Fourth company .text weblog online
I haven't mentioned lately how much I appreciate ScottW releasing the source to .Text, but I'm doing so again now. I put a 4th community weblog online for our company. Thanks, Scott!
I've commented on the .text-based sites I was working on in previous posts (under the .Text category), how they support email subscriptions (in addition to RSS), are multi-blog, multi-user, hook into company data, etc. The value of ScottW's .text weblogs in our environment (with the customizations to the 0.94 source I was able to add) is obvious.
Only one weblog was initially planned--to track project event activity--but shortly after seeing this I was asked for another, then another, and finally (for now) a “Lessons Learned“ weblog. Its breakout is by department, then operational area or topic for the department, as in “IT : Server Management.”
Another strength of Scott's framework is that once the initial customization was done (less than a week), the turnaround for a new weblog is less than a day's worth of coding and customizing. Change the skin, change some logic, change a connection string, run the customized SQL script for the new database, setup the virtual directory, and you're rockin'. The trick, of course, is to keep cross compatibility in mind for all changes in any new weblog so that when going back to update earlier weblog code, nothing is broken.
To organize management and ongoing development, the VS Solution window looks like the pic below. The web app ( in this case Llearnedlogs), would be swapped out, depending on the weblog being worked on, with the other modules being shared by all. Works for me.
Once our users become more weblog sophisticated and have aggregators on their desktops, I have no doubt they will want individual weblogs as well. This would be sweet, because it would give me a chance to use Scott's 0.95 release for it.
