So for those of you following me on Twitter or Facebook, you might know that this blog is now running on SharePoint Foundation 2010 and the newly released Community Kit for SharePoint Extended Blog Edition Version 3.0.  It was rumored that this may work, but also a little bit cryptic in the release notes, only saying:

No mention what these web.config edits may be however, and when I tried reaching out to some of the folks on the dev team I didn't actually get an answer, but I did hear from Matthew McDermot that it did indeed work, and so I decided to just give it a go and deal with the problems as they came up.  So here goes, but first, if you need to download the software, do so with the following links:

• ​SharePoint 2010 Foundation
  
• CKS:EBE 3.0

Now I had an existing site running in it's own web application (and it's own content database) on WSS 3.0 and CKS:EBE 2.0 (never upgraded production to 2.5).  So my first step was to get that upgraded to SPF2010.  Since I had it in it's own separate content DB this was pretty straight forward.  I just detached and reattached the DB in the SQL servers, created a new web application on SPF, and then ran the following STSADM command:

A couple notes about this upgrade process:

• You have to run that command from stsadm or powershell. The GUI doesn't support adding content databases that require upgrading.
  
• You need to make sure if you are using all the default database settings (server, username, password, etc...) like I did above that you give the appropriate accounts access to your newly attached content DB
• You can use other methods for doing this upgrade of course (in place, etc..) If you want to do the DB attach method but don't have the site in it's own content DB, you can do a site collection backup with stsadm, then restore it to a new web application (with it's own content DB).  Don't try restoring your backup directly to the SPF server though, that will fail since there's no "upgrader" in that process (that would have been a nice feature though). For more information on how to migrate to SharePoint 2010 see the TechNet Resource Center on the topic.

First of all, it's not necessarily your theme or the MTF that isn't working, but rather the HTTP module that does the URL redirection needs some attention.  This, I gather is the "with web.config edits" the note above was referring to.  So crack open web.config on the site and find the following line:

You will find the above in the <httpModules> section.  Go ahead and CUT that line above (we'll be pasting it somewhere else in a minute).  Next find the section simply labeled <modules>.  In this section you will probably find 5 <remove> tags and 4 <add> tags.  Paste the "add" tag that you cut above so that it's after all the removes, but before the add's in the modules section.  Also, you need to add a preCondition="integratedMode" attribute to this element.  So, your whole <modules> section will look something like this (with your additions bolded below):

      <remove name="AnonymousIdentification" />
      <remove name="FileAuthorization" />
      <remove name="Profile" />
      <remove name="WebDAVModule" />
      <remove name="Session" />
      <add name="CksEbeModule" preCondition="integratedMode" type="CKS.EBE.BlogHttpModule, CKS.EBE, Version=0.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3e8b700c069fb747" />
      <add name="SPRequestModule" preCondition="integratedMode" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPRequestModule, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
      <add name="ScriptModule" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
      <add name="SharePoint14Module" preCondition="integratedMode" />
      <add name="RSRedirectModule" type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.SharePoint.Soap.RSRedirectModule, RSSharePointSoapProxy, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91" />
    </modules>​

Ok, so now at this point you can hopefully pull up the EBE site and have the MTF working.  If not, then try going into the CKSEBE settings and change your default theme to DEFAULT (and make sure you have that one deployed).  This will eliminate any issues in your customized theme for a baseline.  Another gotcha (which got me) is that you need to make sure that you have all of your access mappings done correctly.  It seems like under SPF the BlogHttpModule is a lot more finicky that it was under WSS3. In my case I have my blog server being reverse proxied by an IIS 7.5 server, so it can get a little confusing with all the host headers flying around.

So now we are at a point that the OOB CKS themes should be working on SPF 2010. Yey! The next step is to get your theme working.  If you made any changes to the "content" pages, like home.aspx, post.aspx, categories.aspx, and month.aspx, then now is the time to go and make those again since when you activated the new CKS:EBE web feature it would have overwritten those that were upgraded from your old content DB.  For example, in mine, since I don't use webparts on my blog, I changed all of these pages to not inherit from webpart page since that does lots of crazy things like pushing down core.css and core/init.js which we don't need.  I also don't have a placeholder for blogcomments in my theme's masterpage since I use JS-KIT Echo.  If I didn't remove those from the content pages, then they would throw errors.

And finally, the one last thing that I had to tweak to get my blog working again was related to the tagcloud.xsl where it was rendering all of my tags tiny (w8 class).  After a little debugging it appeared that the PostCount variable was not getting set for each category that came back in the <EBE:CategoriesList> webcontrol.  A quick look in reflector showed me that this control has a property IncludePostCount.  It seems that in the past this defaulted to true and now it defaults to false.  Not a big deal, just make sure you set it to true in the <EBE:CategoriesList> webcontrol if you want those populated so that the TagCloud.xsl can do it's thing and calculate relative frequency styling.

I have a feeling I will find other little quirks along the way- which won't be a suprise since this version doesn't actually make claims that it is "SP2010 Ready" or anything.  I may start trying to take advantage of other SP2010 native functions over time, but for now if nothing else, I recommend this upgrade for the sole reason that the post editing interface is so much nicer!

If you want to read more about how this blog is put together and more about customizing the CKS:EBE (older 2.0 version), then look through the kickboard tag on this blog.