How to add a section to Community Server
If you have used Community Server, then you know that it is an awesome application.
What it doesn't do right out of the box is to allow you to add new sections to your site. If you
want to add a new group of pages to your Community Server site, then here is one way to do it that is pretty
simple.
Add a new menu item to your navigation bar:
The default menu bar will look like this.
You need to open the SiteUrls.config file in the root of your website, and find the
'siteUrls | navigation' section (image below) which contains the links of the menu.
Now we'll add a link to the navigation bar (image below), by adding:
<link name="articles" navigateUrl="http://localhost/comservweb/content/Articles.aspx"
text="Articles" />
You will not use 'http://localhost/comservweb', but rather your own Url, so from here forward,
I will put [your url] or 'http://localhost/comservweb', but you will always use your own url.
The Articles page doesn't exist yet, but we will add it in a few minutes. The 'content' folder does
exist already, and that is where pages go when we add new articles using the Community Server
administration pages so it is important that we use '[your
url]/content/...' for our 'navigateUrl'.
After saving the changes to the SiteUrls.config file, and allowing a few minutes for the cache to clear,
the new menu item will show up in your menu (image below).
Add the 'Articles.aspx' page to the site:
Now we have our link in the navigation bar, but we still need to create a page called
'Articles.aspx' so the link will work.
Sign into your site as an adminstrator and go to 'System Tools | Manage/Create Articles', then
click 'Create new Article'. On this page, I'm switching to html view to add some links to our
new page. Also, notice that I named the page 'Articles' because our link above is to 'http://localhost/comservweb/content/Articles.aspx', and the
name set here is the name that is assigned to the aspx page. Add your links using the '[your url]/content/...' url because all
articles we create will be put into the 'content' folder of your Community Server site.
Adding new pages:
In the last part we added links to three pages, so now I'm going to add those pages. I know
I'm doing this in an unnatural reverse order. Normally you would create a page, then link it into
your website, but for this tutorial, I thought it may be easier to see items added one at a time.
Anyway, back to creating our 3 pages so our links work. Use the same 'Add new Article' page to
to create 3 more pages, naming them 'myFirstArticle', 'mySecondArticle', and 'myThirdArticle'. I won't show
that since it basically the same as the last step except you will put content into these pages instead of
building links to the pages of the section.
Now we have the following pages in our site, and we are done:
Technical note:
If you look in the 'content' folder of your site, you will see that there are no files there. The content is actually stored in your database and the application uses its own 'magic' to make the urls work. You like that
don't you? I just boiled down the technical part to 'magic' but it works so we'll keep it simple and leave
it at that.