• 23 Comments
  • February 23rd 2007

UPDATE: What would the best community app be like?

Community Server

Design Meltdown mentioned an appllication yesterday that was new to me. It’s called Community Server and seems to be heading in the direction that my original post stated.

Community Server is a content management system that allows you to combine blogs, forums, photo galleries, file sharing, Wikis, etc… What makes it different from Joomla and the other popular CMS apps is the way everything is integrated. It features a single login and the navigation and style stay consistent across the site.

Telligent is the name of the company behind the app and they have quite a few large clients using it: Xbox Forums, MSDN, The Hive, and BET.

Unlike WordPress, Vanilla, and the other popular platforms, Community Server is built on ASP .NET, not php and mySQL. That alone might make it difficult for it to reach a larger audience.

A few of the sites Design Meltdown mentioned that use CS were quite nice. BlogMailr, FX Best Practices, and Channel 9, integrate a blog, forum, and other sections, somewhat seamlessly.

So why haven’t I spent the past several hours planning for YGG’s conversion? A few reasons.

1) It can get expensive. They offer a free version hosted at a subdomain on their server, but you can’t place any ads in the community or monetize it in any way, and quite a few of the features/add-ons are stripped out. To really do anything with it, you at least have to go with the standard version which is $300, plus $150 per year in maintenance fees. To use the single sign-in with the standard version, you have to buy a $300 add-on. The version above that, Professional, is $1500, plus $400 per year and includes the single sign-in feature.

2) It’s feels like a closed community for developers. The main reason many applications decide to go open-source is because it enables developers around the world to expand the application in ways the original creator may have never thought of. While there are a handful of contributions from Telligent and some of it’s users, there are thousands more expansions available for WordPress, vBulletin, phpBB, etc…

3) As mentioned, it’s language is not customary. I’m not a developer, but all of the projects I’ve worked on and all of the developers I’ve worked with have been based in php and mySQL. Can you find an ASP .NET developer? Absolutely. But when you’ve invested the time and money in developing your site in php, it can be quite a pain in the ass to either convert it all or start from scratch again.

4) The forum section is a clone of vBulletin. Almost every single detail, no matter how customized, resembles vBulletin and displays the discussions in the exact same way. This is fine if you like vBulletin. But I think vBulletin is a step back in the development of community forums, at least the dream community that I originally wrote about.

Community Server seems to be on the right path in bettering what we refer to as online communities. Understandably, they’ve invested a lot of time and money into building CS, but unless they offer more with the free version I can’t see it ever coming anywhere near the size of WordPress. Such growth may not be one of their goals, so it’s tough to say whether or not that’ll ever happen.

I recommend giving their free version a try, as I plan to when I have a bit of spare time. It’s nice to see some development in the world of communities, but like what Darius wrote about in his previous post, a story about two guys in a garage can make an idea enormous. Does a corporation with 60 developers have the same sort of traction? We’ll just have to wait and see.

You can watch a video demo of Community Server in use here.

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Eric

    ASP *cringe*

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Eric

    ASP *cringe*

  • http://www.flipsquare.com Aaron

    I’m not a programmer but why does anyone develop a community app in ASP?

  • http://www.flipsquare.com Aaron

    I’m not a programmer but why does anyone develop a community app in ASP?

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Travis

    I could only imagine that Microsoft was one of their first clients as they began to develop the software. The big M used them for Xbox, MSDN, and other networks. As a result they had to go with the home team’s language. That’s what I think.

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Travis

    I could only imagine that Microsoft was one of their first clients as they began to develop the software. The big M used them for Xbox, MSDN, and other networks. As a result they had to go with the home team’s language. That’s what I think.

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Eric

    Fair assumption

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Eric

    Fair assumption

  • http://www.flipsquare.com Aaron

    true

  • http://www.flipsquare.com Aaron

    true

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  • Chris A

    Its actually written in C# as part of Microsofts .Net platfrom , not ASP, and has been for a year or two now.

    Its not a bad product but its definately playing catch-up with other more common place communities. The forums in particular are way behind what most people have come to expect as the norm. It was only last year they integrated bicking smilies by icon rather than just typing in the code.

