Community Server is Grrrreat!

This is my first post since switching my work blog from DasBlog to Community Server. I'm pretty impressed with the results.

DasBlog wasn't a bad program, but coming from a background in WordPress, it was frustratingly limited and very rough around the edges. I've already detailed my frustrations with DasBlog, so I won't repeat myself here, except to say that the only solutions I've found to my problems are to either fix them myself (not practical, since I'm not a programmer) or wait for a new release (which, to be fair, is about to come out, but it's still not a good answer).

Community Server is a much more polished solution, which is to be expected, since it's the program that's running blogs.msdn.com. Where it really shines, however, is as the backbone of a blogging community. Our goal was to allow Pop Artists to sign up for an account, and have a basic blog be created automatically. Then if they want to muck around with advanced options or skinning, they can, but they also have something that just works out of the box.

For me personally, the two best features are the functional posting page (no more crappy text editor – CS has a more wordpress-like text editor which automatically wraps my paragraphs in <P> tags, and gives me a nice little HTML editor window to do things like adding that "P" tag back there) and the improved control over the skinning. DasBlog was VERY limited on what I could and could not modify in the skins, and CS removes that limitation.

Of course, it's not perfect. CS delivers way more out of the box than we actually need, and it's not easy to disable the extranious bits. We don't need forums, or photo and file galleries, and the included RSS reader is just confusing. Giving my druthers, I would just turn those off and only use the blog engine (this may actually be possible, I just haven't found it yet). It's also stupidly difficult to move the blogs into the root directory (by default, blogs are in a subdirectory, resulting in the irritating URL "http://blogs.popart.com/blogs/scottv/"), involving physically copying files (which needs to be repeated after each upgrade), and modifying SiteUrls.config. Also, it seems that I have to link to my blog as http://blogs.popart.com/scottv/default.aspx – if I removed the default.aspx, I get a 404 – which is dumb, since default.aspx is defined as the default page in IIS by default.

Finally, and most irritating, there is no import/export functionality by default (also true of DasBlog). In order to bring over my blog, we had to install the BlogML Converter Control by Keyvan Nayyeri, which adds an import/export tool for the BlogML format. This got us halfway there, but despite information to the contrary, there's no BlogML exporter for DasBlog in v1.8. We finally got the problem solved after writing to Scott Hanselman himself, who very kindly provided us with his work-in-progress BlogML exporter from v1.9. With a bit of tweaking, we managed to get all the blog posts and categories imported, more or less (none of the categories are applied to any of the posts, but by this point, we'd put a week into it, and no one cared enough to fix it, so I'm just going to re-apply the categories by hand). To be fair, this should get a lot easier, once DasBlog 1.9 is out, but right now it's a royal pain in the butt.

Still, I'm up and running, and planning to start blogging again right away, and I'm pretty happy with Community Server so far…