I downloaded the 1.0 release of Telligent Systems [^] Community Server [^] last night and spent about 5 hours giving it a test drive.  There are a lot of things I like, and a few things I don't like.

First, I'm really happy about all the features that come with it: blogs, forums, and image galleries.  It's a ton of functionality that all comes right out of the box.  This makes it extremely easy to get up and running with a “community“ based site.  Each main feature is highly customizable and is easily configured, in my opinion.  As time goes on there may be a few features here and there that I think of that I wished were in there, but right off the bat it's full of stuff.

Perhaps the greatest thing about CS is how easy it is to install it.  No more messy SQL scripts or hacking through web.config files.  Instead, you just upload or copy the app files to your web server and run a wizard from the installation directory.  The wizard sets up the database and does everything for you.  Nice.

I'm big on skinning, and CS blogs improve their skinning capabilities over the old .Text.  The skinning controls are better designed and organized this time around.

What I don't like is that Telligent Systems has positioned CS strictly as a multi-user community application, in my opinion. You'll have to get your hands dirty if you want to use it for just a single-user, single-blog type of site by peeling away some of the outer layers that surround the blog functionality. For example, there is a home page, a blogs home page, and then finally the blogs themselves. From what I saw there is no way to just disable those first few pages. In order to maintain a consistent look and feel across all of the "layers", some effort is required - it's just not a single blog skin but skins for the blog aggregate page and the home page.

So if I decide to get my hands dirty, dig in, and modify the app such that those outer layers aren't visible, all is good right? I don't think the answer is "yes". It appears that the blogging folder structure used by CS will need to be enforced. Meaning that I can't just use www.kindohm.com for my blog root, which is what I do now. Instead it'd be something like www.kindohm.com/blogs/mikes_blog. In addition, I have some blog posts with permalinks that are indexed by Google and frequently visited. As far as I can tell, those permalinks will all be lost. There is a .Text upgrade that you can perform, but I don't see how the permalinks would remain the same.

And the same goes for the RSS feeds. Since blogs are buried a bit under some folders, my current feed (www.kindohm.com/rss.aspx) will break because it won't exist any more.

I guess I was just expecting more of a seamless upgrade from .Text.

So my final verdict is that it's a sweet product, but I'm skeptical that it'll really fit with how I'd like to use it in my site. I could just bite the bullet and lose my permalinks and not be such a nerd about site traffic :)

By the way, if you'd like to download CS 1.0 but have difficulty finding the link to download the bits, you can find it at http://docs.communityserver.org [^].