Spent today redoing my site. My initial plan was to redo everything from the ground up. Luckily sanity set in and I stepped back to figure out how to make CS do what I wanted. So now Guerillaprogrammer.com is closer to what I want.
I killed several features in CS for my site and added a few new sections. Specifically - no more forums. I don't see that they contribute anything and I'm not planning on building a community site here anyway (never mind that I'm using CS). I also killed the photo gallery. I use Flickr for my pictures and it works great. I did add three other areas though:
1) Portfolio
I'm going to build a portfolio of things I have done. Or more accurately: work samples. I cant actually post previous work because my old clients might not like it. But I can demonstrate my own stuff. I'll be providing a number of articles, code sample or working prototypes and a few video presentations.
2) Hire Me
Next year I'm jumping the rest of the way off the cliff and going entirely freelance. I have my own corporation (Engine of Progress, Inc.) and I'm getting insurance setup. Ideally I'd like to do most work remotely, but realistically I'm going to be getting my executive platinum back because I'll spend plenty of time in airports again. The upside is that I'm going to be doing some really cool projects.
3) Contact information
just that - how best to reach me (email).
Doing this was pretty easy. A quick google search on "Community Server Add a page" will get you what you want. But to save time:
1) login as admin
2) go to the control panel/Administration/system tools/"manage/create articles"
3)create a new article - the name you type will become the name of the web-page (for example: portfolio becomes portfolio.aspx)
4)edit siteUrls.config -
find the navigation section and add your menu choice. For example:
<link name="portfolio" navigateUrl="guerillaprogrammer.com/content/portfolio.aspx" roles="Everyone" text="Portfolio" />
5) save siteUrls.config
Wait a few minutes because it take a little while before your new stuff will show up.
Based on this little trick I think I need to spend a bit more time understanding how siteUrls works. From examination of the file it really looks like 80% of CS's functionality comes from this little trick. There isn't actually a portfolio.aspx page anywhere on the file system. There is a row in the database though. Using siteUrls asp.net redirects the request to a different page that does the actual processing. So if you want to build your own custom plugin for CS you need to understand what is going on in here.