Community Server 2.1 Beta 2

Well, from the looks of things, hopefully you'd notice that I got CS 2.1 Beta 2 running this weekend.  Overall, an okay upgrade experience.  I only had one flaw, which took me 2-3 hours to troubleshoot.  Other than that, it was smooth sailing, kind of a shame I ran into that problem though.  I ran the SQL upgrade script without a problem, all green.  I then copied up the entire CS 2.1 web contents.  Updated the web.config and then went to login and got an ASP.NET profile error.  It took me awhile to figure it out, but all I needed to do was run another SQL script that came with CS 2.1 Beta 2 (the installation instructions didn't mention to run that file).  It needed to update the Membership schema, once that was done it worked perfectly.  So far I haven't encountered a single problem or error with this newest beta, but if you do run into a problem, be sure to email me and I'll report the issue to the CS team.

Thanks to Kris Cargile's recent CS upgrade, I also started using Ken Robertson's Qgyen.ExtendedUrlMapping for CS 2.1.  This add-on allows you to very easily run a single blog for a CS installation and it works perfectly.

I've also installed the Aero theme for CS 2.1 and its awesome.  It's a site-wide theme and not just for blogs, photos, or anything else.  It's for every page, including the admin pages.  It didn't take that long to setup and its pretty easy to configure.  The only thing that took a lot of time setting it up was uploading all of the background images :)  While I was doing that I very quickly came to the realization that the actual handling of photos in the photo area of CS is very lacking.  All of the operations for photos are based on a single photo.  There isn't an easy way to delete multiple files.  There isn't an easy way to move multiple files, and most importantly, there isn't an easy way to upload multiple files.  Very frustrating...until I found the CS Gallery Manager 1.2 by Duncan Menzies.  What a great tool that allows you to upload multiple images to your CS server.  It allows you to add a title, and description and you can specify which album to place the uploaded photos.  It's a standalone windows application so there is nothing to configure with CS.

Again, if you run into any problems with the site, please contact me so I can get any issues with the beta reported to the CS team.  Thanks.