Localized versions of the CKS: User Group Edition and sneak peak of the CKS: Enhanced Blog Edition now available
As mentioned previously, the Community Kit for SharePoint is one of the top 3 community oriented initiatives sponsored* by the SharePoint product group. (The other two are the SharePoint Community Portal and the SharePointPedia, the latter of which will be announced with more details soon.) While the current CKS 2.0 effort has over a dozen volunteers, we can still use more in the areas of development and program management, so ping me directly if you’re interested.
CKS: User Group Edition
In the meantime, I’m very pleased to announce the availability of 3 localized versions (French, German, and Simplified Chinese) of the CKS: User Group Edition 1.0 for which the English version was released nearly 3 months ago and has over 1,700 downloads and almost 20 known implementations! The localized CKS:UGE site admin templates are available here, and the demo sites are at:
My sincere thanks to Gaetan Bouveret (French), Michael Greth (German), and Xi Chen (Chinese) for their efforts! A Spanish version of the CKS:UGE will also be available in the near future. If you’re interested in localizing the CKS:UGE into other languages, please ping me. The whole process takes about only 4 hours with the help of the free .STP Language Converter tool from KWizCom.
CKS: Enhanced Blog Edition
In addition, I’m announcing the availability of the RSStoBlog tool with source code, which provides an easy way to import content from any RSS 2.0 compatible feed into a SharePoint blog. This tool will be part of the upcoming CKS: Enhanced Blog Edition, but I thought that it’s useful enough to be released separately now. I’m also hoping that someone will extend the tool to support the import of associated categories and comments for a feed of blog posts. Thanks to Matt Swann, SDET in the SharePoint product group, for contributing this tool to the community. It’s available here.
A couple of other components of the CKS:EBE are being considered for ad-hoc release: 1) trackback support (for tracking references to your blog entries from someone else's blog), and 2) anonymous comments when Integrated Windows Authentication is used (for an intranet-based anonymous Suggestion Box type of blog). If you think these features should be released immediately, please leave a comment describing how you would utilize them. If you have a feature suggestion for the CKS:EBE, please leave a comment on the CKS:EBE page on CodePlex.
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* Note that "sponsored" is not equivalent to "fully supported" or "guaranteed to upgradable to SP1 or vNext." As with most other projects on CodePlex, the components of the CKS are offered "as-is,” which means that you bear the risk of using it and that the contributors, which includes Microsoft personnel, of the project give no express warranties, guarantees, or conditions.
