blog bits
- Scott Watermasysk's been doing a really good job pointing out the top Community Server news on the Community Server Daily News blog. If Scott thinks something's important enough to post on the DN, then we all need to listen up. Here's the Daily News RSS Url. One of the useful infobits Scott shares in his Daily News posts I think is what's new in the Community Server Knowledge Base.
- Check out these great CS2007 add-ons and modules from Core Dev Wyatt Preul. 1) GoogleBase module - cross-posts a blog post to Google Base with a link back to your original post. 2) AutoTag Module, designed especially for mirrored feeds, to specify tags based on rules, with regex support, 3) a RerunCommentUpdate taks (I'm a little fuzzy on what this one does), and 4) a CommunityServerView.aspx page that shows the merged xml of the cs.config and cs_override.config files.
- CS MVP Thomas Freudenberg re-releases his CoComment CS2007 Control--thanks to the advice of ScottW--as a Control Adapter. Thomas includes a ScottGu link for more information about Control Adapters if you're interested. Very cool stuff!
- Unless you've been living under a rock for the last two days (or like me, on vacation), you've heard about the new Community Server 2007 Theming Extravaganza Contest. Best Theme Export and Best Damn Theme (ha!), with the biggest prizes ever offered before, including a new MacBook for 1st place and a new XBox 360 for 2nd place. The prizes are incredible, but I think what's even more important to consider in entering this contest would be the street cred you'd instantly gain as winner of this contest. So the fat guy behind the desk describes the project and says, "Can you theme Community Server, boy?" "Can I theme Community Server? I won the CS2007 Theming Extravaganza Contest, Homer. And by the way, my rates just went up $20 an hour."
- Scott Mitchell has begun the process of upgrading his .Text blogs to Community Server, starting with his "Scott on Life" blog. This is big news in my book since I've always felt that Scott was (and is!) one of the elite .NET developers in the business. I've been reading his "Scott on Writing" blog since 2003 and soon me and his 3600 other readers will be reading a CS2007 blog.
- Announcing the best Community Server CAPTCHA EVER! Brendan Tompkins places the Captcha Mantle squarely atop his muscle-strewn shoulders with a new CS2007 CAPTCHA control. It's much better than mine. Not only does it support blog comments and the contact form like mine did, but photo and file comments and the registration form, too. What else that's extremely cool about Brendan's add-on is that it is implemented as a Control Adapter, something Thomas Freudenberg taught us with his updated CoComment add-on. Congrats and thanks to Brendan for keeping us CAPTCHA Luddites in the pink. Postscript one: I had trouble extracting the file with WinRar, but none whatsoever with WinZip. Postscript two: if you don't want Brendan Tompkins to rule with world with his hot CS2007 CAPTCHA Control, the CAPTCHA vacuum also drew Jose Fco Bonnin into its vortex who released a CS2007 CAPTCHA as well.
- Bill Bosacker is a CS2007 blogging machine, with his latest offerings being a code snippet to list moderated users and an add-on to support BBCode in blogs.
- A very slick Visual Studio 2005 Plugin by Zeddy Iskandar to copy-paste C# code into a Community Server blog. See Zeddy's screenshots. I hope he does more in Community Server, cause I sure like saying "Zeddy."
- A nifty quirk exploitation from James Shaw on how to give a post any URL by modifying CreateEditBlogPost.ascx. And yes, LinkTo name is AuthorURL as James says, not PostURL. I was confused, but James straightened me out. I forgot the prime directive that when in doubt, just do what James says.
- Community Server 2.1 Service Pack 3 was released last week, but was somehow overlooked as the meaty news event it is with everything else going on. COMMUNITY SERVER CS 2.1 SP3 IS AVAILABLE!!! There, that oughta do it.
forum bits