communityserver

I am running CS 2.0 on a site now, and wow I love it! it is so much better than DNN!
 
What about it do you find better than DNN?

It has a much more restrictive license and isn't free for commecrial use as I understand it.
 
I am talking about from usability, installation, and purpose, for a community site, it is SO MUCH better than DNN.
 
I guess I'm asking what makes it better in those areas?
SO MUCH BETTER doesn't really relate why and I was just curious as I have never used it personally.
 
Editing of pages is simpler, faster, and overall much better usability.

Speed of loads is on a magnitude of 4-8x for initial page loads.

Overall userfriendliness is much better from what I have seen.
 
Thansk Stephen. How is it for third party custom modules?

At the end of the day, the cost issue is a big one for possible commerical use, or at least a consideration.
 
slebmaster, it is like all other asp.net slow on intial load. I have two sites running it that take 8-10 seconds intial compile for the FIRST visitor of a process cycle, after that it loads in 1 second or so(same as yours) DNN, CS, and all other ASP.NET is the same way, even on a fresh server with one asp.net page.
 
I've not tried CS2.0, but the previous versions were unuseable. And at the time it made me go to DNN. I can't go back now. CS was supposed to make a DNN module too, but never have. I wanted more than a forum, gallary and blog. Does CS have a portal type interface now?
 
I liked it too and I wanted to use it. But just had too many problems 2 years ago. I was hoping to get the best of both worlds and have a dnn module with CS.
 
Stephen, Just went on your two CS and take ages to load up too.
In your previous replied you said it compiles only for the first visitor of each process cycle.
Now how often is there a new process cycle ?
My CS took 123 seconds to load the first time and still needs between 5-10s each time.
I've noticed that it performs better with IE than Firefox. Anyone agrees ?
Is there anyone on here who as a CS with a lot of users that performs really well ?

Thanks
Seb
 
Thats the nature of .net on a hosted environment. If there is no activity for a while the server will unload it. I know DNN comes with a keep alive page. basically makeing a request every so often to keep it loaded in memory.
 
my site takes about 12 sec to load up the first time for each process, they are mostly sites where I visit as search engines dont evne have them indexed(much) yet. and they dont have a lot of content, you are free to check the webalizer stats, they dont get much traffic and die :D

CS has a keepalive page as well, keepalive.aspx I think is the name, I just don't have a need to "keep it alive" until I get more content.
 
Sleb, 20 min inactive kills the asp.net process. so one visitor or hit ot keepalive would make it "stay alive"
 
I've been using Community Server since the early days (and at that time, it was called .NET Forums? I don't remember). The recent 2.0 version has been a BIG upgrade from CS 1.1.

  • They've AJAXified alot of the interface.
  • They have support for running CS in a server farm configuration... where you can have 1 database and have several URLs that tap into the same database. The advantage here is single sign-on (to a limited extent I think) and the sharing of memberships and roles.
  • The application supports blogs, a photo gallery, forums, file downloads, RSS "roller" features.
  • They have an extensive and well structured API for any custom development that you might want to do.
  • They included alot of reporting features, an event log viewer, and exceptions reporter in the admin interface.

I don't think they are trying to compete with DNN. CS is more niche and has been positioned to be literally a community server. Sure, it can be an intranet application (I'm assuming DNN is more for this purpose?), but you would have to do alot of customizations to CS to get it to work in this fashion.
 
schooner said:
Thansk Stephen. How is it for third party custom modules?

At the end of the day, the cost issue is a big one for possible commerical use, or at least a consideration.
Click to expand...

Not sure where you got this information, but the express edition can be used commercially.
 
Re: communityserver (Work Around)

I had the same problem. The reason is that the application domain times out every 20 mins if there is no activity, the first request after the timeout can force a recompile and reload of cache. Changing some settings in the machine.config file will solve the problem; unfortunately for me my hosting provider would not allow me to make this change. I found this utility to be useful.

http://www.spikesolutions.net/ViewSolution.aspx?ID=c2b7edc0-5de1-4064-a432-05f6eded3b82

Essentially it "Pings" my home page every few mins so the application domain does not time out. The utility can also be configured to ping more than one page so that auxiliary pages are fast too.
 
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