Community Server on my mind

CS 2007 New Feature: File Storage in blogs

One of the new features in Community Server 2007 is being able to store files on a per blog and/or a per site basis. This article gives you a walk through of how it is currently implemented in CS 2007 Beta 1.

I assume most of you have read about the new file storage capabilities (code name Zion) before, and many of you have probably also already tried it out. But for those that yet haven't had the time to take a look at this feature, I thought I'd give an walk through together with some screen shots to show what it looks like and what it does.

In CS 2007 you can store files on 2 levels (outside the scope of the File Galleries already present in CS 2.1). You can store files in a site wide storage, and you can store files in a storage for a specific blog. One advantage this gives you is that you don't have to create a separate CS File Folder and/or a Photo Gallery for each user or blog on your site. You give your user a blog, and the user gets a storage for blog pictures and files in the box.

Site File Storage

First let's take a look at the site file storage. If you go into Control Panel -> Administration -> Settings -> Manage Site Files, you'll see the following:

Click on image to see it in it's original size

You can upload new files, create new folders etc. In moment of writing this article I still haven't figured out where in the UI I can use these files. If I know the name of the file, and that it exists I can of course manually link to it in a post.

The physical storage for these files are in the root/SiteFiles/<ApplicationID> folder as you can see in the following image:

Click on image to see it in it's original size

Blog File Storage

The Blog File Storage are basically the same thing as the Site File Storage, but of course with the scope of one particular blog. You'll find it if you go to Control Panel -> Administration -> My Blogs.

 
Click on image to see it in it's original size

In the picture above, you can see 2 files and a folder, together with the option to upload new files. The physical storage here is within root/blogs/<name of the blog>.

Click on image to see it in it's original size

Maybe you recognize this as the directory every blog gets when created. Also in here you see the default.aspx for that particular blog. The default.aspx isn't shown to the blog user by default due some global Blog File Storage settings that I'll get back to a little later in this article.

So with all this in place for the Blog File Storage, when you are writing or editing a blog post in the Web UI, there's a 'Select A File'-button in the lower right of the edit page. The button brings up the following dialog:

Click on image to see it in it's original size

(Hey, who's that handsome guy in that picture above? )

As you can see, in this dialog box, you can select to insert a picture or a link to a file from the blogs File Storage. And also you can upload files directly from here.

Thinking as a hoster or site admin, you would probably ask yourself: How do I control this? Can the user upload as much as they want?

Telligent has thought of this, and given us a place to set some global settings for the Blog File Storage.

Click on image to see it in it's original size

Here you can see for example why the default.aspx file is not shown as mentioned earlier. You can add more files that you want to hide in a comma-separated list of file names. There is also a setting for Disk Space Quota per blog, a Maximum File size, and which file extensions to allow. This is great! It gives the hoster or site admin control of how much is uploaded, and to some extent what will be uploaded to each blogs File Storage.

Summary

This article has given you a walk through of the new File Storage features of Community Server 2007 beta 1. If you haven't already, jump over to communityserver.org and download the new beta and try this out on your own. One of the downloads is a demo version that requires no installation, you just need a SQL Express on the machine where you run it. Have fun!