .NET version
• 🔒 Replace MD5 password hashing with a modern KDF (PBKDF2 / BCrypt)
• 🧪 Add unit/integration tests
• 🌐 Multi-language support (currently Persian-only)
• 📊 Dashboard statistics widgets with Chart.js

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👤 Author

Mohammad Hasan Pirayandeh — @MohammadHasanp

📧 PirayandehMohammadHasan@gmail.com

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🙏 Acknowledgements

• AdminLTE 3 — admin panel template
• CKEditor 4 — rich-text editor
• Bootstrap & jQuery — front-end framework
• Mag HTML template — public theme basis
• Entity Framework Core — ORM

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⭐ If you like this project, please consider giving it a star on GitHub! ⭐