STAY AWAY FROM COMMUNITY SERVER! After giving this tool a good shot, and over 20 hours of my time, I am ripping it out, and starting over. This app is poorly engineered from a customer viewpoint. Why? Let's list the limitations:1. Simple customer request: Adding a page to the main menu! Adding a page requires learning to code edits to no less than 4 files, coding obscure variables, debugging calls to the editor, and resetting database connections to make sure they have the right permissions. Compare this to the 2 minutes of effort to add a page to a wiki and update its menus. This is such a problem one user wrote a long step by step blog article to explain it!!2. Simple customer request: Add an article to a page! The articles feature in CS is buried in the system administration section. The articles do not appear on the web site, and do not show up in search results. A genuinely needed feature rendered useless in implementation.3. Simple customer request: A single config file for simple skinning attributes, like color! Changing the color scheme means modifying many files by doing search and replace on color hex codes. I was doing that in 1995!4. Simple customer request: Simple User access permissions! CS developers have totally over engineered and gold plated the user access and user role features, to the detriment of the rest of the system. This is against community spirit, and shows a complete lack of understanding of why communities such as myspace and wikipedia flourish.5. Dev customer request: A well written system that uses modern OO techniques, encapsulation, separation of concerns, etc. Unfortunately CS has many odd features, such as a file that must include all of the URLs of every page in the site, that make it brittle, easy to break, and hard to troubleshoot.These are just some of the reasons I am blowing out CS and going with the templated solution web site tonight. Frankly a wiki with CSS is a much better choice for static content, and many blog solutions, such as blogger, can be integrated with a web site very easily. For example Blogger integration is a directory and ftp parameters.
There are much faster, user friendly, and better designed solutions than CS, so save yourself the frustration, and find one.
Hi rdymond,
First, thanks for the honest feedback. Not sure we needed the same exact post on multiple threads , but we will take honest feedback anyway.
As for your points:
1. We have toyed with the idea of moving control of the menu to a management piece of the UI, but up to this point have resisted. I agree that it could be easier and more intuitive.
2. You are correct on this one. Our article system is not a true CMS. You can certainly use it to store articles, but for most it is a good place for a quick FAQ, TOS agreement, etc. This is NOT the CMS we have plans for. The pure CMS work has not yet completed. I do not have a firm date yet, but our current plans target the CS 2008 release. Once completed, this will support "real" articles, searches, etc.
3. I am not sure I understand this item. We do support changing of style elements in the control panel of via CSS. See this doc.
4. This one I kind of disagree with. Our users have often requested even more security checks. I think we have the granularity we need at a low level. However, I do agree that many sites simply do not use this level of granularity and would be better served by something simpler. We have toyed with the option of supporting a simple and rich set of permissions, but this work has not been fully spec'ed out yet. Again, I am hoping to have some movement for the first 2008 release.
5. On this one, I guess we disagree. SiteUrls are a feature that we use to ensure consistent links and to make it easier for developers to find and change them. You of course can just add links to any page you choose. When it comes to "OO techniques" that really is a matter of opinion. While CS is used by many developers, we are not trying to be a best practices development application. Our goal is to serve our customers and get better with each release.
Again, I am sorry to hear your experiece was not what you had hoped. We are very serious about improvement with each release, so hopefully you will stop by in 6 months to a year and give us another chance. Either way, thanks again for the feedback.
Thanks,Scott
I am dissapointed in CS 2007 myself. I was hoping that a non-technical person could be the administrator. I would consider my self a "power user" maybe but I am definitely not a technical jock. My main gripe is lack of documentation.
I have been weighing the thought of abandoning CS myself, but I need its capabilities under one cover. If I could find another "off the shelf" package for similar performance and price with good documentation, I would drop it in a heartbeat. I am certainly open to suggestions.
But for now I am going to keep struggling with it.
ChuckS
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the response. I can add some comments to your thoughts.
I put this post in a few places because this was data I did not have when I started down this road but wished I did. I could have saved a lot of time and effort.
I don't know who your customers are, but I thought I was going to be one of them.
To support our customers, our business needs:
This is what we need today. This is also what CS advertises. So I thought I was a customer. I also think I might be a customer of Wordpress. Would you consider them a competitor?
What I found getting into CS is that it does not support these needs appropriately. My businesses last priority looks like it was Telligent's first priority.
I consider our startup consulting business needs pretty basic. I'm not looking to manage a 200 page web site, but more like 20 pages. I need between 1-6 blogs, and I need an online file repository. This does not sound like rocket science to me, but perhaps I am wrong?
I hope your product manager (?) takes these comments for what they are worth.
regards,
Robin.
I just took a quick peak at WordPress ... it looks like a great package if all you want to do is maintain a blog website. Personally I need blogs, forums, and a file upload download capabilty. Even though CS's docuumentation is my main issue .... I would really like to have the content more manageable without having to go into html.
I am hoping CS makes the user interface more intuitive and easier to manage. I can't any single out of the box application that does was CS does. If there are others, I would sure like to know.
Chuck S
While I agree with some of your points, I'm seeing this from another point of view.
Before I found Community Server I knew I needed something that does what CS does. I even spent close to four months coding in ColdFusion (my language of choice) and got fairly far. I had a good control panel and a fairly good forum. I wouldn't even consider it close to 10 percent done. Then I found CS and thought "Holy Cow, if I use this 90 percent of my work is done".
While really tweaking CS does require some serous coding, it's a walk in the park compared to writing it from the ground up. And that includes having to learn ASP.NET.
rdymond,
Judging from the business needs you describe above, you need a CMS with collaboration features, implemented as groupware. This is NOT Community Server. CS is a great system, for the right audience. There are quite a few content management systems that will do what your business needs require, but seldom just that. Most of the time they go far above and beyond what you ever intended.
