Every month, DotNetNuke’s got a brand new look on Facebook! Do you Like it?

May is a month of “Festivals” the world over! From the Strawberry St. Festival in Richmond, VA to Sposalizio dell’ Albero (the Wedding of the Trees) in Vetralla, Italy people find reason to celebrate this glorious month.  And at DotNetNuke we believe we have reason to celebrate too!

This is a serious release of Events, completely in line with the DNN6 UX/UI guidelines and ready for Windows Azure.
A special thanks from me goes to Roger Selwyn, colleague team member of Events, who did splendid development work for this release of Events.
 

Every week it seems more and more people are asking me how they can run DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. Last year David Rodriguez released the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator which aims to simplify the process of installing DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. It was a great alternative to manually deploying DotNetNuke but it required the user to know how to use the Windows Azure Management Portal for setting up their Azure account. The original version of the accelerator also included the DotNetNuke installation package within the download. This meant that the accelerator was closely tied to the DotNetNuke version and had to be updated with every DotNetNuke release.

So I have been a smartphone user for a few years now, and it continues to astound me how much I rely on my device on a daily basis. People who know me well will tell you I am generally not an early adopter of technology, so it took me longer than most of my technophile contemporaries before I jumped on the bandwagon. And the real tipping point for me was when I realized that I could replace a number of single-purpose devices with an “all-in-one” solution.

In a practical way I could get rid of my cell phone, my MP3 music player, a GPS, an antiquated voice recorder, and a low resolution point-and-shoot digital camera in favor of a single smart phone. And sure, some of those devices had a few more bells and whistles than what was available on the smartphone, but those were typically features which I did not use or care about. And even better, most smartphones were designed with extensibility in mind… which means that I could easily enhance my smartphone with additional capabilities that matter to me, over and above what comes installed on the device.

In thinking some more about this topic, I realized that the convenience of  “all-in-one” solutions have always appealed to me...

Last week Website Magazine published their June issue which contained a list of the Top 50 Content Management Solutions available in the market. The list included both open source as well as proprietary content management systems and the ranking was based on a custom formula of website popularity based on average daily unique visitors and page views.

Aside from the list itself, Website Magazine also tried to explain in layman’s terms the definition of a content management system and how they add value to a business. The high level description of a “system that helps digital Web workers manage content in whatever form or type it is available” was fairly good, but the elaboration of “Content management systems act as the skeleton for a Web presence, providing a framework — if you will — for the future growth of a company’s digital assets” was even better, in my opinion. And in terms of evaluating CMS systems, I really liked the statement that “The best content management system is the one that provides features that match the demands and growth projections of your enterprise”.

DotNetNuke made the list at the #13 position, behind a number of very successful enterprise software systems and widely deployed open source projects.

The module Form and List will have a new release very soon. Currently a Release Candidate is available for you for final testing. 

What is Form and List? The last release of Form and List happened more than 2 years ago, and, as the former core modules are no longer part of the distribution, it is time to introduce the module again. 

Form and List evolved from a simple list module, called User Defined Table. A list is basically...

Almost exactly one year ago I posted a blog which highlighted the three most pervasive technological trends in the software industry and predicted that the Content Management market was in for a significant disruption in the coming years as it attempts to get comfortable with these new technologies. This same blog was republished with Bryan Ruby’s permission on the CMS Report website.

This morning I kicked off Day 2 at CMS Expo in Chicago, IL with a mini-keynote on this same topic. But rather than just talking about what cloud, mobile, and social represent from a technology perspective, I also tried to explain WHY these trends have come to the forefront in recent years.

At a fundamental level I believe they are actually driven by globalization. And globalization would not have been possible without some critical infrastructure, specifically Internet connectivity, access to broadband, and affordable mobile devices. These innovations provided the basis for a global distributed workforce. However, they alone were not enough to generate the expected return on investment in terms of increased business efficiency and productivity. Rather, this required the emergence of collaborative business networks – networks which could provide the necessary collaboration, coordination, and communication to forge deeper business relationships and more meaningful interactions. And these collaborative business networks rely on those three industry trends which we are all very familiar with now: cloud, mobile, social – also known as systems of engagement. Systems of engagement are critical for getting the most out of a global economy.

