Upgrade to Community Server 2007 and new blog theme
Spent a few hours on Wednesday evening upgrading Tabsy.net to Community Server 2007 (CS 2007). The upgrade was hassle free and to give myself a challenge I decided to install the previous add ons before testing the site for the first time. A bit risky I know but I was confident they would all work! First up I added the Alabaster CSMVP's module - haven't actually activated any of the features yet but may do in the future. Then I added Scott Watermasysk's excellent Share It module which adds quick handy bookmark links to the footer of blog posts, and then his Youtube module which enables me to embed youtube content within a post.
You may also have noticed my blog now has a new theme. Thanks to Keyvan Nayyeri for making it available to the CS community via his blog. The theme was ported over from Styleshout by Keyvan to CS 2007. I then tweaked the header, footer and text to have a slightly different look. Considering this is my first time with the new theming engine in CS 2007 (code named: Chameleon), it was quite easy to see how a blog theme such as this has been put together. Every element on the page is controlled through CS controls and styling taken care of by CSS. I'll be adding some more controls to the blog over the next coming weeks as part of testing for a redesign of uk-mkivs and the launch of uk-audis.
The next addition to the blog theme came in the form of inline Adsense placement. Well, ok it's not technically inline, but it's a close as I'll get it for now. My Adsense code now appears top right of blog posts but doesn't show on the aggregate page due to it being embedded directly into the blog post view skin. This helps to comply with The Google T&C's with Adsense placement which is limited to no more than three units per page. As with the layout and colour tweaks explained above, this required me to pick apart Keyvan's skin file. In this case the code was insterted into post.aspx. Details of what to do can be found in this post over at CS.org. This is a relatively simple step to start monetizing your CS blog. Don't forget though you will need to purchase a personal license for CS if you intend to run ads on your blog.
Lastly, I've changed the way in which the site works, instead of going to a common homepage it now redirects straight to my Blog. This is what's know in CS as Blogging at the root. With the release of CS2007 it's now much easier to setup your root blog via override config files. I won't bother explaining how it works as I blatantly know very little about the inner workings of CS2007, so I'll let this post do the talking!
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