After having just installed Community Server 2.0 beta 2, beta 3 comes out.  Since I was blocking on some bugs in beta 2, I was definitely going to be annoyed if I had had to wait much longer to continue setting up my site.  So I’m quite pleased by this turn of events.

The upgrade process, which involved running some sql scripts, completely did not work for me.  To be fair, I might have messed that up since I was learning a whole bunch of other things about the way my hosting provider does things.

However, it was all cool since I hadn’t overly tweaked the old site.  I ended up manually clearing out the database on my host and just reinstalling everything.

First thing I noticed.  Logging in via Internet Explorer for me *still* does not work.  I was suspicious as to how such a huge bug could make it through a beta, so I checked logging in from another machine.  That worked.  So it seems something about my specific configuration is causing the problem.  That is a little strange since, to my knowledge, I haven’t installed anything that would affect Internet Explorer.

Anonymous posting now works, although it’s somewhat broken in that enabling this feature at the per blog level appears to do nothing unless you allow it site wide.  Also, CAPTCHA filters to filter blog spam are still not included. Grr.

While we’re talking about tweaking various options, I would like to mention Community Server violates my own personal interface rule of not showing users options that don’t apply right now because you have some other option set a different way.  If the option doesn’t mean anything, then don’t show it, or disable it.  Programmers will frequently shortcut this because *they* know what settings need to be turned off or on and writing hiding code is tedious. But this ends up being hell on the user.

However, overall, things are working better with beta 3 and there have been some significant feature reworks.  I was very pleased to see the addition of an articles feature.  Articles are something quite different from a blog posting…it’s content you feel people might learn something from no matter what day they end up reading it.  Categorizing it by a date doesn’t really make that much sense.  So having this new feature is very welcome.

Since I only really intend to make heavy use of the blog and articles feature, with a dash of customized navigation and pages, I feel pretty comfortable going live with all this once I tweak the links up top a bit more.  I’m currently disabling the files and photos sections since I can’t imagine I’ll be adding much to those.  I disabled the forums since I don’t think I’ll be having a ton of people discussing much on this site just yet.  Basically, I’m just disabling links where there’s nothing useful to look at anyway.  I’ll be focusing on the blog for the moment.