Dave Burke Writes about Community Server
Dave Burke has been blogging up a storm lately about Community Server. A list of all his CS related posts is here. And there's some really good ones too! (Not that all his posts aren't great...)
My favorite is .Text, CS::Blogs. A librarian wants syntactic accessibility. I missed his original post about "officially" renaming .Text to dotText, but I think that's a good idea (although I missed the boat a little there since it's already been replaced with CS). .Text is as hard to search and write about as .NET. And trying to create files or directories that start with .Text or .NET is just as painful. I've always resorted to using dotText and dotNet for files/directories, but for some reason never switched over completely. When creating the DotText-CS-Converter utility I used both forms interchangeably, which probably really drives those librarians nuts. =)
And like Dave said, I have yet to figure out what the official/correct/accepted name is for the Community Server components. Is it Community Server Blogs? Community Server::Blogs? CS::Blogs? The blogging software formerly known as dotText? I've seen all of those used, even by Telligent folks (ok, maybe not the last one).
Dave also talks about CS registration. What he's done on his site - seamlessly integrating DNN registration with dotText - is very slick. When I left my first comment on his blog a while back I didn't even notice that I was automatically a registered user until I saw "Kevin Harder | Logout" in the corner at one point. Very cool! I tried to integrate DotNetNuke and dotText and nGallery on my own site about a year ago, but never spent the time necessary to get it to the level that he has it. Then I decided to scrap the DNN piece of the puzzle since it was really too much for what I was using it for and a few simple asp.net pages worked better.
I'm not sure exactly what I want to do with registration on my site yet. When I first upgraded to Community Server I accidentally left registration open for a few days and a couple people actually registered, which was surprising. I changed the configuration to not allow registration for now, although I'm reconsidering that. I certainly don't want to require anyone to register, but it would probably be nice if it was available. Amazingly, after I upgraded to CS 1.0 I have not received a single piece of comment spam! On my dotText blog I was getting swamped with it the last couple months, and implemented a database filter to weed out the spam rather than using a captcha image. I'm not sure why exactly my new CS blog has been saved from the spammers, but I suspect it's because the URL/path has changed somewhat, or possibly a change in the comment UI. I'm sure the spammers will find me again soon, but it's nice not to have to worry about it again for the time being. Eventually I'll probably implement some form of content filtering rather than captcha for CS. I believe in punishing just those who spam rather than everyone by making them type those numbers and/or letters. And so far the spam I have gotten has been really obvious and easy to filter - like 30 embedded links to every drug or form of gambling known to man.
