Community Server on my mind

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!

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!

A GUI for installing CS Modules

I don't know how I managed to miss this Add-in for Community Server . Wyatt Preul created an Community Server Add-in with a management page for installing CS Modules, and released it back in June this year as far as I can see. Basically it's a 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!

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!

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!

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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Create a new CS skin in 5 minutes

Yes, you can do that! Provided that you only want to change the color schema and one or 2 pictures referenced in the CSS files. I did a few skins last week, one of them cause I wanted it for a site of mine, the others just because I could, and wanted to test out if it really was as easy as I thought it could be. So having said that, you might realize that the first skin I did did not take 5 minutes to complete, it took a lot longer. But when all things were in place and I understood how to do it, it was a piece of cake. So here I thought I tell you how I did it, so you also could create your own skin in no time.

One of the things I had to do, which took some time, was to figure out which colors that was used in the original CS skin. If you count all colors that are made with the help of color codes (and not pictures) there are actually just 8 colors. Or maybe I should say 7 colors. Two of the colors are almost identical to the eye, but have have a slightly different color code, which is probably a mistake.

The original color codes are:

As you can see color 2 and 8 are almost identical.

So what I thought was, if I want to do a new skin, all I have to do is create a new row in the table above, and choose similar colors in for example blue. I did the table above in Microsoft Expression Web Designer (HTML Editor) so that I easily could get the color codes as well from the HTML code. But use any HTML editor should work.

So let's add a row to the table above, with a different color scheme:

Now when I have my new color codes, all I have to do is a search replace on the CSS files. I could open them one by one in Notepad and search replace 8 strings one by one. And that's what I did the first time. But then I realized there's Visual Studio 2005 with search/replace in files. So I opened that feature, pointed it to the /Themes/default/style folder, and went through the 8 colors to replace them. You might want to do this on a copy of the default skin.

That's all! Skin number 2 that I did, couldn't have taken more than 5 minutes to do. Oh, that's right. In one of the skin I did a new GIF for the menu bar,and edited the CommonTabBar class in Common.css to point to that GIF instead. The picture was a screenshot from Outlooks toolbar (made it 32 in height and 1 in width).

Here's a pic of the result:

You can see 2 more examples of skins over at CSMVPs.com in the photo gallery. I love the pink theme!! ;-)

I'll list the original color codes here as well in case you want to copy them:

#BBDE79,#D2E6BD, #99AA99, #698D73, #EFF7E0, #91723F, #667766, #e2eecd

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Views statistics of your blog

Did you ever wonder what the statistics of views for your blog posts really mean?

Well, I did, and I posted a question about it in the forums of CS.org. After a while, I got a good explanation from Kevin Harder (Community Server Team Member). He explained it liked this:

"Generally speaking, "Views" is the number of times somone viewed a post on the web via a browser, and "AggViews" is the number of times someone viewed the post via the RSS and Atom feeds.

More specifically, the web view count is only updated in the EntryView control.  This is displayed when you are viewing a single post.  If you are viewing a list of posts, such as on the blog home page, the view counts of the posts are not updated.

The AggViews works by embedding an "AggBug" invisible image into each post in the RSS/Atom feeds.  When someone views the posts in a feed reader that allows images, the image pionts back to a handler on your CS site that updates the AggView count for that post."

Adding to that, if you look at the number of views for each post, you can see that it is a link. The link leads you to a page which shows referrals to that particluar post. That page also provides you with a drop down box so you can look at referrals to other posts you have made.

 

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CS2: Skinning: Change the title image of your blog without access to the CSS file

I'd never have thought I'd write an article about skinning. I am not very good at CSS. But sometimes you learn when you have to, although what I'll talk about in this article is in no way anything complicated.

In Community Server you know you can change the skin of your blog to a skin that's installed at the CS site where the blog is. But sometimes you might want to change how that skin looks, even if most of it looks really good. If you're at for example weblogs.asp.net or some other CS hosted blog site, you can't do that since you don't have access to the files of the skin. But CS has a workaround for that called CSS Overrides. With that function, as you can hear from the name, you can override what's in the original stylesheet for the skin you are using. So of course, you need some way to figure out what the name of the CSS classes are that you want to modify. But mostly, the skins are available to download for free in some way.

