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So a common question the last couple of days, "Is .Text Dead" ?

Absolutely not. No way. Nie..Nao. Het.

Just to be clear:

• Community Server is the evolution of .Text (I consider CS 1.0 to be the missing .Text 1.0)
• There will be a free upgrade tool to upgrade a .Text install to CS 1.0
• You 100% can run Community Server Blogs, without galleries and forums. (as you can run forums without blogs, etc)
• We will ship the source code (to keep things simple, we have held on to the source until we ship 1.0)
• You will be able to contribute

The way the .Text project was run did not leave much room for outside contribution. Up to version 0.95 the only other major contributor besides my self was Grant Carpenter (also, can not forget about the skins provider by Daniel Nolan). As you can quickly see, this lead to a bottle neck when work got very busy last winter and I took on a consulting project for the ASP.NET team. Around June, the dust began to settle on work and I began chatting with Rob about joining Telligent Systems. By mid-July I was a full time employee of Telligent Systems and we began mapping out the future of .Text, ASP.NET Forums, and nGallery.

Our original plan was to build a bridge between the three applications and allow them to exist for a little while longer as is. However, it became clear pretty early on this would be hacky at best and some code rewrites would be necessary. Although each application (IMO) we pretty well written, none of them were written with the idea of truly integrating with another application.

So that put us at sometime in August. We then spent a large part of the next four months rewriting, abstracting, integrating, etc.

The end result is much better than we originally planned. Not only did we enable all three applications to co-exist and share users (these were the only two real goals), we managed to add a slue of new features and fix some of the most pressing .Text requests/issues:

Set up and configuration is now infinitely easier and more flexible.

• We have a web based installer 
• A new virtualization model capable of not only running multiple sites on a single install but the ability to use shard or unique users
• UI for creating and managing blogs
• Secured/control access to blogs (globally and individually)

General Features

• Built in search
• Support for medium trust environments
• More flexible URL overrides
• Ratings
• Comments
  • Moderated
  • Authenticated only
  • Timed (i.e., new comments for 1, 2, etc days)
  • You can both hide all comments and/or turn them off
• A much simpler and documented skin layer
• Much simpler and less restrictive UrlRewriting
• Posts can be dated for the future (and will not be visible until then)
  Multiple authors per blog
• Role and Permission based access (i.e., users in role X have Post access while users in role Y have read-only access)
• Email subscriptions by post and blog
• Updated CSS Hierarchy

There are actually even more new features and bug fixes. The above list is just some of the highlights.

The challenge will be in the next couple months getting the community more involved. We set some rather tough deadlines to get us to V1.0 as soon as possible and because of this, developed 1.0 more or less in a vacuum. This is similar to how .Text started and I think helped to ensure its success. .Text was in use for nearly a year before I started to make the code public.

Having a company manage/fund most of the project (IMO) will help. We have a clear set of resources (time, money, hosting, tools, etc) and a battle plan. I have seen some of the recent talk about branches and repackaging .Text. For the most part, I understand where most of you are coming from. It has been a long time since a new build. But if at all possible, I would really like to encourage you to contribute to CS and build a single platform. We have some other great plans for Community Server (a KB application, Email List Serv, Wiki, etc) and many of the issues which have been discussed are currently working features in CS.

We have one minor issue to clear up and we will be releasing a release candidate to Community Sever 1.0 have already started working on plans/features for 1.1/1.2/2.0 (current plan calls for two point releases before 2.0).

To summarize, we are still making progress and if you have the time/desire to contribute, we would welcome you to contribute to CS.