Community Kit for SharePoint 2.0 Pre-Release announcement
About 3 months ago, I pre-announced the kick-off of the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) 2.0 effort, and fairly quickly, over 20 volunteers signed up to help. After just 2 months of work (mostly on nights and weekends), the CKS team has accomplished quite a bit and has decided to release a couple of editions and components to the community for evaluation and feedback. The CKS along with over 50 other active SharePoint oriented projects on CodePlex provide a very positive indicator of the power and extensibility of the SharePoint platform. I expect many more developers in the community to join SharePoint oriented shared source initiatives such as the CKS over the next 12 months. If you are interested, the CKS team can always use more help.
This CKS 2.0 Pre-Release contains the following:
The CKS:EBE was designed to enhance and extend the functionality of the built-in blog feature in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. By leveraging its innovative Modular Theme Framework (MTF), your blog can look nothing like a typical SharePoint blog while retaining the ease of use of the SharePoint blog’s built-in functionality. You can modify an existing theme or install a new one even if your blog is provided by an external SharePoint hoster or an internal IT department, and you only have Contributor level permissions. The EBE team’s motto is that your blog should look as smart or creative as you think you are. :-)
The MTF is the brainchild of Vincent Rothwell, who was the Lead Developer for CKS:EBE Beta 1. Here’s the default out of the four included themes in the EBE:
Not impressed? Well, with just 2 clicks of the mouse, your blog can instantly look like the screenshot below, complements of the excellent design work done by Isha Hartono of Provoke Solutions in New Zealand. Urged on by CKS:EBE team member, Ari Bakker, the Creative Design team at Provoke has created several other themes, which are available separately.
If you’re still not impressed by this or the remaining two included themes (Summer and Bird), you can easily create and deploy your own by following the CKS:EBE MTF User and Designer Guide (written by Ari) included in this release. If you create a theme and would like it to be considered for inclusion in the next release of the EBE, please contact Brent Bolleman, EBE's Program Manager.
Here’s what the Wildlife theme looks like after you’ve signed in. Notice that the “Blog Admin” list of links is now visible.
And here’s the EBE Blog Settings page, which is accessible from the standard Site Settings page or directly via the /_layouts/ebe/settings.aspx URL. Notice the settings for enhanced features such as post trimming, integration with Akismet for comment spam detection, and custom RSS feed URL.
There’s one other EBE feature to highlight: friendly URLs or FURLs! For example, the URL for the blog post in the screenshot earlier is http://cks.wssblogs.com/archive/2007/06/16/welcome-to-the-community-kit-for-sharepoint-enhanced-blog-edition.aspx rather than http://cks.wssblogs.com/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=2, the latter of which isn’t as conducive for search engine optimization. Moreover, the default RSS feed URL is now http://cks.wssblogs.com/rss.xml rather than something like http://cks.wssblogs.com/_layouts/listfeed.aspx?List=%7BB58689A3%2D5343%2D43AE%2DB342%2DAF4DBC6249F1%7D.
While these are indeed exciting and useful enhancements for the SharePoint blog, be warned that the Beta 1 release of the CKS:EBE is not recommended for production environments. The EBE team wants to further refine these features and has several more key features, including the often requested support for trackbacks/pingbacks and import from other blog services, planned for a feature complete Beta 2 release that is tentatively scheduled for the October. Please download and evaluate CKS:EBE Beta 1 and provide feedback to the team.
Aside from the contributions by Vince, Ari, Isha, Shane Perran (Summer theme), and Bob Medcalf (Bird theme), this Beta 1 release simply could not have happened without program management by Brent Bolleman, testing by Ki Tsang (who also wrote the Installation Guide), and more testing by a handful of other CKS:EBE team members: Nadeem Mitha, Ben Robb, Pedro Pablo Diaz Arguello, Jagadesh Sri Raja Kakarlapudi, and Bas van Atteveldt.
Wiki Discussion Feature
Since there’s currently not much documentation available anywhere about how to enhance and extend the SharePoint wiki, the CKS:EWE team felt that it would be worthwhile to release even in alpha form some of the work that they’ve been doing. In this release, the key feature is integration between the SharePoint wiki and the SharePoint discussion board that enables a piece of functionality that’s similar to that of MediaWiki, which powers the popular Wikipedia.org website.
Upon installing the EWE, every SharePoint wiki page will have a new “Discuss” button, which opens an associated discussion board page.
