This book is organized into 12 chapters.
The first chapter provides a brief overview of Community
Server, the various versions, the feature set, evolution and a brief comparison
with DotNetNuke. This provides a good introduction to a newbie while serving as
a quick refresher for more experienced users. A more detailed description of
the differences between various versions of CS would be a good addition to
this chapter.
The second chapter describes how to obtain, setup and start
running Community Server. It discusses the various installation packages, the
installation procedure, how to configure the admin account and how to verify
whether the installation is working fine. A few more screenshots of the
installation procedure and a listing of the common error messages and their
causes (e.g. SQL Server does not exist) would be helpful to someone new to
installing .NET applications.
Chapter three describes creating, managing and modifying
blogs in Community Server. This chapter explains how to configure blogs in
considerable detail and takes the reader through creating blog groups and
blogs, adding posts and moderating comments.
The fourth chapter covers Forums and starts with a brief
history of Forums and how they were used. It then goes on to discuss how to
create a Forum, how to post to a forum, edit posts and delete posts. It also
discusses moderating posts, assigning tags to posts and managing forum
settings.
Chapter 5 discusses galleries. Community Server supports
both photo and file galleries and this chapter discusses both of these in
detail. The photo galleries section starts with adding gallery groups, adding
galleries to the groups, adding and navigating through photos, managing
comments, tags and albums. It also discusses customizing a photo gallery and
managing advanced Photo settings (watermarking, displaying properties of a
photo etc). It also explains how to import photos and how to syndicate photos.
Community server enables file sharing between community members. The various
features are discussed in the section about file galleries; follows a
similar track to that of photo galleries. Here, Anand explains how to create
folder groups, create and manage folders and uploading files. He also covers
managing comments, settings, how to access the file gallery and viewing the
download report.
Reader and Roller (in the specific context of
Community Server) are respectively, features used to aggregate and
display information from other blogs in a Community Server site. These
features, which simplify content aggregation and display, are discussed in
Chapter 6. In the section on reader, it discusses adding, agtgregating and
managing feeds and assigning permissions to the same. It also covers working
with the roller and managing the various settings in some detail.
Community Server has a robust User Management module and
this is discussed in the seventh chapter of the book. It
describes searching for users, using the quick lists and browsing
users, etc. It also discusses Creating and Deleting users, changing
passwords, managing roles account profiles, registration settings and Avatars.
Community Server is extensively customizable. Chapter 8
discusses the various customization options in Community Server like
customizing the home page, modifying themes (both using admin pages and
dynamically) working with Addons and working with Plugins. The Free TextBox add
on and the CS.Calendar module are also discussed.
Chapter 9 delves deeper into the various settings that
configure Community Server. This chapter discusses how to manage General Site
Settings (enabling Ink, modifying Terms Of Service, setting the default site
URL etc), Managing the contact information, RSS Settings and email as well as
tracking IP Addresses.
Chapter 10 explains the various reports that a Community
Server Administrator can generate from within CS. It explains how to generate
reports for the forums, blogs and the site as a whole. Since reporting in CS
depends on SQL Jobs, this chapter explains how to create and modify a SQL Job.
Community Server includes a lot of system tools that can be
used to implement Censorship, Ad campaigns, URL redirects, Mass emails, etc.
The last chapter in the book explains how to use these tools to maximum
advantage. Some of the features it describes are implementing Google AdSense and Amazon Associates, implementing censorship, working with the Spam Blocker and
Member points system. While this is not an exhaustive list, it points to the
breadth of coverage that this chapter gives to the various system tools in CS.
Last, but not the least, this book includes an Appendix that
explains the various steps involved in deploying a Community Server
installation to a production server. While more experienced Admins may
give this a miss, it is a valuable resource for admins who are new to
registering a domain and hosting sites. Also, there is an online
Appendix that
lists links to various online resources that might be of interest to a
Community Server Admin.