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The technical depth of this post is about as lightweight as it can be, but the subject is interesting because it represents a new level of controlling page layout with JQuery.  The use of "CSS inadequacies" in the post subject is a little misleading, as I'm also considering the inadequacies of the developer's CSS chops.  That would be me. The situation was that I was placing a paging control at the right-side of a page. Everything was jake until the last page when the...

This Community Server mod was too much fun not to blog about. Blog Post Comments as Customer Reviews. We all know that users can rate a post, but displaying an individual star rating per "comment" is not something you see every day. This is what we're talking about. Here's the skinny on converting comments into customer reviews. The rating widget used in the comment form is the Ajax Toolkit Rating Control. Custom WeblogPostCommentForm coolness was in adding the AjaxControlToolkit...

I had to add this fix for a new Community Server site launch this fine Super Bowl Sunday so I thought I might as well blog about it. It's also an important issue when using Community Server Single Sign-On. Single Sign-On automatically creates new user accounts in a Community Server community with the primary membership stored in another application and data source, typically a parent ASPNET site. This works great, but emails are created as [username] + @localhost.com, or daveburke@localhost.com...

I needed to display a graphic under the user avatar on the first forum thread post today and found it to be an interesting little task. Essentially I took an approach similar to highlighting an author's comment in CS2008.5, which I always thought was pretty slick. You'll find that on …/hawaii/post.aspx. Look for IsAuthor(). For our purposes of displaying a graphic in the first forum thread post under the user avatar, we add a Conditional Content control with a custom IsFirstPost() method...

I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be announcing new releases of my Drive CodeSmith template library to generate custom code for Sueetie, but while I’m still doing a lot of Community Server stuff I will continue to release updates to Drive for CS development. Version 1.0.4 has support for creating Chameleon SubForms. I also made a number of modifications to the Form templates to reduce keystrokes. Drive is available at http://driveframework.com . Template updates - Removed SourceTable requirement...

This is one of those monkey-on-my-back posts that I need to write before we can get back to regularly scheduled dbvt.com programming. I've been using the Drive code generation templates more and more. I've been adding new templates to the library as well, releasing v1.0.3 over the weekend. The new release includes a new template that creates a Community Server Module. CSModules are functions that are triggered by Community Server global events, like when a new user is created or post updated...

I inadvertently blogged about this new CS2008.5 SP1 feature last week after encountering an error using the post editor's Insert Media selector. As I described in that post, the fix was adding theme.config information to support the new media handling properties. This function should probably fall in the category of "it's the small things...", but it can be very useful in managing the display of images on your community site. There's a lot of intelligence behind the scenes in...

Overall a good week was had by all. Enjoyed some new client contacts, both Community Server and non-CS. I'll talk about the client contacts first. Interestingly, both CS gigs involved upgrades from CS2008 to CS2008.5, and both sites were based on my favorite theme, Lean and Green. This theme, of course, no longer exists in CS2008.5, adding some additional overhead to the projects. One of the companies told me how they were already steamed about the CS2008.5 license increase (surprise), so the...

I updated five Community Server 2008.5 sites to SP1 this morning and everything went pretty smoothly. Fortunately I'd done it a bunch of times before. I did encounter a weird "Fix for given key not present in the dictionary error" when I tested the editor's Insert Media function on a custom blog theme. The popup window displayed the Oops-masked "Fix for given key not present" exception and not the insert media form. I've come to like using that little widget, so I...

I'm excited to announce the release of Drive, a Rapid Development Framework for Community Server. You can learn more about Drive and download the framework at DriveFramework.com. "Rapid Development Framework for Community Server" is a rather high fallutin' description, I know, so what exactly is Drive? Drive is a collection of CodeSmith Templates I created over the last two years doing Freelance Community Server Development. I felt the templates were at a point of completeness that...

Interesting experience with Community Server background tasks today. In my CS-based Jobs Management Application I have a number of background tasks running all the time, one of which is a data import task that pulls in data from a number of Access databases. There's a description and screenpic on this post. This task normally takes only a few seconds to execute, but mid-morning the task began taking over 3 minutes! Without the background task monitoring I added to this process I never would have...

Configuring Community Server for a single blog has kicked my butt since 2003. (I'm going back an extra year because it kicked my butt in .Text, too.) I was configuring a new site for a single blog late last night--I thought Saturday Night Community Server geeking was a thing of the past, but I'm working on a special project I'll tell you more about soon--and found myself scanning communityserver.com and some of my client site configs for re-enlightenment. If you search the Community Server...