Web Content Management For Telligent Community Server

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Apr 24, 2009

If you are looking for a community solution, then Telligent (news, site) is one of most well known. But it may not contain all the functionality out of the box that you would like — we're speaking of content management here.

So it's good to have partners like Four Roads to come alongside and fill in the gaps in functionality. CMSWire took a look at the content management capabilities this company provides Community Server, known as CS Publisher.

On its own, Telligent Community Server does not offer content management related capabilities like workflow, versioning and such. So Four Roads developed CS Publisher, a simple web content management solution that integrates with the community platform.

A Community Server Partner

Four Roads is dedicated to producing solutions that integrate with the Telligent Community Server solution. They have several offerings currently including:

CS Publisher: Content Management
Four Roads Commerce: eCommerce
Nexus: Facebook Integration

Our interest was with CS Publisher and what kind of functionality it adds to the Community Server platform. With the help of Michael Trefry, Chief Product Officer, and Robert Nash, CMO, we ran through the functionality delivered with CS Publisher.

A Look At CS Publisher

The first thing to know about CS Publisher is that it installs on the same server as Community Server. Installed as an add-on, you see all the functionality of this content management solution integrated directly in the Community Server environment, so you really can't tell they are separate solutions.

CS Publisher - List of Managed Pages

As you can see by the figure above content management within CS Publisher is based on pages.

Page Creation

For each page you have all the standard elements such as title, page name, tags, revision notes, SEO options (metadata), comments and ratings with moderation and review, and a WYSIWYG page editor.

Page tagging is integrated with the tags created for Community Server. One advantage of integrated tagging is that content pages are indexed with Community Server and show up as part of the search results overall.

CS Publisher - Create Page

You also have several additional capabilities to enhance your pages:

Widgets: You can add sidebar widgets to your page to add additional features such as Related Content, Shortcuts, Active Users or a Tag Cloud. These widgets are Community Server widgets.

CS Publisher - Page Sidebar Widgets

Code Blocks: Code Blocks are snippets of ASP.Net code that you can insert into your pages. You create them at the Administration level — and only administrators can add them — and then selectively add them to pages.

An example of a code block is a list of blog entries to display inline with a page. To do this, you simply add one line to your page where you want the code block to be rendered.

Four Roads is developing a library of code blocks that can be included within content pages.