Community Blogs

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 Separator element and NEXT link did not appear. It looks good below thanks to JQuery, but it's original position was the same as above, an inch from the right-hand side rather than lining up at the edge.   There may have been a pure CSS approach...

I'm Day One into a new client project updating a customized CS2008 site to CS2008.5 SP2.  It's interesting what unanticipated issues you encounter when upgrading a working site.  Today it was the display of User Favorites by "Post" and "Section," two criteria that don't exist anymore. In CS2008, separate favorite lists were achieved with a UserData FavoritesShared property of type FavoriteType - Post, Section, None or User.  The FavoriteType enum still exists, but it's been removed from the User object, which is probably the right call.  In CS2008, separate Post and Section favorite lists were displayed like so. <CSControl:PostList runat="server" ShowHeaderFooterOnNone="true"...

This Community Server mod was too much fun not to blog about. Blog Post Comments as Customer Reviews. We all know 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 Rating control as if it were your everyday TextBox. Worked like a charm. protected AjaxControlToolkit.Rating customerRatingStars; protected override void AttachChildControls() {     customerRatingStars =        ...

written by Al on Sunday, December 09 2007 Note: After moving from CS 2007 to graffiti this post above links appeared broken, this one will fix that issue. I was tired of looking at my blog page look and feel, that's why during these 3 years blogging I have changed how it looks so many times. I wanted to add a few things, and I do believe I'm not finished yet. I wanted to add my picture and a calendar like Wordpress . Community Server has the normal link per month, but I want to be able to select a date and see the post of that day. So I wanted something simple, as adding a ASP.NET calendar control cannot be a big deal. To even cut a few more corners, I decided to use a CompositeControl class. This post, hopefully will also show how easy...

I do so much weird stuff in Community Server, like today when I needed to style selected sidebar widgets different from others.  Sidebar CS Widgets share the same CSS classes in a single ContentFragmentList control <LeaderTemplate />, like so.   <CSControl:ContentFragmentList runat="server" Property="WikiWidgets"> <ItemTemplate>     <CSControl:ContentFragment runat="server">         <LeaderTemplate>             <div class="CommonContentBox">                 <CSControl:ContentFragmentData...

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. What problem might this produce on the community site? Quickly now...Correct! Site-specific email functions are hosed. This means when using a Single Sign-On configuration with Community Server you want to reproduce the user email addresses from...

This is a pretty simplistic nuglet, but I went about my business for two days living with a non-centered navigation menu until this simple fix presented itself. The issue is one most of us encounter: Anonymous users see 4 menu items in their Navigation List, Registered Users see 5. This is usually not an issue unless we need to center it on the page. CSS-wise we use an Outer Div at 100% width, then place the Navigation List in an Inner Div of a set width using auto margins. The problem is specifying the width of the inner Div because we don't have a set number of menu items. The solution is adding the Inner Div based on role, like so. <CSControl:ConditionalContent ID="ConditionalContent1" runat="server"> <ContentConditions>...

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. <CSControl:ConditionalContent ID="ConditionalContent1" runat="server"> <ContentConditions> <CSControl:CustomCondition ID="CustomCondition1" runat="server" CustomResult='<%# IsFirstPost(Eval...

Community Server supports three versions of the site editor. The editor is used throughout the site for functions that vary from managing a user's Bio to entering Forum and Blog posts. The three editor versions are Plain Text (no HTML), Standard (HTML), and Enhanced (more HTML widgets.) The editor used on the site is defined in the communityserver.config file <Editor /> area where the three are listed with one designated as default. Each user can also set their editor of choice in their User Profile. This works great, but what if you want to restrict users to a Plain Text editor for all functions except for, say, forum posts. With a bit of Editor Control duping and tweaking this is easily achieved, along with some simple edit profile...

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 on Forms - FormEmptyStructure.cst - Removed ControlUtilityPrefix property requirement from FormFilledStructure.cst - Added ability to generate ints in SubFormFilledStructure.cst as TextBoxes rather than only the default DropDownList control. Will...