Converting From CommunityServer to DotNetNuke Intro

Published Saturday, January 08, 2011 11:19 PM

(originally posted on DNNDaily)

So I have been trying to figure out how best to do this blog post for a while now, though I think I will be better off doing it as a series of blog posts rather than one individual one. So this post will be the starting point for the conversion. I will update it with links to the other blog posts in the series as they get created and added.

Previous Posts: 
Part 1: An Introduction 
Part 2: DotNetNuke Installation 
Part 3: Converting users from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke 
Part 4: Getting the conversion tables ready for CS  to DNN 
Part 5: Moving Forum threads from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke
Part 6, Community Server to DotNetNuke Moving Forum replies and attachments
Part 7: CommunityServer to DotNetNuke handling URLs

Background (all in my opinion and based on my memory, as inaccurate as that may be):

Back in the early days of ASP.NET there were a few projects that many asp.net developers tried to use. There was a forum project at the time managed by Rob Howard at Microsoft, the ASP.NET Forums. There was a blog project called .Text and a photo gallery called nGallery.

Ultimately Rob left Microsoft and formed a company called Telligent, he took the ASP.NET Forums, and worked with the owners of the nGallery and .Text to merge them all into a product from Telligent called CommunityServer. CommunityServer progressed over the years, and a number of websites have been built with it. I believe www.asp.net once ran on CommunityServer, and I had a number of websites of my own that ran on it at one time. I don’t believe www.asp.net still runs on it, at least 100% but some forms of CommunityServer are still in use as seen by visiting the blogs at http://weblogs.asp.net including my own at http://weblogs.asp.net/christoc.

Initially CommunityServer was called “open source” and veiled under that banner, but over time that changed and it became what most would consider a very expensive piece of software. Over the past 6 months I have seen a lot of interest in converting off of CommunityServer

My history with CommunityServer

My background with CommunityServer begins before it started, I worked with the ASP.NET Forums project, and became (remain) good friends with one of the very first Telligent employees. I’ve had a number of websites that ran on .Text and CommunityServer throughout the years. My personal website ran on it, I had a few racing websites on it as well. As of late http://www.sccaforums.com/ ran on it, though at the end of November 2010 I converted it over to DotNetNuke. This series of blog posts will document all that was necessary for that conversion.

I’ve been using DotNetNuke since it was known as IBuySpy Workshop. I work for the DotNetNuke Corporation now. So it made sense for me to convert from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke.

When I converted moved from CommunityServer 2.1 to DotNetNuke 5.6.0 and the DotNetNuke Forum Module version 5.0. I did make a few customizations to the Forum module and I will talk about those.

What’s Coming

Here are some of the things that need to be covered in the conversion. I will link these posts as they are written, and also add to the list as I find other info to be covered.

  • Installing DotNetNuke and background
  • Converting Users (hashed passwords)
  • Converting Forum Groups
  • Converting Forums
  • Converting Forum Threads
  • Converting Forum Replies
  • Implementing BB Code in DNN Forum Module
  • Customizing the DotNetNuke Banner SkinObject
  • Handling CommunityServer URLs and sending them to DotNetNuke
by Chris Hammond
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Comments

# Richard English said on Thursday, January 13, 2011 10:19 AM

Hi Chris,

I'm looking forward to these blog post as I have a couple old CS sites I need to convert to DNN. I hope you will also cover converting blog post.

Thanks

# Chris Hammond said on Friday, January 14, 2011 1:15 AM

Thanks Richard, I will try to get back to the series in a couple of days. I've been doing my training classes all week at the office and haven't had the energy to do much beyond those!

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