Community Server

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Community Server is a community collaboration platform that consists of a core blog, forums, photo gallery, and file sharing system. It has additional add-ons that add support for news server access (NNTP), email server, virtualized file system, and single sign-on modules. Community Server is developed by Telligent Systems and built with ASP.NET, C#, and Microsoft SQL Server. It is available as downloadable software that can be installed on a web server or via a hosting provider such as CommunityServer.com. The most recent stable version is 2.1 SP2.

History

Community Server was created in 2004 from the merger of three widely-used open source ASP.NET projects: the .Text blog engine, the nGallery photo gallery, and the ASP.NET Forums. The developers behind those projects (Scott Watermasysk, Jason Alexander, and Rob Howard) joined together as Telligent Systems and along with several other developers created Community Server.

Past Release Dates:

• Community Server 1.0 - February 20, 2005
• Community Server 1.1 - June 16, 2005
• Community Server 2.0 - February 20, 2006
• Community Server 2.0 SP1 - May 26, 2006
• Community Server 2.1 - August 9, 2006
• Community Server 2.1 SP1 - October 30, 2006
• Community Server 2.1 SP2 - December 5, 2006

Current Beta Release:

• Community Server 2007 Beta 1 - February 15, 2007 [1]

Next Stable Release:

• Community Server 2007 - April 15, 2007

Features

• Robust forums system that can additionally integrate with email discussion lists and news servers
• Publishing system that can manage thousands of single and multi-user blogs
• File and photo sharing integrated with forums and blogs
• Content mirroring to enable content syndication and republishing
• Integrated search across blogs, forums, photos, and files in one consistent UI
• Integrated tagging support throughout all applications
• Search engine-friendly permalink structure
• Extensible with support for plug-in modules, scheduled jobs, and spam rules
• Automatic TrackBacks and Pingback
• Easy WYSIWYG HTML editing
• Control panel with consistent tools for managing your community
• Single sign-on authentication modules available for forms auth, cookies, Active Directory, and Windows Live ID
• Source code for all core components available in the free SDK download
• ...more features

Criticism

• One of the single sign-on authentication modules available in Community Server is Microsoft's Windows Live ID. However it can take weeks for the average programmer to integrate a CS site with the Live ID service.
• The licensing terms for Community Server have changed for the upcoming 2007 version. The free non-commercial license is now restricted to 10 Blogs, 15 Forums, 10 Photo Galleries, and 100 Shared Files. An unlimited non-commercial license is $99. [2]

Further reading

• Narayanaswamy, Anand (2006). Community Server Quickly: A Concise and Practical Guide to Installation, Administration, and Customization. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1-84719-087-1. 
• Preul, Wyatt L. (2007). Professional Community Server. Wrox. ISBN 0-47010-828-2. 
• Community Server: The platform for enabling your communityPDF (702 KiB) - A white paper from Telligent Systems providing an overview of Community Server's capabilities
• Press Release for Community Server Hosted Edition Beta

See also

• Telligent Systems
• Weblog software
• Comparison of Internet forum software

References

External links

• CommunityServer.org - Official Community Server homepage
• Community Server Documentation
• Community Server Developer Wiki
• Community Server MVP community site