A quick blog post as we near the final day of Movember 2011.

Thank to all of you who have taken the time to grow your fine Mo's (mustaches) for the past 30 days. Also thank you to those of you who started your mo's but caved to the weight that carrying a Mo brings, your efforts are still appreciated!

Do you work for one of our many DotNetNuke Partners? Are you already thinking about participating in Movember? Have I got a challenge for you.

Form a team for your company, you can do so via Movember.com, and then join the DotNetNuke Network! The partner that raises the most money for Movember

Dear DotNetNuke Community,

Movember is coming up, and I am getting the DotNetNuke Team going again this year. For those of you who weren’t with the company last year Movember is this. You start with a clean shaven face on November 1^st, and grow a mustache (not a beard, not a goatee) for the ENTIRE month, to raise awareness (and money) for cancers that effect men, primarily prostate cancer.

With all of the changes to DotNetNuke 6, a lot can be lost in the fact that you actually maintain the content of your website, and while the maintenance UI has changed, the content that you present is still up to you. A CMS can only do so much for displaying you content, if you want to do some fancy things, branch out of your standard HTML.

I recently wanted to do a couple of things for my car website (yes, I’m a car guy, so it is easy to use the website for examples).

1. I wanted to have a random image loaded in the top portion of the pages of the website, changing, or randomly loading, on each page load (not rotating live on the page).
2. I wanted to display a list of recent photos on the home page, and when you click on one of them I wanted them to open up in a light box.

I could have done this in any number of ways, but I chose to implement some simple jQuery for each, below I will show you how.

First things first, the website uses my free DotNetNuke skin, MultiFunction, available via Codeplex. I have some example documentation on how to customize the CSS for the skin to make your site unique, feel free to check out the Documentation page.

Have you ever had the need to blog a range of IP Addresses from accessing your website? Or perhaps, setup a website that is only accessible to a specific range of IP Addresses? DotNetNuke Request Filters are a great tool for getting such functionality configured, all configurable within your browser, without needing access to the settings in IIS.

In case you didn’t hear, DotNetNuke 6 was released yesterday. In preparation for the release I went up to our Engineering office in Langley Canada (I work out of our San Mateo, California office) to sit down with some of our developers and have them do some demonstrations of some of the new features in DotNetNuke 6.

These are all relatively short videos, with the goal of them being under 10 minutes, one or two is slightly longer than that. They are all free to watch! Here’s a listing of those videos, and URLs to them in the DotNetNuke Video Library. In no particular order.

So this year will be my 3rd year, (would be my 4th if I hadn’t bailed at the last minute on year 1), that I will be speaking at the St. Louis Day(s) of .Net. If you haven’t been to the STLDODN you should definitely check it out. It is a great two day event, and at $125 (if you register by 7/8/2011) the price can hardly be beat!

The event is being held this year on August 5th and 6th, 2011. Again at the Ameristar Casino in St. Charles, MO, about 10 minutes from where I used to live (two moves ago now).

Read the full blog post for all the details.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been feeling awful open source like. We come from an open source background, and we, DotNetNuke Corporation, are still very very committed to stick with those roots. So I put together a couple of releases for projects I work on, and created a new project as well.

Read the full blog post to find out about

Wiki Module v4.5 almost ready for Release
The World’s Best Free DotNetNuke Skin
An Update to the DNNSimpleArticle Module

DotNetNuke Training Year in Review

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been here at DotNetNuke Corporation now for just over 14 months. In May 2010 we started offering our DotNetNuke Training webinars on a regular basis, this program has been rather successful in it’s first year.

Over the past year we’ve basically offered four core webinars, Portal Admin, Content Admin, Module Dev and Skinning. These were offered on a monthly or semi-monthly basis for the past year. Anyone who paid for one of these courses got access to the recordings for the course for 30 days after they were delivered. This has worked out well from a training perspective, you can see some of the feedback we’ve received from various students over the past year on the Instructor page. Due to the frequency of the courses and the limited bandwidth I have as the sole deliverer of those materials, we haven’t been able to grow our training materials and offer new courses as I would have liked.

Read the full blog post for details about our DotNetNuke Training Subscription!

Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman, Richard Dumas and myself made the trek to Chicago this weekend for DotNetNuke’s first showing at CMSExpo (www.cmsexpo.net).

We weren’t really sure what to expect, as the conference was in the past a Joomla dominate conference, and while there isn’t anything wrong with that, it gave us some concerns. I must say though, all those concerns have been tossed out the Window. We had a great first day!

read the full post for all the details

If you are in the Chicagoland area, or are up for a trip to Chicago, you should check out the CMS Expo coming up the 2nd through the 4th of May, 2011.

What is CMS Expo?

“CMS Expo is a 3-day learning and business conference designed to help content pros get the facts, find the support and make the contacts needed to help them succeed. Hosted by the CMS Association, CMSX delivers timely, relevant and actionable insights to help leaders make informed decisions for business.” – http://cmsx.us/

Where is CMS Expo?

The CMS Expo is being held at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston, IL

Who is going?

Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman and myself (Chris Hammond) from DotNetNuke will be presenting sessions, and we will have Richard Dumas along for the ride as well. We have a number of sessions that we are providing, as well as prizes that will be available at our booth. You can see a full listing of our sessions from the DotNetNuke page of the CMS Expo website.

Well the Wiki module is back in motion! The last I talked about the module I reached out to see if I could find someone willing to take over the project, unfortunately that didn’t pan out. So now that I’ve cleaned up a few things I needed to get done I’m back in action on the module. I spent a number of hours last night working on one of the biggest issues, the ability to use special characters in the titles of Wiki entries.

The other day I posted on how to add the new Facebook Comments to your DotNetNuke website. This worked okay for basic modules that only had one content display, but for a module like DNNSimpleArticle this didn’t work well as the URLs for each article didn’t come across as individual URLs because of the way the Facebook code is formatted. When displaying the Comments I also only wanted to show them on individual articles, not on the main article listing.

There is actually a pretty easy fix though, a number of options, you could write a very simple module to do this, you could embed some of this into your Skin, or the method I chose. I wanted to make this work using Razor with the new Razor Host module in DotNetNuke 5.6.1.

For instructions on how to get the Razor Host module installed you should watch the following Video.

If you’ve ever needed to send a backup of your DotNetNuke database to a developer for testing, you likely trust the developer enough to do so without scrubbing your data, but just to be safe it is probably best that you do take the time to scrub.

Before you do anything with the SQL below, make sure you have a backup of your website! I would recommend you do the following.

1. Backup your existing production database
2. Restore a backup of your production database as a NEW database
3. Run the scripts below on the NEW database
4. Shrink the NEW database
5. Backup the NEW database

Some of you know I have a car problem, some of you don’t. So to explain this a bit. I started racing cars in a sport called Autocross back in 2000, and have been doing it pretty heavily since then. In late 2002/early 2003 I was building websites around my racing hobbies, and I was getting into .NET at the time for work. Well, low and behold I stumbled on what was to become DotNetNuke and the rest is history. I’ve had quite a few car websites on DotNetNuke over time, though if you compare the number of sites to the number of actual cars over that time, the number of cars wins!

I don’t have an Autocross event coming up for a couple weeks, but I couldn’t wait, I had to do something to the car. To see more detail check out this full blog post. It has DotNetNuke related content I swear

Late last year I created a blog post and video about a new version of the module development template that I released on Codeplex. This new template uses MSBuild scripts instead of NANT scripts to automate the packaging process for the modules built with the template.

The MSBuild script works well out of the box, to package your module you simple change into RELEASE mode and then execute the build.

If your project contains references to DLLs (in the website’s BIN folder) that you also need to package up so that you can deploy them with the module however things become a little murky. Earlier today Bruce posted on that original blog post asking how to include those DLLs in the build script so they get packaged automagically.

With the New Year, why not resolve to learn more about DotNetNuke?

DotNetNuke is the most successful and widely adopted open source project on the Microsoft Stack. Its been around for eight years and isn’t going away anytime soon. While the software itself is written in VB.Net you are not limited to VB.Net when developing custom extensions for the platform, in fact, when I do my module development I do it primarily in C# out of preference.

If you’re a developer out there who shuns learning a framework such as DotNetNuke, you should really take a look around. With hundreds of thousands of websites being powered by the platform it has created a demand for people with technical knowledge of the system. There are job postings almost every day looking for developers and designers for DNN, so it would make sense to learn it and start to understand how it works if you want to take a look at some of those opportunities. There are even job openings here at DotNetNuke Corporation.

This evening I was working on creating a Full Width skin for a car racing site I’ve worked on for a number of years. The site has a very active Forum running on DotnetNuke 5.6.0 and the 5.0.0 release of the DotNetNuke Forum module. The problem with the site is it is a fixed width design and that doesn’t’ work well for many forums.

Basically I wanted a three column layout where the middle column stretched out as wide as possible, and depending on if there was content in the Left and Right columns, I wanted them to not display at all, causing the Middle column to expand to fill the void.

For the DotNetNuke Connections conference last month I provided an advanced DotNetNuke module development course as a pre-conference training session. That training covered details on how to implement some of the newer features in the DotNetNuke platform within custom modules, mainly ContentItem integration and Taxonomy features.

For the course I created a very basic Article module for DotNetNuke, ultimately naming it DNNSimpleArticle. For the course I created both a C# and a VB.NET version of the module. Since that course offering I’ve cleaned things up a bit more in the module and just tonight uploaded it to Codeplex at http://dnnsimplearticle.codeplex.com. Please read the full blog post for details on the module, and a few warnings (this module is not supported, use at your own risk)

So earlier this year I had this thought, DotNetNuke should do something in support of Movember (the annual month of November where you grow a mustache for the month in support of raising awareness for Men’s health). I thought about it, and thought about it, and about let it slide right by without doing anything about it. But at the last minute I got things rolling, and I must say, it turned out way better than I had imagined!

Check out the full post for all the details, and a YouTube video of the DotNetNuke team members who participated.