Site Templates Part 4: Community Site in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365

Before reading this article, I highly recommend reading my previous parts:

• Site Templates Part 1: Team Site in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365
• Site Template Part 2: Blogs in SharePoint 2013 or Office 365
• Site Templates Part 3: Project Site in SharePoint 2013 and Office 365

Welcome to the 4th Site template, Community Site in SharePoint 2013/Office 365. Here we will see what the components available are. We will see what the Community Site template provides us.

Click on create a new site, the following form opens up.

• Title and Description
  
  
• Web Site Address: Here you can make it different from your default site name.
  
  
• Template Selection: Here you have an option to select the language and to choose a site from a template having many options.

  Here in this article we will be seeing the Project Site template so select it.
  
  
  

• Permissions: Here you can assign permissions to the site directly either by inheriting the permissions from the parent or assigning it unique permissions.
  
  
• Navigation Inheritance: Using this option you can inherit the same navigation as your parent site.
  
  
  
  
• Click on Create, It will create the site.
  
  Welcome to the My Community Site, as in the screen below we can see the Home Page of the My Community Site divided into a left navigation, a center part and direct links on the right side to the features of the Community Site.

Let's see what it has for us.



Left navigation

As part of the left navigation we have links like:

1. Home
2. Categories
3. Members
4. About
5. Site Contents
   
   

As part of the community tools we have links as:

1. Manage discussions
2. Create categories
3. Create badges
4. Assign badges to members
5. Reputation settings
6. Community settings
   
   

Then we have what's happening on the right side of the site where it will portray the number of members, discussions and replies that had occurred until now on the community site.



Then we will have Top contributors where we will have the names of the users who have been identified as the most number of contributors on the community site.

Discussions

Then at the center, we have an option to create a discussion where a user can create a discussion, he can ask questions or views and other users can comment on them.

Here we have a basic input form where you need to add discussions on for the users to talk about.

We have the input as:

1. Subject
2. Body
3. Question: You can check the radio box to identify it as a question
4. Category: You can create new categories to assign your discussions to.

Categories

Here you can create new categories by filling in the following fields:

1. Category Name
2. Description
3. Category Picture

Badges

This is a Badge list where you can provide badges to the members of the community site.



Members

This is the members list where all the members have been added and from here you can assign a badge to the members by “Give Badge”.



Once you select a member, click on “Give Badge” and the following drop down opens where you can assign the badges to them as in here is Expert and Professional.



About the My Community Site

Here we have the brief description of the Community Site.



Site Contents

Here on the screen below we can see the site contents.



Here we have contents as:

1. Categories: It contains all the categories you want to add your discussions to.
   
   
2. Community Members: It contains all the members you add in the community site.
   
   
3. Discussion List: It contains all the discussions created by community members and all the threads pertaining to them.
   
   
4. Power BI: Microsoft provides comprehensive BI tools that integrate across Office applications and other Microsoft technologies. These tools enable analysis, reporting, dashboards and visualizations.
   
   
5. Site Assets: It stores all the assets of the site.
   
   
6. Site Pages: It stores all the pages of the site.

Site Settings:

Finally we can see the site settings that you can see from the previous blogs on Site Settings in SharePoint 2013 at C# Corner.

Link: Site Settings in SharePoint 2013.





But we have new features in Site Settings of the community site as Community Administration that are.

Manage Discussions

When we click on Manage Discussions, we will be re-directed to the Discussion List.



Manage Categories

When we click on Manage Categories, we will be re-directed to the Categories List.



Manage Members

When we click on Manage Members, we will be re-directed to the Members List.



Community Settings

Then we have community settings where you have the following two options:

1. Established Date: Here you can set the date that will represent when your community was established.
   
   
2. Reporting of offensive content: Here you can select this feature to allow the users to mark the a comment as abusive.

Reputation Settings:

Then we have Reputation Settings for the discussions where we have:

1. Rating settings: Where you can allow the discussions to be rated in the terms of stars and likes.
   
   
2. Members achievements point systems: Here you can assign points to the users for:
   
   1. Creating a new post
   2. Replying a post
   3. Member's post or reply getting like
   4. Member's reply getting marked as Best Reply.
      
      
      
3. Achievement Level Point: Here you can assign levels to the users after they reach certain points that will alot them in levels as configured by the admin.
   
   
4. Achievement Level Representation: Here you can assign images to the levels to the users where after they reach their levels they will be marked by an image as configured by the admin.

Here it was Community Site, once again SharePoint 2013 is making life easier for SharePoint users by giving a beautiful portal for discussions.

Keep Learning.
Cheers!