blog bits
- Quite a bit of feedback on CommunityServer.org's new look. Other than fat sidebars, alternating table rows of yellow not being mellow, one person not liking the menubar dropdowns and a few folks missing their puke green world, all positive comments all the time. I like the new look because it's got Ben Tiedt's fingerprints on it and everything Ben touches is golden. I like the alternating yellow table rows, too!
- I'm not part of the Twitter Set (I don't want to be that plugged-in), but Telligenti Kyle Beyer has a very interesting CS2007 module that acts like a twitter client that will update your Twitter Status whenever you make a new post to your blog. If I was a Twitterer I'd be all a-twitter about that module!
- I've not heard about the need or usefulness of adding a fully qualified url of your Google sitemap to your robots.txt, but I trust my neighbor Tim Laughlin from New Hampshire. This also serves as a reminder that GoogleSiteMap is built into CS2007, so timely advice.
- Scott Watermasysk is looking for an advertising sponsor of his blog since he's not a Google Ads fan. This post could have been written by me, since I feel the same way (though there are no ads on dbvt.com.) Yeap, ScottW and I think the same on just about everything. We're practically twins.
- Community Server Lead Developer Jose Lema is sponsoring a contest for the best CS2007 "extension" (csmodule, task, provider, etc.) Prizes include a copy of his new Professional Community Server book.
- A great tip from Dan Bartels on how to use the censorship feature to create relative urls in posts. One of those "brilliant in its simplicity" ideas.
- As we near CS2007 RTM Day, a few site template resources for you to consider when deciding on your new site theme.
- A new DBVT series offering: CS2007 Cool. Here's a ditty on the new Controls Section in the web.config making it unnecessary to declare controls in .ASPX and .MASTER pages.
- Don't forget about the CS2007 capability to import and export themes, as I describe when updating a production site from development. I almost forgot!
forum bits
- One of the things that demonstrate how the CS Core Dev Team has got their act together, Jose Lema confirms that all Single Sign-On and Commercial Add-ons will be ready for purchase and download when CS2007 is released.
- Fix for "Unable to cast object of type 'System.DBNull' to type 'System.String'." Forum description field empty for rue25 and for ptorticill it was a null cs_sections description field.
- Ben Kingsley with a description of the CS Theming New Day dawning in how he tied a custom .ASPX page into the CS Master Themed Page model.
- A fun CS2007 forum thread with Unrelated dynamically limiting a Forums Grouplist. "My god this was simple!" Unrelated says, then thanks Ben Tiedt four times (3 times is enough, man.) Then Unrelated asks the real question, "Where will I earn money now as my skills start to be obsolete??" Too funny, U-man!
- I don't plan on upgrading to Vista any time soon, but for the more adventurous of you here are two useful threads on setting up CS on Vista. And the second.
- I channelled Bill Bosacker to answer a Null Reference Exception when accessing the Control Panel after the user edited the name of the Sample Weblog. Whoa. Bill Bosacker is still here! HE'S WATCHING ME!!!!
- Smartypants George Capnias beat me to providing my pent-up, dazzling insights on how to use tags to group 10,000 blogs. Of course, it made me feel good to know I was thinking the same as George about this, or anything for that matter. That guy's good.
- George Capnias reminds us of the cure for the common multi-file attachment syndrome: the .ZIP file.
- A five-star CS Bit here: Ben Tiedt explains how to create a custom theme in CS2007 that does not support the "Theme Configuration" page as well as how to add or modify dynamic configuration options. With additional info on the roles of the theme.config and DynamicStyle.aspx files.
- A great post from last July by LPH on his hack to use different default themes on a multiple virtual Community Server site.
- An Email Checklist and troubleshooting guide, mostly stolen from (who else) The Wizard.