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Community Server Quickly

Chapter 1. Introducing Community Server

In this chapter, we will provide a brief overview of Community Server and also examine the applications included with it. We will further explore the evolution of Community Server including a comparison with DotNetNuke (DNN). Towards the end of the chapter, we will discuss the various editions and licensing options available for Community Server and also provide a sneak preview of some of the key features of upcoming Community Server 3.0.

What is Community Server?

Community Server (CS) is a web-based application completely built with Microsoft's .NET Framework. It is rendered on the browser as an aspx file. Community Server is currently serving millions of websites across the World Wide Web.

Note

aspx is the standard extension for web pages developed using ASP.NET.

Note

The official website of Community Server is http://www.communityserver.org

Community Server provides a facility to create and manage applications such as blogs, forums, photo galleries, file galleries, reader, and roller from within a single interface. They can be customized as per your requirements.

Note

Community Server uses a single registration system so you only need to register once to work with all applications provided by it.

You can choose which application is to be displayed on the home page by clicking on the Applications link under the Settings section by selecting the Administration link on the Dashboard. For instance, you can enable blogs and forums and disable other applications, so that your end users will be able to access only blogs and forums from the site. In the same way, you can enable or disable other applications depending upon your requirements. Let us examine each one of the applications included within Community Server in detail.

Blog

A blog or a weblog is an online diary. It can be maintained either daily, weekly, or monthly, as per the convenience of the user who manages it. The first blog was started in 1994 and the term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. A blog could focus on a particular subject such as technology, politics, local and international news, or could just contain random musings. Each post on a blog is classified as separate entry, and old blog posts are automatically archived and are available for reading at any time as long as the blog is active on the World Wide Web. A blog post comprises text, images, links to other blogs or web pages, and other media relevant to your blog. Moreover, people use blogs to post articles and related news, such as about their vacation trips, awards, and much more.

Community Server includes an application for the creation and administration of blogs as shown in the following screenshot:

We will examine more about the creation and management of blogs in Chapter 3.

Forums

A forum is a web-based application used for holding discussions regarding a wide range of topics relevant to the site. The evolution of forums dates back to 1995 when dial-up bulletin boards were popular. Basically, technology, computer games, and health are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of different topics such as for discussing the features of specific software, programming languages, upcoming events, user-groups discussions, and much more. You should note that a forum relates to a specific topic. Forums are also commonly referred to as message boards, discussion boards, discussion forums, discussion groups, or bulletin boards. Community Server includes an application for the creation, management, and administration of forums as shown in screenshot below:

We will examine more about the creation and management of forums in Chapter 4.

Photo Gallery

A gallery is a term used for storing some kind of information. A photo gallery, as the name suggests, stores photos. In olden days, they were stored as hard copy volumes spanned into several albums. With the evolution of technology, people started storing them on the World Wide Web. Community Server includes an application for the creation, management, and administration of a photo gallery as shown in the screenshot below:

File Gallery

A file gallery is similar to the photo gallery that we discussed above, with the difference that files are stored inside the file gallery instead of images as in the photo gallery. With Community Server, you can create a file gallery (see the screenshot overleaf) within minutes by following a few simple instructions.

We will examine more about the creation and management of galleries in Chapter 5.

Reader and Roller

The functionality of reader and roller has been completely overhauled in Community Server 2.1. You will notice significant changes in its working if you currently use any of the previous versions of Community Server.

Reader enables you to display the posts from different blogs using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. It shows the posts together with the relevant links in a grid as shown in the following screenshot. Each registered member of the site can manage his or her own reader provided that the necessary permissions are given by the site administrator.

Many people blog everyday with lots of interesting content on a wide range of topics. You can easily display all those external posts in your blog using Community Server and this functionality is termed roller. Roller makes use of RSS feeds but the contents are populated inside the relevant blog to which the feed has been added. This feature is popularly called Content Mirroring.

