Overview of Community Service

When used in conjunction with Portal Server's Community Sample, Blog portlet provides for a per community weblog. Only community members can post to the weblog. If the Roller server user interface is left directly accessible, then all weblogs, including community weblogs, are visible to any user with access to the Roller server. Set up the Roller server in a headless configuration that only exposes the APP and AAPP endpoints. Refer to documentation in the Roller project page fore more information.

The Blog community service is not enabled by default (see Enabling Blog Community Service for more information on how to enable the Blog community service). When a new community is created that contains the Blog community service, Blog provisioning occurs.

Blog provisioning prepares a weblog for use within a newly created community. It performs the following steps automatically when a new community is created.

1. Creates community specific, shared weblog user account.

2. Creates a community specific weblog.

3. Adds the user account as a member of the weblog.

4. Sets various portlet preferences according to the weblog and weblog user account created in steps 1 and 2.

If the community specific weblog already exists, it is used as is. If the shared weblog user account already exists, it's properties are reset to those expected by the Blog community service.

The community weblog's handle (it's unique identifier) is equal to the community name. A weblog also has a description and various other properties. These are all set to generic default values when the weblog is created by provisioning. The values can be changed later by accessing the Roller server directly.

The APP entries URL, and the user name and password of the shared user, are set into the preferences of the community display profile. Therefore, all community users will get these preferences, and the community blog service will access the community weblog with the credentials of the shared user account. The author of new weblog posts will be the shared user.

If community users wish to access the weblog with a personalized (nonshared) weblog user account, they can do so by editing the Blog portlet. This allows the user to either create a new weblog user account or specify an existing one, and add the user to the community weblog as a member. Once the user personalizes their weblog user account settings, they cannot revert to the shared user account.

By default, when personalized by a community owner, the weblog user account is added as a member of the community weblog with the administrator role. When personalized by a community member, the user account is added with the author role. This behavior is controlled by the memberPermission portlet preference (see Portlet Preferences for more information).

If community users wish to customize the community weblog properties such as description and locale, they can do so by accessing the Roller weblog server directly. The default access URL for the Roller server is http://<server>[:<port>]/roller. The authenticating user must have the admin role in a weblog to modify weblog properties.

Portal community users can access the Roller weblog server directly (if it is configured to allow it). From there, they can post and otherwise manage the weblog entries of the Portal community weblogs (of which they are a member).