The too-long process the other day with Community Server list controls has allowed me to get the home page of this site into something close to what it will (probably) look like on release.

Getting it to the current state has considerably increased my confidence that I'll be able to make the site do what I hope it will do.  

I'm now fully impressed with the CS system, even if I'm still a bit overwhelmed by some of what I still need to do to get this into a shape that I'm willing to call a 'beta' and tell other people about.

My next task will be to move the news digest posts over to this system as their original source. (Digest items are currently arriving here from the buggy-but-useful Blinklist service.) It looks like I'll need to do a bit of coding to make that happen.

I'll continue to use the underlying CS blog system to hold the news digest items, but I believe that I'll need to add two custom properties for the posts in that blog -- one for SourceUrl and one for SourceName. I know (thanks to the Wrox book) that those can be stored as extended properties of the post object. But I think it will be necessary to add a tab to the blog editor where I can easily set the values.

In the longer run, I believe that it will be useful to do more page-level or control-level coding to present the digest info correctly. For instance, when the digest item is displayed on the home-page list (as it is now), I want the title url to go to the full post here (which will include a longer digest) on this site rather than to the original source as it does now. I'll keep the "Read source" link, but will have to do some control-level coding on the lister to set that to the value read from the (new) extended property for SourceUrl.

In the slightly longer run, I'd like to add "Source: <Source Name with link>" to the start of each full post (and probably also to the start of any feed item from the digest), but not to the underlying post. In other words, I want the source link displayed only when the full content of the item is being shown, but (probably) not on any of the brief aggregate displays. I would, however, want to add that link to the bottom of each post in the data store so that it's always available.

[Module code offered on pg. 253 of the Wrox book would be a good starting point for customizing feed content.] 

Beyond that, I'd like to create an Ajax form similar to what Blinklist offers that would let me (and -- hopefully -- others) easily add items to the digest while reading a news story.