We will examine more about the creation and management of reader and roller in Chapter 6.

What is Community Server?

Note

aspx is the standard extension for web pages developed using ASP.NET.

Note

The official website of Community Server is http://www.communityserver.org

Note

Community Server uses a single registration system so you only need to register once to work with all applications provided by it.

Blog

Community Server includes an application for the creation and administration of blogs as shown in the following screenshot:

We will examine more about the creation and management of blogs in Chapter 3.

Forums

We will examine more about the creation and management of forums in Chapter 4.

Photo Gallery

File Gallery

We will examine more about the creation and management of galleries in Chapter 5.

Reader and Roller

We will examine more about the creation and management of reader and roller in Chapter 6.

The Evolution

Microsoft released the first version of an ASP.NET-based forum application (see screenshot below) in 2002. The application was initially developed by Scott Mitchell under the name WebForums.NET in 2001 and later sold to Microsoft with some additional features. It was first deployed at the official website of ASP.NET and can be downloaded from http://asp.net/Forums/Download/Default.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1.

Rob Howard and his team of developers were instrumental in the development and management of the application at Microsoft. The forum software is still being used by many websites and is available separately for download from the above- mentioned Uniform Resource Locator (URL) along with its complete source code.

Rob floated his own company named Telligent Systems in 2004. Telligent decided to develop a new forum application with rich features from scratch. This marked the beginning of Community Server. The development team decided to extend the traditional forum application to include blogs, photos, and galleries, which are relevant for developers, business owners, and hobbyists so that they will get all the required functionalities under a single umbrella. This will also avoid the pain of installing multiple applications for the creation and management of blogs, forums, and galleries.

Telligent initially launched a series of builds and finally ended up with 1.0. After getting the feedback from visitors, Telligent launched Community Server 1.1 including more features. With the release of each version, new features such as an improved user interface and the facility to easily customize the software were included. The launch of Community Server 2.0 has been greatly welcomed among developer circles, since it shipped with many more intuitive features than its earlier counterparts. One such notable feature is that of roller. With roller, you can display posts from the blogs maintained by other people.

Note

You can either install a fresh copy of Community Server or can upgrade from any of the earlier versions by following the instructions that are included with the installation package.

Telligent has made exciting improvements to version 2.1 of Community Server and it includes many powerful features including a new functionality called Tagging as shown in the screenshot below:

Moreover, all users can create and manage their own reader and the roller, as functionality has been tightly integrated with blogs.

Note

A complete list of all the features can be explored at: http://communityserver.org/i/features.aspx

Telligent has made exciting promises for the future builds of the product, which include an integrated Content Management System (CMS). We will explore the features included with the upcoming Community Server 3.0 at the end of this chapter.

A Comparison with DotNetNuke (DNN)

DotNetNuke, popularly called DNN is a robust ASP.NET based application used to build a complete website.

The official website of DotNetNuke can be accessed at http://www.dotnetnuke.com.

You will find sites powered with DotNetNuke all over the Web. One of the unique features of DotNetNuke is that users can build and customize their site very easily using administration tools provided by the application. Moreover, advanced developers can tweak the source codes and implement their own functionalities. One such classic example of advanced customization is DotNetPanel ( http://www.dotnetpanel.com). It is a powerful hosting control panel for managing Windows 2003 Servers.

DotNetNuke ships with a simple discussion board but it does not contain all the features of Community server. It is not possible to create a blog or photo and file galleries using DotNetNuke. On the other hand, Community Server is mainly used for the creation of blogs, forums, photo and file galleries, reader, and for showcasing external blogs using roller. You can make use of both DotNetNuke and Community Server to create high quality website by taking advantage of the rich features provided by both applications. You can easily deploy them on a single website under two different directories since the technology used by both DotNetNuke and Community Server is ASP.NET. You only require a server that supports ASP.NET and SQL Server 2000 or greater. While DotNetNuke is available free of cost without any restrictions, Community Server is available as both free and paid for versions. The free version of Community Server is called Express and it has certain restrictions for usage. You will learn more about the different editions in the next section of this chapter.

