February, PDNUG and Community Server

Last night I had the pleasure of attending another stellar meeting of the Plano .NET Users Group. We had Rob Howard come out and explain one of his company’s (Telligent Systems) projects, Community Server.

What is Community Server? Essentially, it is .TEXT (the blogging engine created by Scott Watermasysk), nGallery (a photosharing application created by Jason Alexander), and ASP.NET forums (a forums package done partly by Rob, I believe) all rolled into one. Telligent now has all the creators of these three open source projects now working for them, so they’ve combined the projects and improved them a great deal.

How was the presentation? Excellent. We didn’t take a break at all the whole presentation (from around 6:30 to after 8:00, I think). And I didn’t even notice till the very end. Good stuff.

What do I think of Community Server? Well, I’m impressed. I’m thinking of using it to do a rewrite of a couple of my sites. And it is an open source project, so one can take it and modify it if needed. It also has a nice, modularized, plug-in architecure, so extending it shouldn’t be too tough. I’d like to create a MySql data provider for it for my own hosting, so I’ll probably get firsthand experience with that. Overall I was very impressed with the project. They’ll be releasing the code whenever version 1 comes out, and I’m definitely looking forward to that. Rob said he was going to release RC2 today, so that hopefully won’t be long.

Anyway, if you need forums and/or blog and/or photo-sharing, check it out.