Community Server on my mind

Correction of one of my old posts

Previously on J-O Erikssons blog: A long, long time ago. At least in Internet Time. At J-O Eriksson's old blog there was an article about a solution to handle sending Newsletters to your Community Server users with the help of CS Roles . As time went Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

How to learn where your users click

Implementing a more clear menu, like I did the other day, and do other changes to you blog, might be of no meaning at all if you're not aware of how/if they are used. Assuming your blog is for you readers, and not just a personal journal for yourself, Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

The Secrets of CSModules

Listen to this article Whether you are a developer, or a Community Server admin that haven't got much experience of .NET Development, I believe you should benefit from this article. This article gives you an overview of what CSModules are, how can you Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Videos on the CS Home Page

After writing the article " CSModule for MSN SoapBox " I got a question on how to put up a Soapbox video on the Home Page of Community Server . And since the last 2 articles has been about Soapbox and CS, why not have one more? Tell me if it's Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Go directly to site admin and skip the dashboard

This might be a small thing for most people, but I find it somewhat irritating to end up at the dashboard each time I want to go to the Site Administration. I click the Control Panel button, and the Dashboard appears, and I always click on Administration Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Changing order of your forums

This is an old question I've seen asked many times, all the way back to the ASP .NET Forums time. At that time you had to manually go into the SQL Database and change the values of the SortOrder field. I think at sometime there was an up and down Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Tranquilize your blog and inbox

Many of us in the Community Server Land have been talking about blog spam comments, spam rules etc the last weeks. One thing left out, at least from my own blog, is an issue that comes with these spam huntings, and that I got asked in the comments of Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Deleting Auto-Deleted Spam comments

The last week, many of us have seen a large increase of spam comments sent to our Community Server blogs. That has given us the opportunity to learn how CS Spam rules work, and to see what a great job they do if configured correctly. And you might also Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Add/Remove buttons from the Paperclip Theme

If you run your blog at the root as I do, you might want to get better use of the toolbar of the blog. In my case I use a modified version of the Paperclip theme. As you can see in the picture above, I have modified the toolbar by adding 2 buttons (Media Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

My blog has been Qgyenified

As Thomas Freudenberg said yesterday there are a lot of add-ons for Community Server. And many of them are already working on CS 2.1. I just realized I am running 3 of Ken Robertson's modules on my own blog, and I think they are really useful. Qgyen.Lightbox Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Screencast: CS Reports in Excel 2007

Ok, I'll admit it! What I am going to show you in today's screencast, works well in earlier versions of Excel as well. But the title looks more cool if I write Excel 2007. And that's what I am using in the screencast as well. The topic is admin reports. Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Separating moderation on a forum level

Did you ever want to have different moderators for different forums in Community Server ? It is possible, but not very straight forward as checking a check-box.....yet anyway. During the last couple of days, I followed part of a thread at CS.org, where Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

How I do Community Server Upgrades

I know, most of you have done this a million times, and I am not trying to teach anyone that already knows with this article. I just wanted to write some pretty good practices on how I do it after learning from some mistakes in the past. Some of the mistakes Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Mark as not on vacation anymore

So I am back after a short vacation. Well actually my vacation starts today. Vacation from my regular work that is. But last week I had some things that I needed to attend to that took most of my time, so I decided to take a week off of blogging. I haven't Read More... If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!

Screencast: Batch import photos into a gallery

In today's screencast I want to show you another, in the line of, what I call "hidden" features of Community Server. Namely the import function in a photo gallery. IMO it's not located in a place where you might expect it to be. You will find it under the 'Advanced Photo Settings' in the control panel of a gallery. I believe it should go under Common Tasks and/or Manage Content. It would be more logical, and easier to find.

Although the screencast is recorded with CS 2.1 Beta 1, this function was also in CS 2.0 (at the same location). I believe this is a feature that comes all the way from the preceding nGallery application, it was present there as well in very similar appearence.

So what can you do with it? Well, you can upload a batch of photos (for example via FTP) to your web, into the folder created for the gallery you want to import pictures to. Then, as you can see in the screenshot above, you can import them either to the root of the gallery, or to a sub gallery. This is of course much faster than uploading the pictures one by one if you have a lot of pictures to upload at once.

The import job is a so called CSJob in CS. It is within the same thread as most other jobs by default, and it's interval is by default set to 15 minutes. So have patience if your photos doesn't show up at once after you've pressed import. The interval can be changed, but be aware of the side effects on other jobs and your site's performance if you do that.

OK, enough talk, let's roll up, roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour, step right this way!

Watch the screencast (Flash, opens in a new window)

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