Thanks to a heads up by Mike, whom I met at BarCamp Milwaukee, it turns out that my comments weren't working on my Community Server 2.0-based blog. When someone attempted to add a comment, the system would respond with an HTTP 404 error. Nice.

One of the problems I thought was due to the fact that I'm using Community Server against it's intended purpose, running as a single blog in an engine meant for..well…a community. I went over to the Community Server site to pull down the new v2.1 files and apply them to my installation. This just opened a whole new can of worms in that I overwrote my config files that contained the various information to make it work as a single blog. Needless to say, my blog was down for quite a few hours as I trudged through my memory banks and the internet to try and remember which config changes I needed to make. After the changes were in place, which I was pretty sure were correct, I was still encountering errors. But the fact that I wasn't running locally meant that I wasn't able to see the actual error message. Frustrating to say the least. It was at this point that Istarted to seriouslyconsider a different blogging engine. I've been thinking about this for the past few weeks or so. Community Server is a great piece of softare with a ton of features, but for my simple purposes it's a bit much. Too many things get in the way when I start to encounter some sort of problem.

One of my big conerns about switching to another blogging engine is howdifficult itwould be to build a mapping url handler that would identify a request url for the community server path and map that to the new blogging engines path. My criteria for a blogging engine was that it must run ASP.NET and I must have access to the source code. The blogging engines I started to investigate were Subtext and dasBlog.

Subtext is a forked version of the old .Text engine which was my initial engine up untilmy move to Community Server a few months back. The move to Community Server was logical in that new development seized on .Text as it's primary developer, Scott Watermasysk, joined Telligent and morphed .Text into Community Server. Subtext forked it's source branch off of .Text and carried on new devlopment as Subtext. The good thing about Subtext is it looks as if the URL's for the content matches pretty much exactly to what Community Server serves up, so there would be no need to create a mapping handler. There's a bit of work involved in getting the content out of Community Server and into Subtext. I have a few issues with my comments and author details and trackbacks. But it's close.

I'm also looking into dasBlog which doesn't have a backend database as it stores all of it's content into serialized XML. Importing the content into dasBlog is certainly much more difficult and it will certainly require a URL mapper. I tried finding a Community Server to dasBlog converter but one doesn't seem to exist. There's plenty of discussion about going from dasBlog to Community Server but not the other way around. I find that interesting.

After bouncing back and forth between Subtext and dasBlog, I went back to my Community Server update to 2.1. I find out that during my upgrade process, I happend to skip a step that required me to update my membership database schemas. Once I applied that update script, my blog was back up and running. I wasn't able to determine this until I had my blog running on my local machine which makes it possible to determine what the actual problem is. Needless to say, I'm back up and running and the comments are working. Yay! However, I'm still looking to migrate to a new blogging engine. If you have any suggestions on easy ways to convert to Subtext or dasBlog, please let me know.

Tag: Community+Server, Subtext, dasBlog