What are my options to adding completely custom functionality within Active Social?  For example, if I wanted to add a "like" button to journal entries, is there a way that I can add a custom user control to the journal entry template?  Or define a custom token (with access to code/database)?

Also, I see guides on how to create custom templates for portals or themes, but what's the best way to customize the config files (if there is one)? For example, to change the markup produced by one of Active Social's tokens, or change one of the journal templates?

Can I add config files to a theme, or are overrides always at the portal level? Is this recommended against, or is it safe?

Actually, this feature was just release in the latest version of Active Social.



You can copy local portal level versions for most these so you can modify the tabs, add new tabs, etc.

You don't have to manually copy the files if you use the Template Editor in the Control Panel > Design section. It will make copies in the correct directories depending on which type of template you are trying to save.

Ben, that just applies to templates, right? There's not a way to customize the config files via the Template Editor, is there?

Oh, I'm sorry. That is correct.

I guess I'd still like to hear of the recommended way to add custom server-side functionality to a template.  Is that possible?

I haven't done it in a long time, but as far as I know you can just register your control at the top of any of the .ascx template files. Ideally you would also copy the template to the correct directory in the portals folder, but that shouldn't affect the code at all.

Hmmm... I wasn't able to get the template to recognize anything I registered.  I couldn't even get something like <%= DateTime.Now %> to render...

I describe how I got it working here: http://www.activemodules.com/active...ols/#70836

One more thing I do to customize it run a search/replace module. I wrote my own but something like PageBlaster may suffice. This works best with javascript or behind the scenes type stuff. For example, you would define a tag like: [MP3=http://mysite.com/somesong.mp3] and the regex will replace it before it gets sent to the user with the script to embed an MP3 player for the specified file.