Community Kit for SharePoint Enhanced Blog Edition

I've been writing this blog for a few months now, so I figured it was time to explain a bit about how the blog site is built.

Being a Microsoft Gold Partner focused on SharePoint, I felt we should use SharePoint for our blog sites.  Of course I quickly ran into some limitations in doing that, particularly in a public facing blog site.  Things like anonymous commenting (with anti-spam protection) and friendly URLs were important to me.

It didn't take long to dig into the Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition to help with this.  This is a CodePlex project that can be found at http://cks.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Enhanced%20Blog%20Edition&referringTitle=Home.

Called CKS:EBE for short, it solves a lot of my problems.  For a good blog posting on what it is, I would recommend having a look at http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/blogging-with-sharepoints-enhanced-blog-edition-002482.php.

Of course not everything worked perfectly.  At first I didn't have the CAPTCHAs running (those funny distorted letters and numbers you have to type in so a site knows you are a real person).  It didn't take too long for the blog spammers to find me, and start over-running the site with automated spam comments.

I tried enabling the CAPTCHA, but it didn't work for me.  I eventually found http://cks.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=23454, which explains that the CAPTCHA only works on certain themes like Wildlife.  Of course the Default I was using it didn't.  I followed the thread in the post and used SharePoint Designer to update my Default theme, and the CAPTCHA fields started showing up.  However it still didn't work in the root site (which is what I am using), so as of today I still don't have them working.  No spam comments coming in anymore, but no comments at all either.  I'll have to keep plugging at that and keep you updated.