Dave Burke - Community Server Byte for October 13, 2007

Community Server Byte for October 13, 2007

blog bits

A well-written and interesting narrative from Scott Vandehey on his frustrations with theming CS2007. "So, to recap: If you want to find anything out about Community Server, be prepared to spend hours trolling the forums and documentation, sifting through the irrelevant and out-of-date results to possibly find an answer, but more likely, you’ll have to post a question yourself, and wait for a community member to help you out."
If you want to read a second interesting narrative about a journey away from Community Server, read Rob Wallings's "Tale of Moving Blog Engines from Community Server to WordPress." I understand everything Rob was saying here, especially about community, but geez, using Community Server 1.0 as a baseline? "But as CS 1.0 got worse and I began dreading writing new posts I realized I needed to take action. I decided, if nothing else, I needed to migrate to the current version of CS, called 2007.1." Uhhh, yeah.
Introducing Phizzpop. This is the most impressive Community Server-based site I've seen in a long, long time. Great job to everyone involved. I joined the site and plan to spend some quality time there.
The K-man brings us the second part of his Community Server 2007 Spam Busting expose. More good descriptions and screenshots of the various spam blocker settings as in Part 1.
Alex Crome continues to work through the kinks of his Mark All Forum Posts Read control. From the CS Forums thread it looks like he's just about nailed it.
Another very cool demonstration of Community Server for you at Skate.Reel where Videos and Images seem to be driven by CS Blogs. I really like how this site demonstrates the seamless integration of Community Server elements into a site with a broad array of other functions. Very slick.
MySpace forums is now using Community Server Forums. Congratulations, guys. In every conversation I have with new clients I mention how Community Server is built to scale. "These Telligent guys get off on huge numbers of people running their stuff," I tell them. That always seems to put clients at ease. Now being able to add "MySpace uses Community Server Forums" puts a nice Maraschino cherry on top.
Jon Sagara with instructions on ensuring the Enter key initiates a blog search. He also posted on the issue in this CS Forums post.
Cool tip from Adam Toth on using Windows Character Map to preserve an apostrophe in his RSS feed title that was being urlencoded.
Since last time on DBVT.COM, I'm pleased to announce the return of the ITunes Library. I also added a couple of Nuglets on monitoring your Community Server background tasks and how to use Live Writer with CS to ensure that your feed subscribers get the final version of your posts. ReMix07 stuff and a post on CodeSmith as a peripheral brain function which I noticed last night got StumbledUpon. Thank you to whoever did that.

forum bits

Community Server's aggregate tag filtering is pretty cool if you want to display posts with specific tags on the aggregate post list and feed, but not if tags are squirreled away in there that you don't know about.
Ben with the most simple solution yet on applying different themes to different forums using a Page_Load() Header.Controls.Add(stylesheet literal) based on CurrentForum.SectionID.
Another Chameleon DisplayConditions example to hide empty user photo galleries.
Wyatt prompts contemplations on using the Community Server model to create custom .config and .xml overrides. More SDK source code gold to explore.
Some thoughts on cleaning up test data on sites prior to launch. I agree with Jeff Espenschied (as usual) that it may be best to create a new database and adding the needed areas to the site again, exporting and then importing site themes in the process. I added in a reply that I always have three CS sites going for a project in the standard development, staging and production lineup.
I like TheMez's idea of a Community Server Suggestion Poll to vote up or down on suggested features. This suggestion of an Avatar Selection Gallery would be a good candidate, for instance.
Once again Ben blows me away with his inline code mastery, here using DisplayConditions in conjunction with User Extended Attributes.
TexasRebel's tagcloud's text sizes were all the same. She discovered the issue being that the tags in the testing environment had the same number of posts, thus the same size. That would be a good interview question... "You've got a new Community Server site. The tags in the tagcloud are all the same size. WHAT DO YOU DO?" The newbie candidate runs out of the room screaming, "For the love of God, I don't know! I don't know!" And you hear them sobbing all the way down the hall.
Alex Crome's suggestion of adding runat=server to a non-displaying CSControl is a good tip and something to keep on the top shelf.