In the context of Content Management, we firmly believe that your CMS will continue to be the central hub of your business. However, we also believe that in order to adapt to the changing landscape, your CMS will need to be fully and deeply integrated with systems of engagement. The resulting solution is a perfect marriage of content creation and content delivery. And in looking at the innovation adoption lifecycle, we believe that the cloud, mobile, and social trends have already jumped the chasm and are well on their way to gaining mainstream adoption in the mid-market.

In summary, we believe the future of C.M.S. is already being redefined as Cloud, Mobile, and Social. And we are taking steps to ensure DotNetNuke is ready for this transformation.

The slides for my mini-keynote can be dowloaded here.

The release of the DotNetNuke 6.2 Beta 2 was really the first chance users had some insight into what their installs might look like after upgrading to 6.2. In the previous beta of the blog module, the majority of the changes were on the administration side of the module or behind the scenes. In this beta release, the majority of changes are around things content authors and blog readers typically see. So similar to the core beta 2, this module beta 2 will offer blog module users some insight into what they should expect to see in the final release. Also similar to the core beta 2 is that this is the last chance to test and submit your issues to the project's issue tracker.

New version of the good old User Directory released.

It is quite often that when working on a new version of a site that you will have a development, test, upgrade copy of the site that might be around for a while.  It is also possible that if you are working for a third-party that you might stage client sites on your server for a period of time before go-live.  At first glance this all seems common place and not something that you would be concerned about.  However, that is not the case.  Search engines have become overly aggressive in indexing sites, including those that have no direct back links but have been e-mailed to individuals or similar processes. In this post I'll discuss some important considerations when working with these "non-production" installations to help you ensure that search engines will NOT index the content and cause confusion.

Over the last many months the Engineering Organization at DotNetNuke Corp. has been making many process changes to deliver high-quality Software. As Scrum Master and Lead Developer, I’d like to dedicate a blog series on what we did, how it helped and the lessons we learned.

In this blog, I’d like to talk specifically about Peer Code Review that we implemented over 10 months ago.

The portal "contentmanager.de" published a new german e-book

This year’s DotNetNuke World conference is just around the corner and we are once again looking for speakers. DotNetNuke World will be October 10th through the 12th in lovely Orlando, Florida. Registration will be opening soon, and like last year we will be offering great early bird pricing. This year’s event is shaping up to be twice as large as last year. More speakers, more sessions, and more attendees.

Much like past years, we are accepting session submissions that focus on Development, Design, Administration and Business. We have expanded the number of rooms this year so that we could accommodate more sessions with a broader appeal to business decision makers and end users. This year’s conference will focus on the “Social Revolution” but other topics are equally welcome.

On Friday, May 4th I am excited to travel to sunny Florida and present to the Sarasota .NET Developers Group ( SarasotaDev ). The presentation will take place at the Sarasota Community Foundation located at 2635 Fruitville Rd in the afternoon from 2:00-4:00 PM. I plan on covering a couple of topics related to DotNetNuke which I think the audience will find highly engaging. The first topic being a presentation and demo of the highly anticipated DotNetNuke 6.2 release which fully integrates the ActiveSocial functionality and transforms the application into a powerful Social CMS. And the second topic being an exploration of technology trends as they relate to Microsoft developers and how DotNetNuke intends to adapt to these trends to ensure it remains a highly relevant web platform for the future. I want to shout out a special thank you to Stan Schultes for arranging the venue and logistics for this event. Following the presentation, the group is invited to attend a great party with awesome pizza, appetizers and drink tickets at the Broadway Bar where we will help kick off the BarCamp Sarasota weekend starting at 5:30pm.

