I have completed the aesthetic upgrades to my site that I could with the new Chameleon interface in Community Server 2007. Now it is time to do the fun stuff. One of the things I wanted to do was make the footer area an editable content area, but I didn't want to have to modify the Themes/[theme]/Common/master.Master file every time, like for copyright date changes.

In Community Server, there is a built in control just for this purpose. It is called a ContentPart control, and it is located in the CommunityServer.Controls assembly. There is no need to dive into Reflector, however. All that is required is adding a couple additional tags to a theme file where you want the editable content to live.

First, to the BodyFooterRegion ContentPlaceHolder control, which serves up the "Powered by Community Server" image seen below, I added style="float: right;" to keep it out of the way of my content.

Then, below the ContentPlaceHolder, I added the following tags and controls:

<div style="width: 650px;">
     <CSControl:ContentPart ID="ContentPart1" runat="server" ContentCssClass="CommonContentPartBorderOff"
         ContentHoverCssClass="CommonContentPartBorderOn" ContentName="footer-default">
         <DefaultContentTemplate>
             <!-- Default Content Here -->
         </DefaultContentTemplate>
     </CSControl:ContentPart>
</div>

One important note: Make sure you assign a unique ContentName to each ContentPart.  The names already taken by Community Server, that I am aware of, are welcome-default and featured-default.

And that's it for the editable footer. Now all that remains is to double-click on the footer and edit to your heart's content.