Override Files in Community Server
Monday, December 29 2008 - 0 comments
For all examples in this article, I shall only be modifying the configuration of the HTML Scrubber through a communityserver_override.config for the sake of consistency, however do bear in mind that override files can be used to modify any aspect of a communityserver.config or a siteurls.config file. Why Should I use Override Files? The main benefit of using override files to make changes to the core configuration files is that you are not actually modifying the core configuration files. You are instead making the modifications through a separate configuration file. This means that...
Community Server Question and Answer Functionality
Tuesday, December 23 2008 - 0 comments
The Question and Answer functionality in Community Server (introduced in Community Server 2008.5) is very useful in support scenarios where users come to your community posting questions because it provides a means of tracking whether questions have been answered or not. Below is a screenshot of a sample Question and Answer thread. Understanding Q&A A Question and Answer thread contains four types of posts – the original question, normal responses, suggested answers and verified answers. The original Question The original question appears at the top of every page in the thread. This helps...
Community Server Articles
Monday, December 22 2008 - 0 comments
Articles are a little known feature of Community Server which adds some very simple content management facilities to your site. When I say basic, I do mean basic. These articles don’t appear in search, nor are they automatically linked to by any part of Community Server (apart from in the Control Panel). To link to articles you need to add the links yourself – this could be from blog, forum posts etc. Or by adding a link to the navigation . However they do make adding and updating additional content pages on your website, in keeping with the look and feel of your community, very easy...
Customising Content Boxes
Monday, December 22 2008 - 0 comments
Common content boxes are used throughout the Hawaii theme. They are most visible in the Sidebars of Hawaii pages but they are also used in defining the main content of the page. There are four areas available in a Common Content Box, which may not all be present for a particular content box Title / Header Header Form Content Footer What each region refers to in a Common Content Box should be obvious from the above image of a common content box. In HTML, a common content box is defined as follows <div class="CommonContentBox"> <h4 class="CommonContentBoxHeader"> TITLE...
Resizing the Content Editor
Friday, December 19 2008 - 0 comments
It's been a little quiet here recently so let's put that right. Did you know that you could resize the content editor used when posting to Community Server? To do so, just click the arrow like icon in the bottom right of the editor and drag it up or down to adjust the height of the editor This is very useful when you're writing a long response and get bored of having to continually scroll up and down if you want to look back at something you wrote earlier in the post.
AlexCrome.CS 2008 Is Here!
Friday, October 10 2008 - 0 comments
Finaly after working on it for months I feel ready to release this package. I am still working on documenting this release so do be patient with me whilst I do that. Included in this release are (If it's not a hyperlink, I haven't documented it yet). To download the package, please see the Installation Instructions . I shall be blogging more about particular aspects of this package over the coming weeks. In particular I plan to blog about Configurable Addons, and how they can be used to prevent having to modify the CS Control Panel whilst providing a nice way of configuring your addons....
AlexCrome.CS 2008 Is Coming…
Sunday, October 05 2008 - 2 comments
The title says it all. I’m very nearly finished, just got to put the finishing touches on the package which I should be able to do sometime this week (or at least I hope so). You can expect a number of old addons to be included Quick Reply control MarkAllPostsRead control NotifyAdministratorOnUserCreate CSModule (I have removed the RegistrationPM and UserHasUnreadPrivateMessagecondition as these are now included out of the box in CS.) You can also expect some additional addons to be included RefreshBlogPostCacheOnComment CSModule (updates cache immediately when a comment (blog or media gallery...
Login as a member of your community
Monday, September 29 2008 - 4 comments
Don’t you just love it when you get a conversation or email from a member of your community saying “I can’t access the website”. You ask them a few questions, and you’re convinced it’s a problem just affecting their user account, so somehow need to login as them. In Community Server 2008 or below, you’d have had to either changed the User’s password for them, and then give them a new password, or ask them to give you their password, neither of which is a particularly desirable outcome.
Classic Forum Home Page
Sunday, September 28 2008 - 1 comments
Whilst I do prefer the Hawaii forum view to the more typical forum views from past versions of CS, it does take a bit of getting used to, and I don’t dare to impost it on the users on my personal CS site (Nintendo Wiikly) for fear of a revolt – one lost user for me would be a loss of about 10% of my active user base :( – I decided to return to the old style of forum view.
What Theme Page is Community Server Using?
Saturday, September 13 2008 - 0 comments
URL Rewriting is a very powerful feature of Community Server, however for those trying to start themeing and modifying CS, it's very difficult as you have to work out what the rewritten page is - having /forums/ rewrite to /themes/YOURTHEME/forums/grouplist.aspx is not obvious at first sight. Even for seasoned CS users, who can read siteurls.config, it's not that easy (let alone pleasent) finding what page is actually being rendered. To aid this task, I've created a simple aspx page which you can drop anywhere in community server which allows you to enter URLs, and resolves the rewritten url (see...