A complete discussion regarding DotNetNuke is beyond the scope of this book. You are advised to refer to the books Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 3.0 by Daniel N. Egan (ISBN 1‑904811‑27‑2) and Building Websites with VB.NET and DotNetNuke 4 by Daniel N. Egan, Michael A. Washington, and Steve Valenzula (ISBN 1‑904811‑99‑X) published by Packt Publishing.

Editions and Licensing

Community Server is available in five different editions: Express, Standard, Professional, Enterprise, and Hosted. Each edition is licensed on a per server basis and includes more features than its predecessors.

Note

The latest version of the licensing guide is available for download from the Files section at http://communityserver.org/.

It is possible to upgrade to the higher editions as and when necessary by going through the Upgrade guide available for download from the official website. A brief overview of each edition is given below.

Express

The Express edition is perfect for people who need to get a community up and running on a budget. It is free, but has restrictions on use. However, it can be deployed for commercial purposes.

Standard

The Standard edition is the entry-level commercial platform and unlocks some features not available in the Express edition.

Professional

The Professional edition is targeted at organizations that require many of the capabilities offered by Community Server for running a high-traffic community.

Enterprise

The Enterprise edition unleashes the full potential of Community Server and has been designed for organizations that require all of the capabilities found in Community Server.

Hosted

The Hosted edition enables you to create a professional web community within a few minutes without any need to download Community Server separately. It doesn't require any setup or configuration. The hosted edition is available in three different plans—Standard, Plus, and Platinum. You need to purchase any one of these plans by visiting https://www.communityserver.com/. You will be provided with a special URL in the format http://Domain.communityserver.com, where Domain stands for the name that you gave at the time of registration.

The required disk space and the monthly bandwidth will be provided by Telligent from its servers. This edition is mainly suitable for non-technical people or organizations that want to get a basic Community Server site up and running as quickly as possible without any major effort. Over the coming months Telligent is planning to roll out a number of new capabilities such as integrated email, new themes, as well as a potential free ad-enabled version.

The table given below lists the features included with each edition and also the cost for obtaining each server license:

	Express	Standard	Professional	Enterprise
Web Sites per server	Unlimited	1	10	Unlimited
Users per license	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Forums per license	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Blogs per license	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Photos per license	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Files per site	50	500	Unlimited	Unlimited
RSS Reader (Users)	250	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Footer Customization	Not Permitted	Permitted	Permitted	Permitted
Spam Blocker	Included	Included	Included	Included
IP-Banning Add-on	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Member Points System	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Reports	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Web Farm Support	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Single sign-on Authentication Add-ons	No	No	1 Available	All Available
Email Gateway	No	No	25 License	100 License
Enterprise Search	No	Separate Add-on Available	Included	Included
NNTP News Gateway	No	Separate Add-on Available	Separate Add-on Available	100 License
FTP Gateway	No	Separate Add-on Available	Separate Add-on Available	100 License
Microsoft Exchange Connector	No	Separate Add-on Available	Separate Add-on Available	Included
Premier Support (Tier 1)	No	No	No	10 Hours
Peer-to-Peer Support (Through Forums)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Cost (US Dollars)	Free	$299	$1,499	$9,999

Note

You can purchase a license for the latest version of Community Server at: https://store.telligentsystems.com/

What's New in Community Server 3.0 (or Calypso)?

Telligent has already announced plans for the release of Community Server 3.0. The version has been code named as Calypso. It will be mainly targeted towards simplifying common tasks with intuitive wizards, improvement of user interfaces, and adding more help-oriented content. Moreover, Community Server 3.0 will only run on ASP.NET 2.0, unlike Community Server 2.0 which ran on both ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0.

