AlexCrome.CS 2008.5

Alex — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:56:00 GMT

I've finaly got around to finishing and packing up the 2008.5 version of my addons.

For those of you who can't wait to read the rest of this blog post, you can download the addons from the media gallery and read documentation on them from the wiki.

New in this version

Extended Attributes Sub Form

This is the addon I'm most excited about. A very powerful feature of Chameleon Forms in Community Server is the ability to plug in "SubForms" which can collect additional data and store it with the object when it saved. Whilst this is a powerful feature, for simple situations where you only want to collect extra data without performing validation or much extra work the SubForms method is overly complictaed with a lot of formality required to do a simple action.

The Extended Attributes SubForm is a SubForm which allows the controls within it to be defined through an XML file in much the same way you can define DynamicConfiguration optiosn for a theme in the theme.config file (In fact the subform control uses the same DynamicConfiguration bits as Theme Configurationd does). Whilst I accept the XML file itself is not as elegant as writing a custom SubForm, for simple data collection it is easier, and more accessible.

You can see an example of the SubForm in action at http://alexcrome.co.uk/demo/ExtendedAttributesSample.aspx .

The table of contents addon can be used to generate a Table of Cotnents for an individual post. The table of contents is generated based on the use of heading tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.) A table of contents is placed by adding [toc] into a post where you want the table of contents to appear. The following is the table of contents generated for this post.

Other smaller additions

New User Random Avatar - Sick of having lots of users with the anonymous avatar? This module will assign new members a random avatar from the Selectable Avatars store when they join.
Default Mirrored Blog Post Author - Sick of having mirrrored blog posts having the anonymous user avatar. This module will cause the posts to be created by the first owner of the blog the post is being mirrored to instead of the anonymous user.
SubscribeToHubOnJoin - Subscribes a user to a group when they join so they recieve email updates from that group.
New Hub Random Avatar - Does the same as the User Random Avatar module, but for Hubs.

Changes to Existing Addons

Referal Points now supports creating friendships betwen users when a user accepts an invitation from another user.
A few CSModules have been renamed

Get the Addons

To get the addons, just to to the media gallery and download the addon package. Installation instructions are available on the download page.