rkuo.com

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.

So here I am, trying to set up my new personal website at http://www.rkuo.com. (Can you believe that domain wasn’t taken? Neither can I.) I had originally wanted to use dasBlog, primarily because several of the bloggers I read (Omar and Scott, for example) run the dasBlog project.

I set up dasBlog and all was good, except I realized that I didn’t want the home page of my site to be a blog.  Here’s where you run into issues…many software packages run well on their own, but try to build a cohesive site out of the parts and it’s almost impossible without writing your own code.  dasBlog is excellent, but I needed a little bit more.

Now another brief aside.  I could probably customize any of these packages to my liking with some effort.  But in general, I find that doing so causes more pain in the long run, because maintaining those customizations along side all the other improvements happening to some of these packages is a huge pain in the butt.

So next, after much searching, I settled on Community Server.  This does seem to be, on the surface, an excellent and highly integrated professional looking package with forum support, photo galleries, file uploads, blogging, and more.

I installed beta 2 of version 2.0.  Unfortunately, this required me to purchase an additional SQL Server package from my hosting provider.  Oh well, I’ll live if it gets the site working the way I want it.

I was pretty impressed, but I also ran into some huge issues while installing that haven’t been solved yet.  This is a beta so I suppose I can’t complain too much, but the site is sort of in limbo while I pray for beta 3 of Community Server 2.0 to release and solve my problems.

Here are the issues I ran into.

1. The site kept ripping the www off all the url’s.  So if you went to http://www.rkuo.com, you’d be shot to rkuo.com.  Apparenetly this is an option buried in a config file and by default, it rips the www off the url.  I changed it to put the www on all the url’s.  I guess this could be a personal preference thing, but I somehow think having the www on there is natural.

2. I can’t login to the site with Internet Explorer. I can with Firefox.  Wow, that’s a doozy. Big bug.

3. Anonymous comments to blogs can’t be enabled. Another big bug.  I don’t want visitors to have to sign up for an account on the site just to comment on a posting.

4. Blog spam CAPTCHA filters aren’t included. Obviously, I could do without blog spam and this is the only reliable way to do it in a somewhat user friendly manner.

5. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to edit the tab bar at the top to add my own custom links.  I eventually found out how (SiteUrls.config) but a UI for that would be nice.

6. I managed to hang Firefox a couple of times while tooling around the site.  To be fair, I think this is a Firefox bug. =)

7. Seems a bit slow.

What’s good about Community Server

1. Tons of options and features.

2. Very professional default look and feel.

3. Ability to edit the front page inline via some sort of AJAX control. Neat.

4. Several fully integrated modules and a good level of abstraction that mostly allows me to customize what I want to if I look hard enough.  Modifiying the tab bar, removing forums, galleries, and file uploads for now, moderation settings, etc.  There’s a nice amount of detail in the whole package that

5. A nice web installation wizard for those of us who don’t own the machines we’re hosting our sites on.

I have to say overall I’m pretty pleased with the packaged potential that Community Server  2.0 provides, but there are some big bugs in beta 2 that need to be resolved before I can go full steam ahead on this site.