Tonight I finally got around to testing Community Server 2.0, which is the grandchild of this dotText blogging engine. I've seen some screenshots of it, and it looks quite nice.
Installing it was a breeze. I've set it up with SQLExpress (2005), which seems to work fairly well. The msi was a whole lot easier to work with than the dotText 0.95 set up. Logging in as an administrator was no trouble. It looks good.
And then... the downside. You have to be logged in as an admin to create a new blog. That's OK. I can deal with that. But even the process of setting up a blog for a newly created user was quite confusing. It took me like 30 minutes to figure out how to do it, AND to make sure I'd actually created a blog. Because when I logged in as this user, I didn't see ANY buttons or links that told me that I could now start blogging. After searching through the Community Server website, I found out that I could probably just type in http://mysite/Controlpanel/default.aspx, and it would work. OK, it's a work around, but I think it's really silly.
And then I wanted to create a post. After finding the control panel page when logged in as a common user, finding the button for "Create new post" was fairly simple. But when I tried clicking on it, I got this nasty error message, saying "server error in '/cs' application". It gave me an stack trace, but I can' figure out what was wrong... I've already created new post categories and done a bit of writing to the database, so I don't think it can be that.
So, after trying it out for about 2 hours, I'm actually quite dissapointed. I'm dissapointed about the usability of it. Setup was easy, actually using the solution is not.