A series of mesoporous carbon nitride materials have been fabricated using inexpensive and eco-friendly urea and formaldehyde as precursors and mesocellular silica foam (MCF) as a template through a nanocasting approach. Several techniques, including XRD, TEM, elemental analysis, FT-IR, XPS, and CO2-TPD have been applied to characterize the physicochemical properties of the mesoCN materials, and the results show that the materials possess high surface areas (331-355 m(2) g(-1)), relatively concentrated pore size of ca. 6 nm, and abundant and multiple nitrogen-containing species. As heterogeneous base catalysts, mesoCN materials demonstrate high catalytic activity and selectivity in both Knoevenagel condensation and transesterification reactions. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.