CS Blog/Forum Interface Questions

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chrison600 Posted: Tue, Jul 15 2008 5:18 PM

rated by 0 users

Hello all,

First post. I am considering using Community Server to implement a very basic intranet platform. We need to create a site where our people can frequently post brief "articles" about what they are working on or things they have discovered and want to share. I like the idea of using a blog or forum module as a starting point, because entry of content is very simple (we have some not-so-technical people here).

Ideally, I'd like to have the content able to be grouped into categories such as "Marketing" and "Development". I'd also like the most recent content to appear in a prominent location on the "home page", and I thought it would also be nice if the categories would expand and contract based on user action. For example, on each initial visit, the last 5 entries would appear in the "Most Recent Entries" category at the top of the page, followed by category headers. Clicking on a plus symbol on a category header would expand it to show the most recent 5 entries in that category. You could access entire posts by clicking on the post, or all posts in a category by clicking on the category link.

It would also be nice to be able to "regroup" posts by author. You could toggle between "Group by Author" and "Group by Category" and the posts would group accordingly, including all of the functionality as above (collapse/expand/open detail).

Is Community Server a good platform for this kind of solution? Does this grouping/expand/collapse functionality come out of the box or via an addon?

Any advice or hints?

We're hosted on GoDaddy, but we could host this internally too.

Thanks,

Chris

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The Community Host replied on Tue, Jul 15 2008 8:26 PM

rated by 0 users

Hello

Short answer:  Community Server is a fantastic platform for the type of solution you seek.  Out of the box functionality covers most of the features you desire.  The other 'nice-to-have' stuff... do-able, of course, with a little tweaking here and there.

I'd say go for it - I think you'll love it.

You could keep it with your ISP or host internally.  Obviously tweaking becomes easier if you host internally.