If you're serious about your business, you should be serious about your business requirements. Think things through on forehand, and then scan the marketplace for suitable products.
I bed you could use some serious re-thinking your business requirements -- see points 6 & 7: file storage for consultant and customer collaboration. Collaboration on projects implies workflow & versioning, both missing from your business requirements.
For me CS 2007 is a big step forward as a non-CS expert can actually skin a blog/forum using the master page(prior to that any skin tweak was an absolute nightmare). But it is still definitely quirky and quite difficult to understand what is going on all the time (I have a tough time finding basic elements like the 'sign in' bar at the top of the blog).
For me there were always two issues - performance and documentation.
On performance there seems to be a lot of improvement, blogs and particularly forums are much more responsive (although still a bit behind some fo the php alternatives in my opinion). The reply page on the forums still takes too long to load however.
Documentation is still an unbelievable nightmare. Not sure how a package like this is shipped with zero documentation, especially as it is a complex bit of kit that most users will need to modify. The how-to blogs and FAQ's are a very poor substitute for a guided explanation of how the software works.
Hi, I too am sometime pretty frustrated with CS, but I think the question is to know your goal, as someone mentioned here.
I'm running several communities. When I need a cheap or even free system with an article management function and community functions which I can modify from the front-end almost to the absurd, I've resorted to Joomla + Community Builder + bridged PHPBB. It does take time to set this up though and tends to be buggy (and you thought CS has bugs..)
When I need to setup an interaction-focused community (ie, not contents/article focused community) with multiple groups / access rights, when I need to do it rather quick and I don't need customization (ie, I'm happy with Forums, Blogs and File/Photo repository the way they work in CS), I go for CS. We emulate CMS functions in CS by using Blogs. Could be more elegant, but it's working for us at the moment.
La vita e bella
D
Though CS offers the flexibility but it appears to have complicated in the process of making it so. I was trying to have the email to forum post feature for over 2-3 months and I almost gave up. My company wants this feature badly and with out this it does make sense to have a CS forum for us.
It is a simple use case
- Provide the member a feature to subscibe to a forum
- Allow him to recieve an email when there is a post ( Could get it with lot many trials and configuration changes)
- Allow him to reply to that email and have it posted to the forum back ( Gave up)
Creating mutliple community sites with the same CS instance still appear to me a rocket science.
I posted these issues couple of times to the CS forums but there was hardly any useful response which could resolve the problem
Hi Micheal,
Sending email is easy, that’s just a matter of setting up anSMTP relay – which can easily be done through IIS. Community Server doesnothing special here – beyond what any web applications (ASP.NET or not) woulddo.
As for receiving email, yes that is a different beast. That doesrequire the ability to setup and/or route email to a specific IP address. Didyou talk with anyone on our team about getting this setup – note, thisfunctionality is not “built-in”. It’s a separate feature known as Enterprise EmailIntegration (it’s actually what I’m using to reply to this thread).
Thanks,
Rob
From: michealmail4[mailto:bounce-michealmail4@communityserver.org] Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 6:48 PMTo: Rob HowardSubject: Re: [Getting Started] STAY AWAY FROM COMMUNITY SERVER!
Yeah,
Though CS offers the flexibility but it appears to have complicated in theprocess of making it so. I was trying to have the email to forum post featurefor over 2-3 months and I almost gave up. My company wants this feature badlyand with out it does make sense to have a forum for us.
- Allow him to recieve an email when there is a post ( Could get it with lotmany trials and configuration changes)
- Allow him to reply to that email and have it posted to the forum back (Gave up)
Creating mutliple community sites with the same CS instance still appear tome a rocket science.
I posted these issues couple of times to the CS forums but therewas hardly any useful response which could resolve the problem
Whom can I contact and what is the contact number? I understand that it is a separate component. I wish to first evaluate even before going for purchasing. Iif it is so complicated then I probably would rethink if I need to go for it. And as said it doesn't make sense to have CS forum for us without the capability of recieving emails in CS Forums. To solve this can enlist the detailed steps that go into it.
1. Where do I get the seperate email integration component. Is there an evaluation version ( I cannot take a risk of buying it and then getting into all the complications of setting it up). so prefer to have a link for evaluation version
2. what are the detailed steps that go into to make it work.
3. Assume that we are novice and would really need the explanation of the steps.
Thanks
Mike
Hi Mike,
With our new Store and Download Center, you can do all this without calling anyone! Just request a 30-day demo license (for Enterprise Mail Gateway) and then download the component (Enterprise Email Integration...about half-way down the page). Installation steps are included in the download.
Since you'll be downloading the fully-functional component, you'll only need to re-visit the store to purchase a permanent license, if you decide you want to stick with it.
Please let us know if you have any problems...
One is glad to be of service...
I said, things cannot work so easily in CS. They have become way more complicated.
I tried the whole evening yesterday trying to get the mail gate work and that doesn't heed. finally nothing seem to be posted to the forum when sent from an email.
I set passive mode to yes in one forum and no in other forum and gave mailing list names, added incoming mail accounts, enabled them, enabled the forum subscriptions, left Remote Access Code empty (because I dont know what to fill in it) and still it doesn't work. By the way I got the licences and applied in the control panel. I applied just the licence key and left licence install empty because nothing being sent to me in licence email to be installed
michealmail4:By the way I got the licences and applied in the control panel. I applied just the licence key and left licence install empty because nothing being sent to me in licence email to be installed.
Right, you should have received a "key" which you would enter in the "Install License Key" field. When you hit the retrieve license button it should connect to the Telligent server to retrieve the license file/information. If successful, I would think you would have seen something related to it under the "Total License Attributes and Usage" section.
As for how the email gateway works, someone else will need to answer that for you.
Every survival kit should include a sense of humor. ~Author Unknown
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