Blog

A blog or a weblog is an online diary. It can be maintained either daily, weekly, or monthly, as per the convenience of the user who manages it. The first blog was started in 1994 and the term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. A blog could focus on a particular subject such as technology, politics, local and international news, or could just contain random musings. Each post on a blog is classified as separate entry, and old blog posts are automatically archived and are available for reading at any time as long as the blog is active on the World Wide Web. A blog post comprises text, images, links to other blogs or web pages, and other media relevant to your blog. Moreover, people use blogs to post articles and related news, such as about their vacation trips, awards, and much more.

Community Server includes an application for the creation and administration of blogs as shown in the following screenshot:

We will examine more about the creation and management of blogs in Chapter 3.

Forums

A forum is a web-based application used for holding discussions regarding a wide range of topics relevant to the site. The evolution of forums dates back to 1995 when dial-up bulletin boards were popular. Basically, technology, computer games, and health are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of different topics such as for discussing the features of specific software, programming languages, upcoming events, user-groups discussions, and much more. You should note that a forum relates to a specific topic. Forums are also commonly referred to as message boards, discussion boards, discussion forums, discussion groups, or bulletin boards. Community Server includes an application for the creation, management, and administration of forums as shown in screenshot below:

We will examine more about the creation and management of forums in Chapter 4.

Photo Gallery

A gallery is a term used for storing some kind of information. A photo gallery, as the name suggests, stores photos. In olden days, they were stored as hard copy volumes spanned into several albums. With the evolution of technology, people started storing them on the World Wide Web. Community Server includes an application for the creation, management, and administration of a photo gallery as shown in the screenshot below:

File Gallery

A file gallery is similar to the photo gallery that we discussed above, with the difference that files are stored inside the file gallery instead of images as in the photo gallery. With Community Server, you can create a file gallery (see the screenshot overleaf) within minutes by following a few simple instructions.

We will examine more about the creation and management of galleries in Chapter 5.

Reader and Roller

The functionality of reader and roller has been completely overhauled in Community Server 2.1. You will notice significant changes in its working if you currently use any of the previous versions of Community Server.

Reader enables you to display the posts from different blogs using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. It shows the posts together with the relevant links in a grid as shown in the following screenshot. Each registered member of the site can manage his or her own reader provided that the necessary permissions are given by the site administrator.

Many people blog everyday with lots of interesting content on a wide range of topics. You can easily display all those external posts in your blog using Community Server and this functionality is termed roller. Roller makes use of RSS feeds but the contents are populated inside the relevant blog to which the feed has been added. This feature is popularly called Content Mirroring.

We will examine more about the creation and management of reader and roller in Chapter 6.