Ektron Developer's Guide: Building an Ektron Powered Website

Chapter 10. Supporting Customers

• How do you support an existing customer base with Forums?

• How do you use blogs to connect to a community?

• How can you use a wiki to create community content?

• Can you use the SocialBar to share pages and media?

• What's the easiest way to get feedback on content?

So far you have worked on managing the content and information architecture of your site. You made sure the navigational elements help clients find the content they are looking for quickly and accurately, and you had begun to explore community outreach in the form of calendars and surveys. The next step is to foster a deeper community, a natural meeting ground for the people who work with your product on a day-to-day basis. Getting your customers interacting on your site is one of the key pieces to building a community around your product.

One of the fundamentals of creating that type of interplay is allowing users to author content on your site, and manage it through the overall lifecycle. To that end, in this chapter you will review some of the basic building blocks to help your site garner more user interaction.

This chapter also covers some of the control mechanisms available to manage all this user- generated content. The ContentReview Server Control and ContentFlagging Server Control allow you to farm out moderation duties to your user base, and easily run reports to ensure that all the content you are exposing to the world is in good shape.

Of course, none of these features will bind your users ...