Friday I answered a question in the forums on CommunityServer.org about adding an blog list in the sidebar. I had done this before to this site on previous versions of CS. I had not taken the time to do it yet, so for maybe the first time in my life it thought, “No better time than the present!“.
My answer involved making some code changes to the core. After thinking about it some more I realized I would either have to find a way to do the same thing without the code changes or I would have to write an external control to drop in for those who would rather not muck around in the code.
After spending a bit of time trying to get AggregateBlogList to display using a different skin I ended up just creating a new control (a server control) that inherits from Aggregate Blog List named AggregateBlogListSidebar, which then by default uses a skin named Skin-AggregateBlogListSidebar.
You can see the results here.
So, grab the code from here. Drop the dll in your bin folder. Add the Skin-AggregateBlogListSidebar skin and then update your Skin-AggregateColumn file to make use of the new control. (more detailed instructions are included in the ReadMe in the zip)
If you’d prefer to alter your code or create your own control rather than use my dll then it really is as simple as this:
using CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls;
namespace DanHounshell.CS.Controls {
public class AggregateBlogListSidebar : AggregateBlogList {
}
}