So I have been doing some testing on my website and needed to redirect requests to http://chrishammond.com to http://www.chrishammond.com/. Lucky for me the site is using IIRF to manage my urls from the old community server days to my DotNetNuke conversion.

So I'm finally getting around to doing a write-up about my conversion from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. The conversion wasn't for the faint of heart, though it has been a great learning experience, which I hope will be beneficial to anyone else considering moving away from CommunityServer or other platforms and onto the DotNetNuke platform. I chose to move from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke 4.8.0 running the Engage: Publish module, available from www.engagemodules.com. My reasons for choosing the Publish module are detailed below. Overall the process has taken me rougly 3 weeks, though not all of that time was spent doing things productive :). I hope to cover some of the details on this conversion, and the thoughts going into the process, as well as thoughts after the process. Before I do that though I will give you a little background on my experience with both systems first.

It is nearly 3pm CST on Wednesday January 23rd, 2008. Almost 2.5 years since I initially setup a .Text blog for this website I am finally ready to convert the site to run on DotNetNuke. I'll post more about "why" I am converting to DotNetNuke, and how I am doing so. Only a few of you will even get to read this via CommunityServer as the conversion will be taking place in just a few minutes. One thing to note if you are subscribed to the site via RSS/ATOM you might have to change your URLs. The new URL will be available shortly. For now, this is it, the final blog post via CommunityServer for the domain name...

I think I've cleaned up all the data issue for my conversion from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. Now I have to skin the site! I'll work on a skin this evening after my run, while watching last night's American...

So I've been working for the past few weeks on an a little project. The goal is to convert http://chrishammond.com from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. I'm not going to be using the DotNetNuke Blog module, instead I've been adding some new features into the Engage: Publish module so that it will support blog like functionality, with the ultimate goal of making it support nearly all the blog type functionality that you find in common blogging systems. I've spent probably 100 hours over the past month or two working on the module (mostly on my own time) to get it setup for the conversion. I believe I have the software nearly ready to go so a few days ago while I was in Chicago for some DotNetNuke Training classes that I was conducting I started working on the SQL scripts that I will be using in the conversion. I have most of these scripts configured as the import process seems to be good, all the blog posts and tags are pulled over. I still have a few more things to finish up on the import process though. Here's a list of things I need to do to get the site ready for the conversion. I'll mark them off as I get them completed. Create conversion scripts for all blog posts (955 posts) Script to convert all tags (300+ tags) Script to convert all comments (1194 comments) Create a URL Handler for the old to new URLs (an unknown number of urls) Skin the site (3 DNN pages initially with more in the future) As I typed it up I see I have more left to do than I expected! I would like to see this will all be done by 1/6/2008 but I don't see that happening as it is 1am on the 6th right now. I'll keep working for a bit longer, then get back to it tomorrow evening after I watch American Gladiators! More coming soon on my conversion from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke! Update 2:30am 1/6/08: I've finished the conversion scripts for Comments now as well. Posted from...

Well, an hour after my last post, but a whole day later, I've successfully imported my blog posts from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. I'm not using the DotNetNuke blog module, I've customized (available in a future release) the Engage: Publish module to fit my needs. While I'm far from done, I have at least proved to myself that I can get all of the blog post content moved over into a test environment. I'm currently testing out bringing over all of the Tag information. Once I have the tag information I have to begin looking at how I am going to handle all my old URLs from CommunityServer. I believe I can come up with a good solution for that, but we'll see as time goes on! For now I've gotta get back to...

Well I made it home from Chitown this evening. I got to the airport early with hopes of trying to catch an earlier flight out but didn't have any luck. My flight however was not even half full, which made the wait worth it. I've finally started working on the SQL scripts that I'm hoping to use to convert this site from Community Server to DotNetNuke. I've modified the Engage: Publish module to support Tagging which was the last major feature I needed before I could finish things up. I'll start testing the import this weekend and see how it goes, hopefully I'll have the site converted before the end of next...

I setup a new skin here on ChrisHammond.com It's a tweak of the Luxterior Light skin for CommunityServer. I took a photo that I took in September 2006 and modified it a bit and used it as the background of the website. What do you...

According to CommunityServer here on weblogs.asp.net I have a TON of work to get done. "There are 4294 comments and/or trackbacks awaiting moderation for this blog.You can view them at:" Wow, I have 4294 comments and trackbacks that I need to approve or delete.... Gee thanks CS for being so helpful. All of these are spam comments/trackbacks, yet now with the upgrade of Weblogs.aspnet I'm getting email notifications for this every couple of days when a real comment is posted... Posted from...

Has anyone else had a HUGE influx of comment spam on your CS sites lately? (I'm assuming quite a few folks are seeing this)Over on ChrisHammond.com (upgraded to 2.1 a few days ago) I've been getting close to 100 spam messages a day. While it's nice to have the CS 2.1 spam filtering running over there, I'm curious if anyone has looked into where it's all coming from??? Posted from...

I saw this post from J-O this evening. Content parts are pretty useful within CS as J-O states. Here's another great use for them. On SCCAForums.com I needed an easy way to put some common navigation on a majority of the pages. I ended up creating a common contentpart on the SCCAForums.com pages that allows me to easily manage this navigation from within the browser. Posted from...

I've done some communityserver development in the past, but never anything with the CSmodules architecture. I was looking around for some good examples tonight and didn't come across too much along the lines of a CSModule that actually does something, until I came across this post from ScottW. I'll hopefully work with it this weekend, in between working on pulling motors. Posted from...

So I was looking around last night to update a site I setup for a buddy of mine. www.krek.name I was looking for some free community server skins.Where are they? They sure aren't easy to find if there are any actually out there and available? I found two on CommunityServer.org, and guess what, one of those was mine! I ended up using the other one for Krek's site, but I would have thought by now there'd be far more free skins available. Sure there are plenty of "blog" skins, but where are all the free skins for the rest of the application? Posted from...

Well, a quick test of the site and I'm so far unable to get google ads working on the new upgrade of CS. Perhaps that's part of the plan, or perhaps it's just an oversight. Posted from...