I came across a blog which demonstrates how to Create Resource Galleries programmatically, this is a totally unsupported by Microsoft and could lose your support with them on the product.

 

There is no way with the current MCMS API to allow you to create Galleries on the fly.

 

I am sure this feature will be availabel in the vNext version of MCMS/O12.

 

Another similar approach by Cubik to create Galleries programmatically.

There is a lot of information emerging about the next verson of MCMS and Office 12 in past few weeks, here are some links below:

 

MCMS/O12 vNext -

 

MCMS migration to vNext - early adopter opportunity -

 

Microsoft CMS Futures

 

Content Management Server and SharePoint (Office 12 Blogs)

 

Microsoft Enterprise Content Management (ECM) white paper-

 

 

via Jawad:

 

 

 

 via Chester's Blog:

 

CompareHTML is a component which ships with MCMS which can be used to compare two postings. This blog explains how it can be used to compare two postings. It can be extended as needed.

via Stefan:

Arpan Shah, Product Manager for MCMS and SharePoint has provided a nice list of his personal top 10 features in the next version:

There's a lot of great buzz in the community as well as Microsoft around the next version of Windows SharePoint Services and Office "12" servers. The amount of investment that's going into these technologies, if it wasn't obvious at PDC, is tremendous. I thought I'd take a moment to share with you my list of the top 10 favorite "things":

- Security/Auth "stuff" from supporting the ASP.NET 2.0 authentication provider model and security trimming to single item security. :-)
- Built on top of Whidbey - support for ASP.NET 2.0 web parts, nav/auth provider models, master pages :-), and more
- SPS/CMS integrated architecture from end-user to development and deployment
- RSS, Wikki and Blogging support.. the RSS support is especially great w/ the new version of Outlook... or any RSS reader really
- Content types - very cool and super useful.. define a content type that includes metadata and actions
- Recycle bin - IT orgs will love that
- Lists - things like eventing support, scalability
- Search investments - relevancy and User Experience are fantastic
- ECM investments - from content creation, sharing, searching, publishing to retaining
- Workflow based on Windows Workflow Foundation

There's a lot more... but I thought I'd list my top 10. I bet Fitz's top ten is more developer focused... and Mark's top ten is more solutions focused... mine is more of a mix of everything.

If you're already developing SharePoint solutions - your web part investments with the current version -will- carry on to VNext.

If you're a CMS customer, there's a lot of great things in the next release. However, there are some architectural changes. So, I recommend taking a look at the best practices whitepaper that I listed in my previous. On SP2 and Beta availability, we'll have more guidance on how to prepare.

Exciting news on the vNext version of MCMS!

 

via Stefan:

 

Ok, finally some official information next version of MCMS has been officially anounced and presented at PDC. Here is a short summary of everything that has been anounced so far:

• Next version of MCMS will be build on top of WSS in Office 12
• ASP.NET 2.0 features like Masterpages will be leveraged
• Plugable Membership and Role providers allow authentication against any 3rd party authentication source
• Plugable Navigation Providers allow easy to build navigation for your website
• Improved Content Deployment Concepts
• Improved Caching
• Publishing Content from documents in a SharePoint document library through an extensible converter framework
• Build in Search capabilities
• Extensible Workflow through use of Windows Workflow Foundation (WinFX)
• Automated Content Migration from MCMS 2002

via Chester:

This version includes

1. Posting Revert.
2. Resource Replace.
3. Multiple posting Approve, Submit, decline etc...

Download the newer version of MCMS Manager from here. Please post your feedbacks.

via Arpan:

 

There were several large announcements made at PDC that are very relevant to SharePoint and CMS customers. I'm personally super excited about this and to be part of this. Microsoft revealed Office "12" - client and servers and talked about our investment in ECM. This is great news for CMS and SharePoint customers that there is one integrated architecture for end-to-end document and content lifecyle.

Another huge announcement was the introduction of Windows Workflow Foundation - WinFX. http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/workflow/ Office "12" servers will build on this technology to provide some great workflow!

A lot of CMS and SharePoint customers and partners are wondering what they can do to better prepare for the next version of the technology. If you are a CMS customer, take a look at the newly published whitepaper at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnmscms02/html/CMSDesigningCMS2002Sol.asp.

If you are a SharePoint customer, make sure you follow guidelines published at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odc_SP2003_ta/html/WSSSharePointCodeReuse.asp

Finally released Skelta CMS Lite now named Skelta CMS Accelerator - Express Edition.

 

via Andrew

 

Seems the Skelta marketing group was throwing a few names around… but it looks like they’ve settled on the Skelta CMS Accelerator.  This is a free add-on to licensed MCMS 2002 installations, providing extended workflow to MCMS, as announced @ TechEd 2005.

Announcing the worldwide launch of Skelta CMS Accelerator - Express Edition (Free), a completely integrated out-of-the-box workflow solution for Microsoft Content Management Server. The CMS accelerator allows users to build extensive, customizable workflows for document approvals, automatically publish approved content and define separate workflows for multiple channels. It also has advanced features such as 2-way email, SMS and Active Directory support. Skelta CMS Accelerator is built on Skelta's award-winning workflow framework Skelta Workflow.NET.