    I’ve been running it for 2 years now, and one of the biggest drawbacks I’ve found is just the unresponsive ness of their support forums. I think they are set up for large corporate deals each with their own contractual support deal with them. That probably describes their average user too, all of which makes their community support forum a very quiet and slow place. There are good users there but not as many as most support forums.

    I still think if you are a one man band, who wants a blog, file and picture areas and a forum its still worth a go.

  • Chris A

    Its actually written in C# as part of Microsofts .Net platfrom , not ASP, and has been for a year or two now.

    Its not a bad product but its definately playing catch-up with other more common place communities. The forums in particular are way behind what most people have come to expect as the norm. It was only last year they integrated bicking smilies by icon rather than just typing in the code.

    I’ve been running it for 2 years now, and one of the biggest drawbacks I’ve found is just the unresponsive ness of their support forums. I think they are set up for large corporate deals each with their own contractual support deal with them. That probably describes their average user too, all of which makes their community support forum a very quiet and slow place. There are good users there but not as many as most support forums.

    I still think if you are a one man band, who wants a blog, file and picture areas and a forum its still worth a go.

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Travis

    What’s the URL of the website you use the app on, Chris?

  • http://www.younggogetter.com/ Travis

    What’s the URL of the website you use the app on, Chris?

  • http://www.theguitarblog.com Josh

    I’ve been following the development of CS for a while now, and the reason they use ASP.NET is because the founder of Telligent helped invent and develop ASP.NET while working at Microsoft. Community Server began life as an integration of several .NET-based open source projects: the .Text blogging engine, nGallery for photos, and the ASP.NET forums application originally written for Microsoft’s http://www.asp.net site. They’ve since added more CMS capabilities to the project.

    For end-users, I don’t think it really matters what programming language the application is written in, so long as the application works as expected. Quality shared hosting costs about the same regardless of the server OS used. I agree that CS definitely still has some catching up to do with regards to some of the open source solutions that are available, but they have a new release coming out in a few months that may narrow the gap. I’m looking at using CS for one of my sites, but am going to wait until CS 2007 is completed before making my decision between CS or one of the other solutions like Drupal.

  • http://www.theguitarblog.com Josh

    I’ve been following the development of CS for a while now, and the reason they use ASP.NET is because the founder of Telligent helped invent and develop ASP.NET while working at Microsoft. Community Server began life as an integration of several .NET-based open source projects: the .Text blogging engine, nGallery for photos, and the ASP.NET forums application originally written for Microsoft’s http://www.asp.net site. They’ve since added more CMS capabilities to the project.

    For end-users, I don’t think it really matters what programming language the application is written in, so long as the application works as expected. Quality shared hosting costs about the same regardless of the server OS used. I agree that CS definitely still has some catching up to do with regards to some of the open source solutions that are available, but they have a new release coming out in a few months that may narrow the gap. I’m looking at using CS for one of my sites, but am going to wait until CS 2007 is completed before making my decision between CS or one of the other solutions like Drupal.

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  • spafighting

    It’s become a big problem for forum owners to protect them from spam.
    Automated programs are sending their ads in huge quantities today.

    We’re small community of coders, upgrading forum’s source code to prevent spam-programs to post ads at your forums.

    Our technique is probably one of the best. There’s no need in such ugly methods as ‘capcha’ or ‘secret question’.
    For average user there would not be any visible effects. No need to make e-mail activation (that usually makes number of successful registrations less), no even need to make your users register at forums to post messages.

    More info only at icq: 448759872
    Send messages even if not logged in.

  • spafighting

    It’s become a big problem for forum owners to protect them from spam.
    Automated programs are sending their ads in huge quantities today.

    We’re small community of coders, upgrading forum’s source code to prevent spam-programs to post ads at your forums.

    Our technique is probably one of the best. There’s no need in such ugly methods as ‘capcha’ or ‘secret question’.
    For average user there would not be any visible effects. No need to make e-mail activation (that usually makes number of successful registrations less), no even need to make your users register at forums to post messages.

    More info only at icq: 448759872
    Send messages even if not logged in.