I was obviously excited when Rob Howard announced the availability of CS 1.0 source a couple of days ago. Like a lot of people, I have been waiting for that day to come for a long time. Yesterday, Saturday, was Community Server Day for me with my girls off to Boston for the weekend, leaving me "alone with my work." Besides taking a couple of breaks to walk the dogs, stack some wood and re-watch last season's final episode of Deadwood, I was heads-down, balls-to-the-wall focused on setting up Community Server and migrating my blog and photo gallery from dotText and nGallery to CS from early morning until crash time.
Fourteen hours of CS nerding under my belt and I have to say that I am quite happy with dotText 0.95 and nGallery, thank you very much. Surprisingly, I just don't know if Community Server is in my future.
Okay, what's my beef then? No beef, really. Howard, Watermasysk, and the other Telligent .NET noteables have designed an application on which they are going to build a business, and I hope it will be a big success for them. They're thinking of their future, not their past, nor, I think, are they thinking about the geeks and soccer moms out there who happened to stumble onto their dotText, ASP.NET Forums, and nGallery efforts along the way. Community Server is a brand new commercially-focused product and designed for people to start anew with CS 1.0.
Here's
a screenshot of my blog migrated to Community Server on my office network. I tried using McLaws'
CSverter in several configurations and it hung like my Uncle Charlie at 7.8% of the way in. Forget it.
From the comments I've seen its one of those things that works for maybe 2 out of 10 people who use it. This tells us a couple of things but one thing for sure: migrating from dotText to CS 1.0 is a bitch. Not a priority for anyone involved in CS development, from all appearances thus far. After downloading my dotText and nGallery SQL databases from my provider, I migrated all posts, comments, and trackbacks. I stopped before getting to categories, views and aggregated counts, but I migrated enough to tell me what I needed to know to make a decision about CS. I used SQL scripting alone to migrate the essentials. Allowed null values in cs_posts ThreadID and ParentID fields, added an INT DotTextID field, and went from there.
I implemented the CS singlesite config and disabled forums, but CS took over my site anyway rather than functioning as a distinct application. I don't know how I feel about that. But the deal breaker was probably CS::Galleries, which doesn't support two key features that were in nGallery: 1) The ability to upload multiple photos, for starters. Say what???? And 2) in CS::Galleries you have two choices of where to store images: in a database in binary format or in file storage using XML data access. What happened to using SQL for image data and storing the images as files like my current nGallery configuration? Maybe that option will be available to paying customers only? Either way, someone brain farted on the way to Damascus on CS Galleries 1.0. So I decided to keep my old nGallery app and run it on the same site as CS. But that's just weird, makes things unnecessarily complicated, and seems to be something CS doesn't like, as it wants to muscle in on my nGallery application directory. I posted to CS::Forums and received a quick reply from Ken, but its an answer I don't like and doesn't increase my CS warm fuzzy count.
dotText will probably be in my future for a lot longer than I was anticipating. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the dotText Mod Community with CS source now available. I wonder how many fellow dotText developers will come to the same conclusions as I did, that Community Server is just not for them? Or will most say I'm full of crap and migrate to CS en masse? We'll see.
It's still very early, of course. I mean, the source has only been available for a couple of days. CSVerter notwithstanding there are really NO migration tools available out there. First impressions are still coming in. My first impressions, right or wrong, are now officially recorded here...in dotText 0.95.
Walked on a frozen Shelburne Bay today to check out what the ice fishermen were up to.