Dave Burke - Community Server Byte for February 26, 2007

Community Server Byte for February 26, 2007

blog bits

Ben Tiedt keeps us up-to-date on post Beta 1 changes in Cameleon Condition Controls, the Comparison Adjustment controls used with current-date-aware conditions such as highlighting recent posts and new users. Another cool new CS2007 capability to look forward to.
Keyvan Nayyeri with a new CS Dev Guide on new aspects of Community Server 2007. He touches on Morpheus, the new membership provider with the ability to share membership data between sites more easily, the new email system from Ken Robertson that among other features supports customizing emails, and .NET 2.0 support where ArrayLists can now be replaced with the generic List<> type.
An interesting review of Community Server from someone familiar with the php/mySQL world of community software but new to CS. 1) It can get expensive, 2) feels like a closed community for developers, 3) not a customary language, 4) forums a clone of vBulletin. "Understandably, they’ve invested a lot of time and money into building CS, but unless they offer more with the free version I can’t see it ever coming anywhere near the size of Wordpress. Such growth may not be one of their goals, so it’s tough to say whether or not that’ll ever happen."
Shahed Khan describes how he retrieved his Community Server admin ASPNET Membership password using queries and tokens. password salt and other ingredients. Excellent work, really. Another way would have been to change the hashed password to a cleartext password, change PasswordFormat to "0", and login. The most interesting thing about this incident if you read it is that Shahed was using WebHost4Life's plug-n-play CS add-on, and they wanted to charge him $19.95 to change his CS admin password. What in the heck were they going to do, I wonder?
J-O Eriksson shamed me twice in two days, correcting me gently but firmly for my Community Server ignorance in forum posts. I nuglified the most recent J-O lesson in describing how to set a user default date format with User Profile Default Values.
Nick Brown with the essential differences between CS 2.x and CS2007 in showing the Aggregated Post List on the site home page.
Nick Brown with a great tip on how to make CS 2007 XHTML 1.1 Compliant.

forum bits

Ben Tiedt on how to disable the HTML and Image buttons in TinyMCE. WTR follows up with a link to a TinyMCE Wiki with quite a lot of information on customizing TinyMCE.
Arranging TabbedPanes on one or multiple rows. Ben Tiedt says the TWC:TabbedPanes control will automatically re-arrange into multiple rows when necessary and that the feature can be disabled with the EnableResizing="false" property.
CS2007 Cooool. Wyatt Preul shows us how to display the User Avatar in CS2007.
Jose Lema with a protein-rich Morpheus nugget answering the question, "If we already have a web site utilizing the asp.net 2.0 membership features, will we be able to 'plug in' CS2007 and have it use our existing user schema?" Jose describes the new option in Morpheus of pointing CS to a "membership database," providing the steps to implement as well as the additional required stored procs to be added to the membership database. This post provides a good overall understanding of Morpheus capabilities. It also tells me that Morpheus is very close to being fully baked for CS2007 release.