The key features that are proposed to be included with Community Server 3.0 are listed overleaf.

Chameleon

This is a theme engine that will deliver a simpler way to create themes. It will also include features that will enable users to manage the look/feel of a theme via the Control Panel. The goals are to reduce the number of files involved in skinning a blog and to provide a streamlined non-technical set of tools for easily creating user interfaces.

Morpheus

This is a membership update tool, which will be integrated with the ASP.NET 2.0 membership store. This will allow easier integration with existing user bases and external storage of membership data.

Zion

This is a new centralized file storage system, which will provide more consistent and extensible support for files and attachments in Community Server. In addition, the update to blogs will allow for better image/file support on a per-post basis.

Tallyman

It is the next version of the mail gateway, which will enable anyone, anywhere, including shared hosting and smaller sites, to leverage integrated email and mail list functionality within Community Server.

Telligent is planning to add one more module to Community Server 3.0, which is code-named Mystique. In addition to the above set of new features, Community Server 3.0 also includes an integrated CMS, which will provide knowledge management, content management, and case management functionalities. At the time of writing this book, Calypso is slated for release during the first quarter of 2007.

Key benefits

Get Community Server Express Edition set up and running fast

Learn to manage blogs, users, forums, and file and photo galleries

How to customize, market, and monetize your site

Description

Community Server is Telligent System's award-winning solution for quickly and easily enabling online communities. It includes a suite of integrated applications, such as blogs, discussion forums, photo sharing, file sharing, email lists, newsgroups, and more, which together can help you create your community presence. Community Server is the trusted solution for many organizations ranging from Microsoft and Dell to Conde Nast and Match.com, and powers massive communities like the Microsoft ASP.NET forums (www.asp.net/forums) and the XBOX forums (forums.xbox.com). You can learn more about Community Server, and see it in action, at http://www.communityserver.org. Written in a clear and concise manner, this book will guide you through the installation, administration, customization, and deployment of a Community Server solution. With the help of this book you will be able to start using your Community Server site within minutes of its installation. The book kicks off with a brief overview of Community Server, its various editions and licensing options, and installation procedures and then delves deep into the creation and management of blogs, forums, photo galleries, file galleries, and more. The book also explores the different ways you can customize your Community Server site along with coverage of various add-ons and modules. You will also learn how to manage your Community Server license and other related settings. Towards the end, the book provides an overview of the various steps required to deploy Community Server to a hosting server.

Who is this book for?

This book is aimed at the Community Server administrator with a base level of technical competence and confidence, but no prior sysadmin or developer experience or knowledge. No knowledge of ASP.NET programming is required for using this book. What is essential is your own passion for your target community and your desire to provide the best platform possible to that audience.

What you will learn

An overview of Community Server, and the various editions and licensing options

Installing Community Server

Creating and managing blogs and forums

Creating and managing photo and file galleries

Using the Reader and Roller functionality to collect and display RSS feeds

Managing users and roles, and working with user profiles

Monetizing your Community Server site by adding paid advertisements

Customizing Community server, applying themes, and using add-ons

Configuring RSS, Date, Time, and Email settings

Understanding Community Server Reports

Deploying Community Server

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Instant access to your digital copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

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A. Nielsen Mar 28, 2007

The Community Server platform is an out-of-the-box server software product that makes it possible to create online communities quickly.The book, Community Server Quickly, helps the system administrator or webmaster that is new to this product, to get a quick start. It must be noted that the book focuses on the 2.1 version of the server. The 3.0 version is at the moment of this review in beta 2, and the book features a small chapter on this release.The first section is a good introduction to what community server is. It presents the five main functionalities: Blog, forums, photo galleries, file galleries and reader/roller.Next it explains in detail how to install the server followed by a very detailed description of the five functionalities. I don't think there is a feature in Community Server that isn't described in this book.The next three chapters is about the administration of users and customizing and setting up the server. This is all described in relation to what the out of-the-box product is capable of.Last the book goes into the more advanced features of Community Server as reporting, ads, spam blocker, URL redirects etc. This is not need-to-know knowledge for everyone that works with the server, but shows that this book describes what Community Server can do from A to Z.I think it is a good book for new admins and developers that need an overview of what features the product contains. If you have already worked a lot with Community Server and wants to develop against it, this is not the book for you. Overall its a well-written book for webmasters or non-technical people that want insight in the wonders of CS.

