Blogging with SharePoint's Enhanced Blog Edition

Whether you have MOSS 2007 or WSS3.0, you have the ability to create a blog site for your company intranet, department, internet and so on. But the blogging site and capabilities that come out of the box with either version of SharePoint is less than stellar.

Now, however with the final release of the new Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 (CKS:EBE) you actually have some blogging capabilities that provide a pretty advanced looking – and functioning – blog.

We thought we’d introduce you to the new blogging features by showing you before and after photos…what a better way to understand how much work went into the creation of this Community Kit.

Prior to the Community Kit, if you wanted a blog site in SharePoint, you just went into the Site Settings, selected to Sites and Workspaces and created a new blog site. Not much to it, and you got a pretty bland blog site to go.

Pretty exciting huh? And don’t even try to think about modifying that main blog page – you’re just asking for trouble.

Add on the Create a Post page and you can see there’s a limit to how much you can do with your blog. You can create categories to organize your blog entries, but you are limited to one category for each post. It’s not normally the case that you would only want to post to one Category.

And people can post comments, but there’s no trackback functionality.

Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0

So now let’s take a look at the new blog with the CKS:EBE installed.

CKS:EBE Settings

There are a number of settings for the EBE. You can find the setting page under the Site Actions – Site Settings – Site Administration section. One of the settings is the Default Theme to use for your site. There are five themes that come with the CKS:EBE, you could use one of these or create your own. For my purpose, I selected one out of the box.

One of the biggest components of the EBE is the theming functionality. It’s called Modular Theme Framework (MTF) and is a straightforward approach to customizing the look and feel of your blog site. Basically it’s combination of the master page, CSS and XSLT. There are a number of alternative XSLT controls that replace the default web parts of the SharePoint Blog site template for lists like Categories and Posts.

The Designer Guide walks you through the steps to customize the default theme to get the design you want. You need to use SharePoint Designer to do the customizations.

If you look at the code for the out of the box themes, you can see how to modify the default theme to your needs. Each theme is basically a set of files stored in a folder in the Themes library.

In addition to an improved look and feel, you also get SEO friendly URLs instead of the usual querystring URLs that mean nothing.

Posting to the Blog

You can use the standard SharePoint posting page to create posts for your blog.

Blogging with SharePoint's Enhanced Blog Edition

\n\nWhether you have MOSS 2007 or WSS3.0, you have the ability to create a blog site for your company intranet, department, internet and so on. But the blogging site and capabilities that come out of the box with either version of SharePoint is less than stellar.\n\nNow, however with the final release of the new Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 (CKS:EBE) you actually have some blogging capabilities that provide a pretty advanced looking – and functioning – blog.\n

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