Browse by Tags
All Tags »
CSForums
Do you have any forums posts that have been caught by a spam rule? Or do you have any forums posts that haven't been approved for other reasons? It's not easy to know unless you frequently visit your Control Panel -> Forums to Moderate . I have had
Read More...
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
Last Friday I posted about a new CSModule that I had just created for showing MSN SoapBox videos in Community Server . Inspired by Gary McPherson's YouTube CSModule which is included in the Alabaster CSModule Package, and by looking through the source
Read More...
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
Have you seen the New MSN SoapBox ? It's like MSN's answer to YouTube. You can upload your videos, comment rate etc videos. From what I've seen of it so far it seems a pretty cool site. And if it's a cool site, you need to be able to integrate it to a
Read More...
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
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!
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!
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!
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!
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
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.
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
A CSModule that I've used myself on a couple of sites, but haven't seen much written about is Ken Robertson's CSModule implementation of the Lightbox JS image overlay scripts.
This module enables you to insert thumbnails of your pictures in for example your blog posts by a specific text part. When viewing this thumbnail in a blog or a forum, and you click on it, it shows a larger image in the middle of the browser window, and the rest of the web page gets darker. I don't know if that's a good explanation for it, but let me instead show it with a screenshot:
You can also try it and se for yourself what it looks like here. When you've installed the CSModule, you just use the text part and give it the ID of a picture in your CS Photo gallery.
It would be cool to have a CSModule like this, that could show pictures from i.e. your Flickr account, and also to be able to determine what size it shows the expanded picture as.
Read more at Ken's blog
[UPDATE]
Hmm...after writing this post, I took a closer look at Ken's blog and it seems he implemented the Flickr thing a couple of days ago. :-) Really interesting! Need to try that when/if he releases it.
[/UPDATE]
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
Today on a topic that I haven't seen that much written on. There was a new whitepaper the other day on this topic, and there's been some posts about the E-mail Gateway (EG). But from what I have seen, mostly together with the blog by e-mail feature.
What I wanted to talk about in this post is what the EG brings to the Forums of Community Server.
First just a brief mention on how to e-mail enable a forum. After you correctly have installed the EG and installed the license for it, there is a new TAB in the forums settings called 'Mailing List'. In CS 2.0 you get there by Control Panel -> Administration -> Forums -> Forums -> Click on the forum name -> Choose the 'Mailing List' TAB.
On that TAB you should see this:
To enable e-mail for the forum click in 'Yes', provide a name for the mailing list which will show up in mails sent from that forum, and also type in an e-mail address that you want the forum to have. You can also set a Footer that will be sent in each e-mail coming from that forum. I won't go into the passive mode in this post. If you want to know more about that let me know.
After these actions your forum is e-mail enabled, and when you now go into that forum you will se an 'Email Available' image in the lower right of the forum page.
When you click that image (not the one above in this post if you tried that) it will take you to the E-mail Subscriptions page for that forum.
If you check the checkbox on that page, and then click on save, you will get all new posts in that forum to the e-mail address that you registered at the forum with.
But that's far from all. You can now also e-mail your posts to that forum, as long as you send the e-mails from your registered e-mail address to the address you created on the 'Mailing List' TAB above. For example you can start a new thread by just sending an e-mail. Or you can reply to an e-mail notification you got from that forum, and it will show up as an answer in the respective thread.
IMO, this is a a great feature of CS 2.0, on which you also could easily build upon for different purposes. On friday I will try to give you an example of a solution that could be made on top of this feature together with another CS feature without writing any code.
See there, I made a cliff hanger! Now you just have to read my post on friday, and you won't be able to sleep for the whole week ;-)
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
On wednesday I talked about post attachements, and referred to a post by Keyvan Nayyeri on how to do attachements programatically. Today I thought I'd talk about attaching a video to your forum posts, which can be played right in the post itself. It's not really attaching a video to a post, it's more like embedding a player which plays a video located at a different location.
Community Server got this built-in and out of the box. It looks something like this:
Sorry for the typo in the picture and in the screencast. Discovered it when I had finished it all. :-)
Watch the screencast! (Flash, opens in a new window)
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!
Today a topic that most of you already might know how to do. How to create a poll in Community Server 2.0. But still, evey now and then the question pops up in the forums. So I thought I'll do a post on it.
Another reason for doing this post, was to examine if I could post screencasts here at weblogs.asp.net in anyway, and also play around with making screencasts in my newly bought SnagIt application (will probably blog about SnagIt in a upcoming post, since it a great tool for screenshots and much more).
I did manage to embed a video in my blogpost here at weblogs.aspnet. I included an OBJECT tag and and an EMBED tag in the HTML of the post, and it worked fine. But the skin I am using cut off the movie in half, probably since it has a fixed width for the posts.
So for the moment I'll have to create a separate HTML page for publishing screencasts.
Watch the Polls in CS screencast (Flash movie).
Watch the Polls in CS screencast (WMV directly in your Mediaplayer).
If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to my feed via RSS or e-mail!