As promised, we’re releasing additional Community Server Hack-A-Thon videos to demonstrate the extensibility of our proven platform using the new Web services API.

Read the original post here.

The first: Jayme Davis, Senior Software Development Engineer, created an OS X Widget that gives you a quick and easy way to follow some of the statistics on your community. It also shows you any unanswered forum posts.

Care to take a look? Learn more by watching this video: http://www.screencast.com/users/jaymedavis/folders/Jing/media/005457ec-b887-40ae-b31c-8c8db0e0b86c

The second: Kevin Harder, Software Development Engineer, developed a Community Server Forums Graffiti Plug-in that creates a mini-forums application within Graffiti. It uses the Community Server REST API to retrieve and save all forum data from a back-end Community Server site.

The plug-in provides four “views” – groups, individual groups, individual forums, and threads. Each view is skinnable, the same way you would normally skin a Graffiti page. The plug-in also adds some Chalk extensions such as $forums, $threads, etc.
When configuring the plug-in, you give it an admin user account and token, but the current logged-in user’s name is used when retrieving info from the service so that each user will only see what he/she has permission to view (using ASP.NET shared membership).

You can create a new thread, reply to a post within a thread, and edit a post.  When doing so, it uses Ajax to call the REST API, updates CS in the background, and then re-retrieves the updated information. All REST API calls are cached for 90 seconds (except when creating a new post) to reduce the number of REST calls made.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Watch the 5-minute preview: http://screencast.com/t/q5SVz7mOo

The third: Dan Hounshell, Senior Software Development Engineer, built Community Server Messenger, a desktop client that works with Community Server “Conversations.”

Dan borrowed the UI from TeleTwitter, ripped out all the guts, and replaced it with calls to the Community Server API. There are a few limitations to the initial application, but it should be easy enough to add tracking for activities and comments, add support for multiple recipients, and allow adding to existing conversations.

Other useful additions include:

• Linking to the user’s profile page
• Implementing as either a WPF or AIR application rather than a Windows form
• Support for multiple sites, or
• Even allowing for branding to a specific site

This is what Dan showed us: http://www.screencast.com/t/WaZvZWe59dX
 

We hope the above entries will continue to give you ideas about what you can do with the Community Server 2008 Web services API. Remember, these extensions were all built in less than a day.

Happy extending!

 

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