After running on Community Server since 2005 I thought it was time to move over to a new hosting platform. Back when I started the site using a Microsoft technology solution was best option as I planned to used customise the source code. Over the years the site has grown and unfortunately Telligent moved away from the community and targeted Community Server at large businesses and dropped the free edition. Also the platform never really developed as I hoped, Telligent where slow in embracing social media and new web technologies which left the site looking a bit dated. I looked in envy at some of the great looking WordPress sites and the vast number of themes and plugins available so I decided to move the site over to WordPress.

Getting WordPress up and running was easy but getting the content out of Community Server was not. There are no built in tools to export the data and while I could use RSS to move over the posts it didn’t bring over all the data. After a search around the web for how to export the data I found a few solutions that looked like would work but they didn’t work that well so I resorted to writing my own code. With a bit of .net code I was able to export the data and write it out into WordPress WXL format and now I have all the posts (going back to 2006) moved over. To maintain the old URLs I wrote a little web service that would take the old community server URL and redirect it to the new WordPress blog and get the old images from the old community server store. So now the new site is up and running.

The RSS feeds for the old individual blogs are now all merged in to the main feed so the feeds are simplified to 3 main feeds:

As well as the new look and feel the site also has better social networking integration, you can join using your Twitter ID, Facebook ID or Google ID and there is an all new forum.

So please join the site and while there is no members blog I still want to keep the tradition going so all members can blog on TDL, just let me know your userid and I can set you up.

I hope you like the new site, the platform has a lot of room for development going forward so if you have any feedback or suggestions please let me know via the contact form.

 

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