Skelta.com

Regarless, it’s now available!

 

http://www.skelta.com/products/skelta-CMS/overview.aspx

Chster has complied a table which outlines the features of Site Manager and MCMS Manager

 

via Chester:

Chester has now released version 4 of MCMS Manager!

This tool is now a must have on any MCMS project!

Well done!

 

Via Chester:

 

I want to thank everyone for helping me to make it as a stable version. Also I've added Page properties editor with this release. Hope to see more feedback! You can download it from here. For more information check MCMS Manager Site.

via Stefan:

 

A question that often shows up in the newsgroup is the fact that in some situations links that MCMS should treat as internal managed links are saved as unmanaged external links. The problem with unmanaged external links is that in case you move the destination posting to a different location the link will no longer work.

The easiest way to identify if a link is stored as external or internal link is to switch between unpublished mode and published mode and check if the link changes.

What are actually reasons why MCMS would store a link as external link and not as internal link? Well, the reason is: This will happen in all situations where MCMS is not able to identify that the link is pointing to another posting.

 

Read More...

Chester has released a beta version of MCMS Manager Remote. This allows you to install MCMS Manager on remote client machine without MCMS 2002 being installed.

 

He has written a web service which is then installed on the main MCMS Server which the MCMS Manager Remote versoin now calls.

 

via Stefan:

 

A quick and easy way to display your Top level channels of your site is by using Datalist control for a Navigation control.

 

By binding the ChannelCollection to a Datalist makes it easier to manage, as you can now change the direction and the number columns the channels are dsiplayed. This can be done by changing the RepeatDirection="Horizontal" RepeatColumns="2" in the Datalist properties.

 

All you do now is to drop this control on the Home page template, and it should render the channels :

 

Advice & emergencies                Business
Community & people                  Education & learning
Environment                              Government & democracy
Health & social care                   Housing
Jobs & careers                           Law
Leisure & culture                        Money & benefits
News & communications            Transport & roads

 

Code:

C# code: 

namespace ajweb.UserControls
{
 using System;
 using System.Data;
 using System.Drawing;
 using System.Web;
 using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
 using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
 using Microsoft.ContentManagement.Publishing;
 using Microsoft.ContentManagement.Web ;
 using Microsoft.ContentManagement.Common ;
 using Microsoft.ContentManagement.WebControls;
 using System.Configuration;

 /// <summary>
 ///  Category Navigation Display for HomePage
 ///    Displays the Top Level of the category list from TopChannel for the homepage
 ///    navigation to the categories.
 /// </summary>

 public class categoryNavHomeDisplay : System.Web.UI.UserControl
 {
  protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataList DataListCategories;

  private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
  {
   // Put user code to initialize the page here

   //Get Top Channel of Site from Web.config Appsettings
   string topChannel = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["TopChannel"];
   Channel currentChannel = (Channel)CmsHttpContext.Current.RootChannel.GetByRelativePath(topChannel);
   ChannelCollection currentPostings = currentChannel.Channels;
   
   DataListCategories.ItemStyle.CssClass = "browse-text-new";
   this.DataListCategories.DataSource = currentPostings;
   this.DataBind();
  }

  #region Web Form Designer generated code
  override protected void OnInit(EventArgs e)
  {
   //
   // CODEGEN: This call is required by the ASP.NET Web Form Designer.
   //
   InitializeComponent();
   base.OnInit(e);
  }
  
  /// <summary>
  ///  Required method for Designer support - do not modify
  ///  the contents of this method with the code editor.
  /// </summary>
  private void InitializeComponent()
  {
   this.Load += new System.EventHandler(this.Page_Load);

  }
  #endregion
 }
}
 

 

User Control:

 

<%@ Control Language="c#" AutoEventWireup="false" Codebehind="categoryNavHomeDisplay.ascx.cs" Inherits="ajweb.UserControls.categoryNavHomeDisplay" TargetSchema="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5"%>

Andy is currently working with me on the same MCMS project, he has come up with a great workaround for sorting the PostingCollection.

 

via Andy:

I've been working on a fairly major MCMS2002 project and one of the things I've come up against is creating a PostingCollection. Now MCMS doesn't allow you to create a PostingCollection type so the only way around this is to store your collection of posts in an ArrayList. This is a shame as you loose the sorting functionality that is baked into the PostingCollection.

Having looked into this issue I've found a nice way to get sorting on the ArrayList that contains your posts. I actually used the CollectionView class which I mentioned previously in my blog. Using this I can pass in my ArrayList that has my posts in it and I can sort on any of the properties of the MCMS Posting type.  I think this technique is extremely powerful when you are building up a custom collections of posts to give you powerful sorting and filtering options.

 

 

 

MCMSFAQ:

 

A great article which takes you through the pro's and con's of AppPool recycling operations for MCMS and the SPARK connector for Sharepoint. The article covers:

 

 

via KBAlertz:

01271 You receive a script error message when you click "Switch to Edit Site"
after you restore a Content Management Server 2002 Web application template
http://www.kbAlertz.com/redir.aspx?kbs=193442