Sure, this is the obligatory first-post of any blog, and instead of (or as well as) the usual "hello world" I decided to open-source the skin for this blog which you can find on GitHub.

My first stab at getting a blog-engine up and running was with Phil Haack's seemingly dead blog engine Subtext -  I only used it because it was the first one I found when I searched Google for "Open Source .Net CMS" - I was a little surprised to see there was no generic Twitter Bootstrap template for it, so I made one (which you will also find on my GitHub). During this process I realised how horribly out-dated and old-fashioned the skinning process seemed, whcih was when I was reminded of a open-source MVC CMS that Scott Hanselman mentioned a while back - Orchard - so I went and checked that out.

Orchard is pretty sweet, there's a great community and the Orchard team have really gone out of their way to extend the feature-set and the toolset, but it actually really feels like they took Subtext and just MVC'd it - the initial project structure looks the same and it still has some of it's quirks when it comes to skinning. In fact... skinning the Orchard CMS is actually a PITA - there's some easy intro stuff that will lead you down the path of thinking "OHHH SCHWEET!" but honestly if you want to re-order the placement of some things or override a default (in-built) page then you're gonna have a bad time. I suspect that's why the Orchard CMS hasn't really taken off - if I were more bothered I might contribute to the project, but I can tell there's been a lot of opinions involved in the project already and some of those may be deep-seated and hard to remove/improve. Plus if I got my mitts on it then I may intentionally break backwards compatibility to improve future tooling/features.

Enjoy my CMS skins!