On the discussion board page, two new buttons are added. The “Topic” button brings the user back to the associated wiki page, and the “Alert Me” button sets up an e-mail alert for just the specific discussion topic whereas the standard SharePoint “Alert Me” feature would setup an alert for the entire discussion board.
Lastly, deleting or renaming a wiki page would be automatically reflected on the discussion board.
Please carefully read the CKS:EWE Alpha Installation Guide for important instructions and caveats about this release. Separately, take a look at the Technical Referece document and the source code if you’d like to know how the functionality was developed. The EWE team is looking for 2-3 more developers, so ping David Mann, the Program Manager, if you’re interested.
A big thank you to Mark Arend, who was the Lead Developer of this Alpha release! Additional features that are planned for the EWE Beta release include support for the CKS: Tag Cloud, a couple of templates, custom tokens such as an in-page Table of Content and associated bookmarks, and duplicate detection for the “FAQ wiki” scenario.
Wiki Import/Export Tool
The EWE team is at a very early stage of designing an import/export tool for the SharePoint wiki. The goal is for this tool to be able to import from other wiki products such as FlexWiki, MediaWiki, and TWiki, and Confluence and also from Word and OneNote as well as to export to Word via HTML (per page) and MHTML (entire wiki) formats.
For this CKS 2.0 pre-release, the EWE team is making available a fairly stable build of the FlexWiki Import Tool, for which the source code was graciously donated by Michael Cheng, a developer in the SharePoint product group. This is a one-off tool that will ultimately be converted to a plug-in for the Wiki Import/Export Tool, so if you’re currently using FlexWiki, please test the tool and provide feedback.
This is an updated ASP.NET AJAX-based version of the ChatterBox web part that was released about a month ago. In addition to the quick and easy persistent chat functionality of the previous version, ChatterBox AJAX provides enhancements such as color coded chat entries and presence detection. The final version, which may include (no promises though) support for multiple chat channels, will be released shortly after Service Pack 1 for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 becomes available, which is when ASP.NET AJAX will be officially supported in the SharePoint platform.
Thanks again to Matt Swann (another developer in the SharePoint product group) for continuing to enhance the ChatterBox web part during his spare time! If you’re interested in helping him make the ChatterBox even more useful and cool, please let him know.
This is a production quality release of the CKS: Tag Cloud, so I’d encourage you to try this out in a pilot environment and eventually deploy it into production. Thanks to Ki Tsang (yet another developer in the SharePoint product group) for all the hard work. The CKS team plans to fully support and leverage the Tag Cloud in various CKS editions.
The CKS Tag Cloud solution consists of four web parts:
- Tag Cloud web part – displays tags in weighted format. The more popular (based on the number of uses or associations with SharePoint list items) a tag is, the bigger it is shown.
- Tag Browser web part – displays items associated with a tag. The order of items can be customized.
- Related Tag Cloud web part – displays related tags co-existed with a tag.
- URL Browser web part – displays link items sorted on number of saves. This web part is designed to be used for the social bookmarking scenario.
Here’s a snapshot of the Tag Cloud web part:
Much More to Come…
As the founding member of the Community Kit for SharePoint team, I am gratified beyond measure by the great progress that has been made by such a wonderful group of passionate, creative, and skillful individuals. The ultimate goal of the CKS is to enable community oriented features and solutions by leveraging, enhancing, and extending SharePoint as a social computing platform. This is “cool and fun stuff” that I would be doing even if I wasn’t the Community Lead for SharePoint, so I’m doubly happy that I can do it as part of my day job! Of course, given how busy my day job has become, I end up doing much of my work as the overall Product Manager for the CKS at night and on weekends just like most of the other CKS volunteers. :-)
You can expect much more to come from the CKS team as it continues to work diligently towards feature complete beta releases scheduled for October and final releases prior to the SharePoint Conference 2008 event where the CKS team will have one hell of a party to celebrate its accomplishments, so join the team and be part of the action! Even ISVs like Bamboo Solutions and KWizCom have committed to contribute to the CKS.
I hope that this pre-release of CKS 2.0 will be useful to you even though much of it is not recommended for production implementation. I encourage you to try out the editions and components that are most relevant to your interests and needs. Please provide feedback via the Discussions or Issues list on the CKS project site on CodePlex rather than leaving a comment here. Thanks!
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