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Consulting, creative, and Web services from the people who know Community Server best.
Consulting, creative, and Web services from the people who know Community Server best.
Key Blogging Features and Capabilities
The tables below discuss some of the core capabilities found in the Community Server blogging application.
Blogging Scenarios
Blogs are a powerful tool for enabling individuals to share their opinions and solicit feedback. Blogs also make for a very, very simply content management solution. Community Server’s blogging application is a proven multi-faceted tool that easily supports 1,000s of blogs and can grow with your organization’s blogging needs.
| Feature | Description |
| Community | The blogging capabilities of Community Server can be used as part of an integrated community solution or as a standalone blogging solution. |
| Multi-user Blog Support | Community Server's blogging platform excels at supporting thousands of blogs and authors. |
| Single User Blog Support | Community Server excels at supporting a single blog scenario with one or more authors. |
| News Style Display | The home page of the blogs section allows for an aggregate display of content, sorting new posts with most recent posts on top. Optionally you can use the post relevance setting to sort more relevant content on top. |
| Public and Private Blogs | Community Server excels at supporting both public blogs, content accessible to anyone, and private blogs, which only are accessible to authenticated visitors. |
Community Interaction
| Feature | Description |
| Comments | Supports anonymous commenting, authenticated only commenting, or a combination of the two. |
| Comment Moderation | Supports full comment moderation along with tools for managing comments. Additionally has a SPAM scoring system to automatically detect and moderate possible SPAM. |
| Comment Notification | Supports ability to send new comment notifications to both authors and subscribers. |
| Trackbacks & Pingbacks | Supports the ability to manage and moderate trackbacks (sites that link to the post). |
| Permissions | Supports a range of permissions that are assigned to groups. Specific permissions include:
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| Alerts and Notifications | Both through RSS and Email. |
Key Features
| Feature | Description |
| Search | The search capabilities are a shared feature and are detailed further on the capabilities page. Search support for blogs is rich, and access to search results is filtered by permissions. |
| Search Engine Optimized (SEO) | Content served is optimized for search engines. Keywords are included in metatags, content uses clean HTML, and URLs are formatted to include subject keywords. |
| Content Mirroring | A unique capability of Community Server's blogging engine is that it enables a blog to mirror any syndicated (RSS) available URL. Content from external sites can be brought in and made available for searching. |
| Content Tagging | Enables authors to use keywords to tag their content and then provides tools for readers to browse tags or even subscribe to tags. These capabilities are both site-wide and blog-specific. |
| Post Drafts | Allows posts to be saved in draft form without being published. |
| Publish Date Options | Allows posts to be automatically published (go live) at a specified future date/time. |
| Posting through Email | Using Enterprise Email Integration authors can write content using any email capable device or application (mobile phones, Blackberry, Microsoft Outlook, etc.). |
| SPAM Management for Comments | Rules engine that automatically reviews and scores all incoming content. Content suspected of being SPAM (unsolicited content) is either automatically sent to a moderation queue or is deleted. While this applies to blogs it is also a common capability for all content added to a Community Server system. |
| Blog Rolls | Tools for managing lists of URLs. |
| Ratings | Rating capabilities exist for each blog post. |
| WYSIWYG Editors | Rich, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors that simplify the entire experience of authoring content. Ensures that knowledge of HTML or other code is not required. |
| HTML Editing | Optional HTML editing view for any post content to give authors exact fidelity for any specific design or layout needs they may have. |
| Mobile Blogging | Supported through Enterprise Email Integration. See Posting through Email above. |
| Pages | Supports easily creating stand-alone pages or articles that are not published as blog posts. Great for articles or static content. |
| Cross Posting | Allows for Community Server's blog engine to post to multiple sources; great for when moving from other blogging or publishing platforms, as it allows all content sources to stay in sync. |
| Ping Support | Service to support alerting sites, such as Google's Blog Search, that their blog has been updated and can be reindexed |
| Google Analytics | Built-in support for easily enabling analytics engines such as Google's free Google Analytics. |
| Ad Support | Easily enable any ad engine or Google text ads. |
| FeedBurner | Enables all RSS syndication to be managed through feedburner.com integration providing robust statistics on syndication usage. |
Media Support
| Feature | Description |
| Photos | Add photos through WYSIWYG editors in the Photo Gallery feature of Community Server or through any blogging tools including email. |
| Videos | Supports inline videos that can be embedded within blog posts. |
| Podcasting | Supports attachments that can be syndicated as part of the blog post. A common example is attaching an audio or video stream (known as podcasting or video-casting). Community Server supports ITunes and support for enclosures. |
| Attachments | Supports virtually any attachment type. The types of attachments are controlled by a list of allowed file extensions. |
Presentation
| Feature | Description |
| Customized Presentation | Community Server supports an extensive themes engine that was designed from the ground up to enable designers to have complete fidelity from design to implementation. |
| Dynamic Themes | Supports dynamic themes that enable each user to have a personalized look and feel for his or her blog. New themes can be added, and existing themes can just as easily be removed. |
| Style Sheets | Full control over style sheet information (advanced users) gives control over all aspects of presentation layout. |
| Widgets | Supports pre-packaged and customized widgets which can be added to themes. |
Syndication Tools
| Feature | Description |
| RSS (Real Simple Syndication) | All content published in the blogging feature of Community Server supports industry standard RSS as well as tools for controlling which content is published in the RSS. |
| Private RSS | Optionally supports private RSS feeds through unique per-user URLs. |
| OPML | Support for Outline Process Markup Language (OPML). |
| ATOM | Support for ATOM. |
3rd-Party Publishing Tools
| Feature | Description |
| Live Writer BlogMailr Microsoft Word 2007 BlogJet w.bloggar | Community Server supports all blogging tools that support the industry standard MetaBlog API |