Adding Default Features in Lotus Connections 2.5 Communities

One of the enhancements to Communities in Lotus Connections 2.5 is the ability to have a Blog, Wiki, Activity, and/or Files component attached to a Community.  In this screen shot you see a default community with the default Discussion Forum, Feeds and Bookmarks widgets. A community manager can click on the customize button and add one of the other features in to a community, you will notice here we have four features to select from In this example a Wiki was selected so the community now has a Wiki added to it and is displayed as a menu item and in the widget display. Now this is all fine and well, but lets say someone defines a requirement that every community created should have one (or more) of the features by default.  In this example I will show how to add the Files feature as a default service in new communities created. To change the default widget configuration you will need to edit the widgets-config.xml file located in the LotusConnections-config directory. (remember to check out the file, don’t edit the original directly) Once you have the file checked out you are looking for the Communities default layout section (which happens to be at the end of the file).  This is what it looks like by default.  Each line is specifying a widget and it’s location in Community, and as you can see we have the three default widgets defined (Forum, Feeds, and Bookmarks). To add a widget to a communities default layout you need to know the unique ID defined in the widget definition.  All of the widget definitions are in the widgets-config.xml file and here is the definition of the Files feature as an example  the defild=”Files” is the piece of information we are looking for here, where Files is the widget ID. We take that information and we add a new line in to the default community template specifying Files as the defIDRef and FilesInstance1 as the instanceID as seen here. Once Communities is restarted when a new community is created it will contain the Files service by default and when customizing the community we no longer have the option to add Files since it is already a default choice This shows how to add one of the other Connections features in to all new Communities created by default.  If you want to make it even more interesting you are not limited to the Widgets that come with Connections you can define your own widgets for inclusion in Communities as well. see Enabling custom widgets for Communities in the Lotus Connections Infocenter for more information on custom widgets.