I've been recently enjoying a few emails on the topic of CMS in Community Server with some new pals of mine from
Tim Haines' New Zealand Entourage. I always enjoy emails when The Hustler's on the distrib list, but particularly so when the topic is Community Server. Thus the topic of tonight's CS Nuglet is Content Management in Community Server 2.0, focusing on the CS 2.0 Content Part Control.
First (and this is not Telligenti Insider info), CMS support is a significant driver in CS 3.0. Rob Howard said this in his WallyM podcast from Mix06 with ScottW.
Here's a transcript. Another point is that Telligent purchased Dozing Dogs last year for their Content Management technology, so CMS is important in Community Server's future.
This CS Forums thread on the topic of Lightweight CMS in CS deals with several related aspects, with a RobH link to the Dozing Dogs acquisition and other related forums threads.
The Lightweight CMS thread began with a request for more information about the Content Part, a new control in CS 2.0 that supports inline editing of content areas. The Content Part can be added to any CS page literally in seconds, and is used in places for lightweight CMS functionality in places you might not suspect, like this Support page at CS.ORG. (Click on any screenshot to view full-size.) In the enlarged version you'll see circled "double-click to edit this content."
We're going to walk through the process of adding a Content Part in Community Server and enjoy CS 2.0 CMS-Lite in action. I'm going to use the iTunes Library on my development server for the demo. What we're going to do is replace the top left-hand circled static text block with a Content Part.
The first thing we're going to do is open up the .ASPX or .ASCX (in this case, Skin-iTunesSideBar.ascx) and add the control. This is the original code.
And below is the ContentPart control, which is like any CS Custom control. We provide ID and RUNAT properties, along with a CONTENTNAME property. More on that in a bit.
Now when we return to our page, and if we have sufficient permissions, when we hover over the content part area we'll see a "Double-Click to Edit this Content" prompt.
We double-click and a modal window appears where we edit the content.
Closing the modal window updates our content part text.
You may be wondering where the data is stored. Well, here's another slick aspect of the Content Part, the data is stored in the cs_content SQL table, identified by the contentname property we entered earlier.
So you and your Content Managing gaggle, enjoy the CS 2.x Content Part as full CMS capabilities continue to evolve in Community Server.
[tags: Community Server, CSControls]