In my case I wanted to chage the header picture for the Paperclip theme. I looked in the CSS file for it and found the class was named 'masthead' with that information I could change the header picture by overriding the masthead class's background-image as shown in the picture below.

Now it's good if your new image has about the same dimensions as the original one, at least in width.

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CS2: Modifying José Lemas modifications of videos.aspx

In June I talked about having a videogallery in Community Server. I referenced an article by José Lema where he talks about the videos.aspx and how to modify that file to get a more Google-like videgallery.

Today I implemented a videolibrary on my Community Server Sweden site. But since the videos/screencasts I do is 800 x 600 they don't fit in the new CS 2.1 skin within a forums post (José's modification links to the respective forums post for each video). The video gets truncated. So what I wanted to do, was to instead link directly to the video/screencast file itself, and also to open the video in a new window. Also I wanted to create a new menu button for my video gallery, that also became the selected button when I went to that page.

So what I did, was to first get the videos.aspx the way I wanted. To do that I modified José's modification in the following ways. (Red text shows the parts I changed)

First, change the row:

<a href="<%# Globals.GetSiteUrls().Post((int)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "PostID")) %> "><img src="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoImageUrl") %>" width="200" height="150" border="0" /></a>

to

<a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoUrl") %>" target="_new"><img src="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoImageUrl") %>" width="200" height="150" border="0" /></a>

Then change:

<a href="<%# Globals.GetSiteUrls().Post((int)DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "PostID")) %> "><%# Formatter.CheckStringLength(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Subject").ToString(), 35) %></a>

to

<a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "VideoUrl") %>" target="_new"><%# Formatter.CheckStringLength(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Subject").ToString(), 35) %></a>

That's it! Now a click on the video thumbnail or the video title in the video galleri will open the video in a new window.

As for the menu button, that was really easy. Just followed the instructions from Dave Burke's excellent article in the subject. The results can be seen in the picture below. Yes the site shows in a strange language......it's swedish.

 

Click the picture to view it in larger scale.

View the video gallery live!

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CS2: Screencast: Thread Status Tracking in Forums

In todays screencast I show you how to enable Thread Status Tracking in Community Server, and also enable it for a particular forum. Thread Status Tracking (TST) could be useful for i.e. a support forum where you want to be able to rapidly see which questions/issues are not yet solved and take action on those. Click on the picture below, or the link beneath it to watch the screencast.

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

Also, I promised in my monday post to talk about a solution that you could make with this function together with the features that the Email Gateway (EG) brings to Community Server Forums.

A simple support system on CS with Email enabled forums and Thread Status Tracking

Let's say you want to setup a customer support service for your customer. In some scenarios there could be reasons where you don't want the customers to see each others posts. They might be giving you some info about their environment under some NDA agreement etc. You could probably do some code to make users only see their own posts in the forum, but with the solution I am talking about you don't have to write a single line of code.

In the scenario I am describing, you might decide to enable on one hand an open support forum for everyone, and an e-mail support service for paying customers. So you set up an internal CS on your intranet, install EG, and configure a forum to recieve e-mails sent to support AT mydomainname.com. Since the paying customers are registered in someway, you have created and configured accounts (enabled notifications etc) for them in the support system.

The customers sends their support requests by e-mail, which ends up in the internal support forum as a post with a Thread Status 'Unresloved'. A technician replies in the forum to the post, which then gets sent to the customer by e-mail. The customer and support tech, continues their conversation in this way until the issue is solved.

After using this system for a while it becomes a knowledge base which the technicans can search for earlier answers to questions. If tagging is used they could also find similar issues easily by navigating by tags.

If I understand the Passive Mode of the forum mailing list, you have to enable that for the above to work, since you don't want to have all replies sent to everybody, just to the one that started the thread.

 

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