On Saturday, May 5th I am excited to participate in my very first BarCamp conference. The BarCamp Sarasota Spring Conference 2012 is taking place on the weekend of May 5th & 6th at G.WIZ – The Science Museum at 1001 Blvd of the Arts in Sarasota. The 2 day event is full of interesting speakers and sessions, great roundtables and workshops, open-space conversations, and killer parties. I plan to present two topics on Saturday: “C.M.S. Redefined: Cloud. Mobile Social”, a session which highlights the three most disruptive technology trends in recent years and how they will influence the future of Content Management; and “The Business of Open”, a journey through the history of the DotNetNuke project as it evolved from an organic open source project to a venture-backed commercial enterprise.

One of the new features in DotNetNuke 6.2 is the Member Directory.  During the implementation of this new feature, we ran into some stumbling blocks trying to retrieve user info and user profile information.  The issue wasn’t retrieving the necessary information, it was the speed at which the queries were performing at.

The last beta for DotNetNuke 6.2 is now available.  That’s correct, this is the last beta.  That means we are feeling really good about where we are with the product.  The team is working hard to stabilize the release, but we still need your feedback!  We still have some issues to work through, but we are getting close to the public release of DotNetNuke 6.2.  Learn more about how to get started with DotNetNuke 6.2 today!

If you are an open source extension developer for DotNetNuke who is also a github fan, we have some good news for you. As of today, developers can choose either CodePlex or github when creating a new Forge extension project on our site. This support also includes the ability for github hosted project releases to find their way to the DotNetNuke extension feed, available in all DotNetNuke installs as of 6.0.

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A few weeks ago Microsoft surprised many folks in the industry by announcing a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. The stated goal of the new enterprise is to advance the company’s investment in openness – including interoperability, open standards and open source.

"The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined manner. This new structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft's proprietary development processes and the company's open innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards communities," said Jean Paoli, who becomes president of the subsidiary after serving as Microsoft's general manager of interoperability strategy.

Since Microsoft chose to trickle out the announcement without much fanfare and without any detailed specifics, there has been a lot of speculation by industry analysts and media in the weeks since. Depending on their level of paranoia for the software giant, people seemed to fall into one of two camps, those who think that Microsoft created the subsidiary because of a desire for greater interoperability and compatibility, and those who feel they were looking for ways to protect their extensive patent portfolio. I actually think that neither of these conclusions were the primary driver. Instead, I personally think it has to do with IP governance.

Last year, we released the first version of our SharePoint connector. In the initial release we decided to start with SharePoint 2007 since at the time it was the most widely used version of SharePoint, but things have changed now. SharePoint 2010 introduced important enhancements and new features that organizations have found valuable and the market is slowly transitioning from SharePoint 2007 to 2010.

New Release – Well here we are again, a new release for DNN Feedback. I have to say that I enjoy the freedom of leading the development of this module, with the ability to completely work to my own schedule. Hopefully enabling me to deliver regular updates with incremental improvements.

This time the update brings greater compatibility with DNN 6 and adding some extra flexibility. And of course it fixes all known bugs in the module.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be delivering one of our free DotNetNuke Explained web seminars, the 4th in our series of 6. This seminar is for Basic Module Development, in which I will show you how to quickly get up and running with custom module development for DotNetNuke.

If you haven’t signed up yet, you still can, go to the registration link. After the web seminar is delivered and posted...

TIOBE Software has maintained a Programming Community Index for more than 10 years. Updated on a monthly basis, it is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages in use around the world. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, seminars, and third party vendors actively using the various technologies determined primarily through search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu.

The April 2012 edition was recently released and highlighted some interesting market trends…

The DotNetNuke community is composed of individuals and organizations that serve a wide range of needs for DotNetNuke users. Whether it is the skin designer, module developer or web hoster, every part of the DotNetNuke ecosystem helps make it easy for our users to take full advantage of the DotNetNuke platform to run their website. In this series of posts I’ll be focusing on the hosters in our community and looking at some capabilities that make each of them unique.

