The Beer House is a Starter Kit meaning Microsoft expects people to enhance and revise it. It has a lot of features but some enhancements come to mind.

Forum
MS itself use the Community Server I believe. My hosting service (webhost4life.com) includes Community Server for free with every ASP.NET account. This is a more full featured forum package but it suffers from having a separate database and login. Presumably NET 2.0 could support it as a provider. Has anyone done this?

A couple years ago I wrote my own forum pacage based on some public
free code. I suppose I could do that again to enhance the Beer House forum but I would rather just plug something better in. Anyone have anything better?

Chat and IM
I don't care much for these myself but many people expect such things on a community site.

Third Party Tools
The Beer House is made with vanilla MS tools. ComponentArt and telerik have well respected suites of tools to enhance the appearance and funtionality of .NET sites. I have a telerik license and intend to upgrade my own site based on the Beer House at least cosmetically. Has anyone else done this?

For example the poll results can be sent to a real charting package.

AJAX
I believe everying in The Beer House is done with post backs. Would it benefit from AJAX/Atlas?

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http://weboperahouse.com
http://www.boyleed.com

I agree, there is a lack of code in the original for stuff like MSN messenger and skype, I accept that not everyone would want this but what about a decent online admin page that allows features such as this to be turned on and off?

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What about search there seems to be a distinct lack of search features seeming this site comes direct of SQL Server

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Yes I noticed that the search features one expects on a site this sophisticated were missing. I have a speculation.

This site stores all of the users information in the Profile system. That is to say if you want a new attribute for a user you add it in the web.config file and the system creates the code to add it into the aspnet_profile table in SQL Server. That table stores new field (attribute) names in one row(tuple) and the values in another. So if you add a dozen new fields to a user's profile you still only have the same name and value fields in your database. By storing everything in long string fields MS has been able to automate a lot of the profile work - tables, and CRUD PROCs.

When you want to retrieve a value there is an Profile object which returns values with a simple syntax. However unless I misunderstand all this, the SQL Server indexing doesn't act with a row, nor is there a way to use the SQL Server full text searching. I don't see how you can do views or joins or filters.

The other thing I noticed after nearly deploying was the fact that there is no linking facility, my current site albeit privative asp allows users to add there own links, to a directory, (ok mine was custom build) but maybe its a good addon, sure would make this far better than DNN, anydays

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