CS2007 Forums at the Root
In reading the Community Server forums, I saw some questions about using forums at the root. I thought that was a great question. I am running my site with a blog at the root and I've seen several sites where they have deployed a forum at the root. Dan documented how to blog at the root for CS2.0 but I don't believe there's quite as much information on running other applications at the root.
To use forums at the root in Community Server 2007, you'll want to do the following things (but don't, yet):
In your SiteURLs.config, find the following setting:
<location name="forums" path="/forums/" themeDir="forums">
You would change your path to "/" and add an attribute for physicalPath. The resulting line would be:
<location name="forums" path="/" physicalPath="/forums/" themeDir="forums">
Now, before you go changing your SiteURLs file, note that Community Server 2007 introduces config override files. Scott Watermasysk provided the override files for blogging at the root which also disables many unnecessary modules and jobs - extremely convenient - thanks, Scott!
The reason you want to use the _override.config files is that you can easily maintain your custom config changes through upgrades/updates/service packs, etc. Your custom config changes will always exist in the _override files.
The logic in the siteurls_override.config file is:
<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Overrides>
<Overridexpath = "/SiteUrls/locations/location[@name='forums']"mode = "change"name = "path"value = "/" />
<Overridexpath = "/SiteUrls/locations/location[@name='forums']"mode = "new"name = "physicalPath"value = "/forums/" />
</Overrides>
I've attached a file containing Scott Watermasysk's blog at the root files and the forums at the root file discussed here. In the next few days I'll try to get a galleries at the root and add those to the collection.
One note - Scott's files were designed for a single-blog CS implementation and therefore remove a number of components that don't need to run if you aren't using anything but a blog. It's easy enough to see what has been removed in the override so take a look at those files if you may use a gallery or something elsewhere on your site and delete the "remove" lines if you want to keep some of those components.