CS2007 Upgrade Complete!

 Here are the magical words that everyone loves to hear when undertaking a major upgrade:

"Well, that was easy!"

I was able to jettison Community Server 2.1 in favor of the just-released CS2007 in fifteen minutes flat, including the database upgrade, backups, and replacing the old with the new. That time does not, however, include the six or so hours spent converting my old blog skin to Chameleon, the new theming engine (many thanks to Ben Tiedt's documentation for getting through this one). This was not made any easier by the fact that I didn't know that the SDK was released alongside the product. Either way, I got the job done. More on that exciting undertaking in another post.

I'm sure I missed something, so I'll be looking things over carefully for the next few days, but everything seems to be running (on the first try, even!) 

CS 2007 is Available

Looks like Community Server 2007 made it out the door on time after all. I've already got it installed on my local environment, but it would appear that there's some port work necessary to get everything up and running with my old skin. Seeing as my development environment isn't 100% there yet (new machine; more on that later), that will take a little time. Perhaps I shall document it.

I haven't played with the new software at all, yet, but I can say one thing without a doubt: the new default skin is a tremendous improvement over CS2.x.

Learning Chameleon

Ben Tiedt, one of the developers working on the new Community Server 3.0 skinning engine ("Chameleon"), has been cluing us in on some of the details of how the new functionality works for the past week or so. From what I can see, this is going to be a huge change, and almost certainly a good one. For anyone who does any sort of CS skinning, I highly recommend checking it out.

Personally, I've been waiting for the details of the new skinning engine to arrive before I start work on a new blog skin (actually, with Chameleon's help, I may go straight for the complete site skin, but we'll see how much time I've got). I figure that the best way to get familiar with the new system is to try putting it to work. Looks like it's about time to get some new designs in motion...