Amazon Verified review

J. Capka Jan 30, 2007

The majority of this book is dedicated to discussing the various features present in Community Server. The approach is very hands on and uses a "how to" approach in discussing the features. The instructions are detailed enough such that the reader does not have to be a seasoned IT professional in order to make use of the product.The authors introduce each feature from a functional perspective before documenting how to use it. This is great for any users that may be familiar with one feature such as blogs but may not know what the other features of Community Server are for.The book also deals with practical issues that will be of interest to many Community Server administrators. These are issues of licensing, hosting options and a comparison with similar products.A small portion of this book discusses customization of Community Server, but it is only a brief introduction and is clearly not the focus of the book.This book is ideal for anyone that needs learn what Community Server has to offer and how to get it up and running. If Community Server came with a printed user's manual, this would be it.

Diane Cipollo Mar 27, 2007

The Community Server by Telligent System is a suite of applications for running an online community. It includes a blog, a forum, and photo and file sharing galleries. This book by Anand Narayanaswamy will help you install, customize, license and administer your very own online community with Community Server Express Edition. The author walks you through everything you need to do to get up and running.He begins by helping you choose the version of Community Server that is best for your needs. Then he walks you through downloading and installing the application on your development machine. He explains the control panel and how to set up the program's options.Next, you work on the Community Server's blog application. Narayanaswamy covers how to set up a sample blog. You will learn how to register and manage users to the blog and how to perform other administrative tasks. A discussion forum is one way to keep visitors returning to your community site. The author shows you how to start up a sample forum, how to set up multiple forum groups and how to manage the forum on a daily basis. Next, he does the same by showing you how to set up and manage the sample photo and file sharing applications. Finally, he helps you work with RSS to track content from other blogs.Now that you have your Community Server site set up, the author walks you through the general management tasks such as registering and managing members, password protection, cookie settings, and working with member profiles and avatars. He also covers IP tracking, email setup and other administrative duties. Next he shows you how to work with blog and forum activity reports, how to manage your license, how to set up and maintain word filters and spam blockers. He also shows you how to set up RSS to get the word out about your new community site.Community Server is a theme and modular based suite of applications. Narayanaswamy helps you customize your community site by changing the look and feel of the themes and customizing the modules to meet your specific needs. Finally, you are ready to find a server and go interact with your community.Anand Narayanaswamy is an independent consultant and runs NetAns Technologies. He is also a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Visual C#. He has worked as a Technical Editor for several publishers.

R. Reszler Dec 28, 2006

If you are a Community Server site admin, owner or even a user then this is the book for you!Written in very easy to understand sections that covers everything from the installation and hosting all the way to using and customizing your Community Server site, includes many screen shots, tips and warnings along the way.This book will get you up to speed fast with Community Server and answer almost any question and is written in a non technical manner that everyone will be able to understand and will make Community Server much more accessible.

Joseph Guadagno Feb 23, 2008

This book covers all of the basic functionality of the Community Server product from Telligent. Chapter 1 gives you a background of the product. Chapter 2 tells you what is required to use the product and how to get a copy of it. The rest of the chapters dive into the detail on the individual features of Community Server, like blogging, forums, RSS feeds, user management and more.The author of the book was very diligent to capture every and explain the many configuration options for Community Server. This makes the book a worthwhile purchase for anyone who wants to implement Community Server.

Community Server Quickly: A Concise and Practical Guide to Installation, Administration, and Customization

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