Overview Of Community Site Template In SharePoint

Introduction

• Community site is a new site template that provides a forum experience in SharePoint Online. We can use communities to categorize and cultivate discussions among a broad group of people across organizations in a company.
• You can also activate community site features on existing sites without creating community site templates, to access the features like Badges, Discussions, Community Members, Categories.

Let’s see how to create a community site in SharePoint Online.

• Open http://portal.office365.com
• Log in with your valid tenant username and password.
• Navigate to Admin Center -> SharePoint.
• Click New -> Private site collection.

Provide the site title and web site address.

Pick a site template -> community site.



Click OK.



The community site has been successfully created with awesome community experience features.

Lists

Categories, Community members, Discussion List, Site Pages.


Categories

Using this category list, we can define the categories for discussion, for example - Products, Clothing, Electronics like this kind of key terms.

Discussion List

Using Discussion list, it holds the posts posted by the community members and likes, ratings and replies from other members inside the community,

Community Members

This list may work as a database for holding all the community members information inside the community forum

Site Pages

In this site template site pages were pretty different It holds the different pages by default here the list of pages Community home, About, Topic, Categories, Category, Members

• Community Home
  
  It’s a default home page it holds all the discussions, Top members widget, Community tools it helps to create badges, assign badges, set reputation and more… I will discuss after with detailed information
  
  
  

• About
  
  This page provides the rules and regulations about the community and the rest of other components are the same as the Home page
  
  
  

• Topic
  
  This page is a separate page for discussion-related information.
  
  
  

• Categories
  
  Using this page, we can create and manage categories for discussions.
  
  
  

• Members
  
  It holds the members' and top members' information inside the community.
  
  
  

Let’s explain all the components:

Discussions inside the community based on categories:

Navigate to homepage -> Community tools -> Click create categories

Click Create categories

On the page Click New-> provide Category Name, Description and Image source


Am created “Electronics, mobiles, Clothes”



Now create discussion based on categories

Navigate to homepage -> click New Discussion


Click save



Now you can see this discussion was under category “Electronics

Also, you guys can provide likes and reply to comments with your suggestion about the discussion


Now you are able to see the member of community sites and his posts


Now let’s assign a badge for a community members

In community tools -> click Create badges


By default, you get Expert, Professional

Am going to Add “Member”



Let’s Assign a Badge to member

Click Assign badge to members

Click on -> moderation -> Give Badge


Assign Badge as “Professional”

Let’s see here

Badge has been assigned to the community member

Open community tools -> Click Reputation settings




Here you can assign reputation points for creating and replying posts for likes and best replies

You can also achievement levels as points and images



Click ok to complete the setup

Now open community tools -> Click Community settings



Enable auto approval for permission requests and reporting of offensive contents.




I just checked "Enable auto approval" and clicked OK.

So now, you guys know about community sites, its default components, and working cycle.

Happy SharePointing!...