Recently, Springbox was tasked by Dell to create several websites that focus on community and social networking. Due to tight timelines and a specific set of criteria, Springbox began to search for a third-party solution. We needed something that had all of the usual suspects when it comes to social networking and community: blogs, commenting, profiles, media galleries, RSS feeds, user-generated content and the ability to scale for a large number of users among other things. It also needed to allow for a great amount of customization. After evaluating several solutions, we decided to go with Telligent Community Server 2008.5. Community Server had everything we were looking for and more. 

The first site that we implemented was a total rebuild of the Dell Lounge. Out of the gate, we needed to heavily modify the default layout and much of the functionality. Community Server's Chameleon templating system made this a snap. While Chameleon’s user controls handled recurring tasks and details, our developers were free to concentrate on higher-level site functionality. 

The Dell Lounge was such a success, and Community Server proved to decrease both development and maintenance time to such a degree, that we also chose the platform for Dell's Take Your Own Path series of regional websites. Take Your Own Path needed to support a large volume of daily traffic; Community Server has already proven itself more than capable.

As we update the sites, we'll build upon the current functionality and add more of the social media aspects that Community Server provides. I'm sure it will be a breeze.

Choosing a CMS, or Content Management System, for your site is like choosing a house. You want something that:

1.    Meets your needs right now; easily expanded later  
2.    Is affordable
3.    Meets your needs
4.    You can find help when you need it
5.    And finally, did I mention, it meets your needs?

CMS solutions are, at their core, a means to an end. That end is ease of updating your site, organizing your information, and giving the end user an intuitive, consistent and satisfying user experience.

We recently completely rebuilt The Dell Lounge to be a fully dynamic, social networking, CMS-driven site. In doing so we had to evaluate several different options for our platform. We ended up choosing from three packages: Community Server Professional Edition, Graffiti CMS Server Edition, and Kentico CMS Enterprise Edition. All three solutions are extremely capable options and we’ve in fact used them all for different projects. For The Dell Lounge 3.0, we needed an extremely robust solution to support our traffic and a very specific feature set that could be extended to meet our future needs. We were also under a very tight deadline so it needed to be easily customized. After creating our feature matrix, seen below, we felt confident that Community Server was our answer. 

We were right. The build went smoothly and finished ahead of schedule. Creating templates with Community Server’s Chameleon theming engine was surprisingly easy to do.

OK, so I’m just going to go ahead and say it. Among a growing list of JavaScript libraries, JQuery is the de facto leader.

If you've developed websites for any length of time, you’ve inevitably run into a problem that’s best solved on the browser side with JavaScript. Before 2006, your next thought was usually, "Ugh, scripting." You had to worry about — and code for — cross-browser compatibility, tweaking the same process in different ways so the site could be viewed in Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla, et al.

Then along came JQuery.

First released by John Resig in January 2006, JQuery focuses on the interaction between JavaScript and HTML. By making use of Document Object Model (DOM) element selectors, events, CSS manipulation, effects and animation, plugin support, chaining commands, cross-browser compatibility and other features that make it incredibly efficient and effective in today's web-based application world, JQuery has become the developer’s darling.

We've embraced JQuery at Springbox, using it for a variety of internal and external projects. Microsoft has even announced that it will be shipping JQuery with future versions of Visual Studio (including full IntelliSense).

Now that’s love.