I am creating a custom blog theme, and in a blog post, links for the next and previous blog posts are shown at the bottom. It was a bit fiddly to get it to work but it is working as intended now. To get it to work I changed the view model from Articulate.Models.PostModel to Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoViewPage<Articulate.Models.PostModel>

Though I can't shake the feeling that it can be done more "correct" so to speak, for example I really want to get the next blog post as an articulate blog post object, so I have access to the Author objects and so on. Can this be made better?

@{
    var next = Model.Next();
    var prev = Model.Previous();
}
<nav class="post-navigation">
    <h2 class="screen-reader-text">Post navigation</h2>
    @if (next != null)
    {
        var nextImg = next.GetProperty("postImage").GetValue() as Umbraco.Core.PropertyEditors.ValueConverters.ImageCropperValue;
        var nextAuthor = next.GetProperty("author").GetValue() as string;
        <div class="nav-next">
            <div class="nav-inside">
                <div class="nav-before">Next</div>
                <h3 class="nav-title"><a href="@next.Url">@next.Name</a></h3>
                @if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(nextAuthor))
                {
                    <div class="nav-meta">
                        <span class="sep">By</span> @nextAuthor <span class="sep">on</span> <time class="published" datetime="@next.UpdateDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")">@next.UpdateDate.ToString("D", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(Culture))</time>
                    </div>
                }
            </div>
            @if (nextImg != null)
            {
                var thumbnail = Url.GetCropUrl(nextImg, cropAlias: "blogPost", useCropDimensions: true, htmlEncode: false, upScale: false);
                <a href="@next.Url" class="nav-thumb"><img src="@thumbnail" alt="@next.Name" /></a>
            }
        </div>
    }
    @if (prev != null)
    {
        var prevImg = prev.GetProperty("postImage").GetValue() as Umbraco.Core.PropertyEditors.ValueConverters.ImageCropperValue;
        var prevAuthor = prev.GetProperty("author").GetValue() as string;
        <div class="nav-previous">
            <div class="nav-inside">
                <div class="nav-before">Previous</div>
                <h3 class="nav-title"><a href="@prev.Url">@prev.Name</a></h3>
                @if (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(prevAuthor))
                {
                    <div class="nav-meta">
                        <span class="sep">By</span> @prevAuthor <span class="sep">on</span> <time class="published" datetime="@prev.UpdateDate.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")">@prev.UpdateDate.ToString("D", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(Culture))</time>
                    </div>
                }

            </div>
            @if (prevImg != null)
            {
                var thumbnail = Url.GetCropUrl(prevImg, cropAlias: "blogPost", useCropDimensions: true, htmlEncode: false, upScale: false);
                <a href="@prev.Url" class="nav-thumb"><img src="@thumbnail" alt="@prev.Name" /></a>
            }
        </div>
    }
</nav>