I recently came across a new hoster who has taken a unique approach to providing hosting services. Traditionally, if you were a web hosting company, you would purchase a bunch of servers and provision them in a data center. As virtualization technology matured, hosters began to shift their high end accounts from dedicated servers to virtual servers. With the advent of cloud services like Amazon EC2, some hosters are completely doing away with the capital costs of owning their own servers.

Last week I travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark to participate in the kick-off meeting for the Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI) technical committee (TC) which was recently formed by OASIS ( Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). OASIS is widely respected as a leading web standards consortium which drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. OASIS is also the home of CMIS, a Content Management Interoperability Services standard that originated in 2009, which in fact served as the catalyst for the new WEMI initiative.

Where CMIS is focused on an open standard that defines an abstraction layer for controlling diverse document management systems and repositories using web protocols, WEMI is more focused on the exchange of unstructured content between web publishing systems. The name “Web Experience Management” was chosen purposely so that the standard is applicable to the broadest audience possible and is not specific to a specific web publishing system architecture, as this initiative is intended to be applicable to Content Management Systems (CMS), Web Content Management (WCM), Web Engagement Management (WEM), Portals, Site Builders, and many others. The founding members of the WEMI TC include many of the world’s leading authorities on web publishing including Magnolia, Acquia (Drupal), Hippo, Sitecore, SDL, Liferay, TYPO3, Jahia, TerminalFour, Adobe, Telerik, Enonic, GX Software, and of course, DotNetNuke.

Man… What a year. Really. A lot of things have happened, and it’s already 1/4 of the way over. The best part is that we have a brand spanking new release of DotNetNuke that features social features for all editions of DNN in the 6.2 release. That release is right around the corner, and DNN Corp folks have been busy blogging about 6.2 features quite regularly. But wait, there’s more! That’s right… This is my elevator pitch, or boardwalk pitch. You choose. Just don’t call me Billy Mays or Vince Shlomi. Go ahead, look them up. One was great but passed away, and the other. Well, let’s just not go there.

As I alluded to in the DotNetNuke 6.2 Beta announcement, we now have two popular modules that are integrated with some of the exciting new features in 6.2.  On Monday,  Chris Paterra announced the release of Blog 5.0 Beta.  Today, I’m pleased to announce the beta release of Active Forums 5.0.

The DotNetNuke community is composed of individuals and organizations that serve a wide range of needs for DotNetNuke users. Whether it is the skin designer, module developer or web hoster, every part of the DotNetNuke ecosystem helps make it easy for our users to take full advantage of the DotNetNuke platform to run their website. In this series of posts I’ll be focusing on the hosters in our community and looking at some capabilities that make each of them unique.

PowerDNN has made quite a name for themselves in our community and like any good business they look for ways to solve customer problems. To simplify management of customer accounts, PowerDNN developed the PowerDNN Control Suite. In addition to using the tool internally, PowerDNN makes the Control Suite available to their Enterprise cloud customers.

That's right, spring is upon us. It's a time of rejuvenation, revitalization, a waking up of the senses as the sun creeps higher and higher into the sky. Flowers are blooming, winter's grip is receding and kids (young and old) the world over anticipate the sharp "crack" of the bat as April ushers in the start of baseball season! Like our new Baseball theme on Facebook!
 

Continuing our look at “Data” using the Entity Framework, WCF Data Service and Knockout.js, we see how to add EDIT and DELETE functionality to your module. We’ll take a look at how to use the technologies and techniques we’ve learned so far and build an EDIT form.

As part of building a robust Social platform, we have added a number of enhancements to Registration.

Registration, Login and Profile Settings

DotNetNuke is a very powerful and flexible platform.  The challenge that this brings is that it is often difficult to know where to make configuration changes.  User/Registration settings is one such area.  In this Beta we have tried to address this by moving the Registration settings to the Admin/Site Settings page.  Admins are familiar with going to this page to make configuration changes.