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.

It’s always been a topic, but even more so recently… People are asking more and more about various things that relate to public speaking. Whether it’s for user group meetings, code camps, DotNetNuke World, meetings with colleagues, or strategic business meetings with partners and prospective customers – public speaking is a critical tool to have honed and in your professional toolbox for your career. Honestly, many of us believe that we are good at speaking in front of an audience, or at least good enough. This first part of the year, I took it upon myself to build some presentation-style videos to explore and teach some of the most important components for public speakers.

If you have not heard of Adam Humphrey, I wouldn’t be surprised. While he is an excellent DotNetNuke community member, much of his participation is under the radar. However, he is in my opinion one of the better designers that our community and ecosystem have. He is most importantly, the owner of Adammer.com, which is the flagship company that he does most of his work out of.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been on the top of most minds in the website design and development for many years now, so I won’t bore you with details about what it is and why it’s important. At this point, that should be obvious. However, maintaining your SEO is a never-ending challenge. This is never more apparent than when you switch platforms on the web, no matter how big or small that platform may be. I have recently run into such a challenge.

Some of you may be already running your DotNetNuke user group meetings. If that is the case, let this be a refresher or a guide. For the rest of us, this is meant as a reference to help you plan out your first meeting, or the ongoing logistics of future meetings. If you’re doing the right things, holding the meeting should be the least amount of work for a user group leader every month. It should begin to run itself…

Yesterday I wrote a blog that introduced you to 4 new user groups that are having their first meetings very soon. At the end of the blog there was also a question, “Do you want to start your own user group?” As a result, I got a very good question that is very common. “What’s the best way to find out if there is any interest for a user group in our area?”

User groups in general are great. They do for the average person what few other venues and mediums can… They connect people in meaningful ways. Sure, you can log onto your favorite social network and find people with similar interests, but you have to build a relationship first. That takes time. At a user group, everyone is there for the same reason. They all want to learn more about the overall topic. Once you share a slice of pizza or a drink with your fellow user group members, you have quite possibly built a meaningful relationship for life.

It’s always kind of difficult to tell what modules will become popular when you create them. For the most part, I really don’t care because usually the modules I release to you and the rest of the DotNetNuke community are those that I built specifically for a specific need I had anyway. However, Content Slider module was meant to fulfill a need. There was a gap in the Forge. As a result, this module has had over 3,500 downloads in about 6 months. THANK YOU for enjoying this module so much!

Today, I finally dedicated some time to give the Content Injection Module for DotNetNuke some much needed love. Fortunately, there aren’t too many reported issues or requested features, so the update went quickly and smoothly.

It’s that time again… This is one of my more popular modules, so I need to make sure it gets some attention from time to time. There was plenty to do too. Thankfully, all of the scoped updates for this release were fairly easy to implement, requiring minimal time. Don’t tell anyone I said that though… It was really, really hard work! Hahaha!

The next version of the Media Module for DotNetNuke is once again here! In previous releases, ground-breaking features like oEmbed were added. In future releases, expect to see mobile rendering and HTML5 to be in the mix. Today, there were a handful of things that needed to be taken care of before taking this module to the next level.

First, I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and support since the original release of this module. It’s been quite interesting. This module has many things planned for it, but I did want to make sure it lived in the wild for a bit to fix any issues that have been found before I begin adding more features. As it turns out, there were two significant fixes that were required.

Many of you are not even aware that the Open Graph Protocol even exists. However, it has been the backbone of inter-connected websites ever since social sharing of content and web pages has existed. This is the standard that Facebook, Google+, and others have adopted to properly connect, share, and display content from site to site when a visitor decides to share it. Of course, like any other standard, every site varies on how well they adopt this particular standard.

It’s once again been a while, but this version of the Media Module for DotNetNuke has been sitting in the hopper for a while. Since before DNN 6.0 was released! As of this moment, I am proud to say that the next version of the Media Module is available to you in the form of version 04.01.00.

If you’ve been in the DotNetNuke community for as long as I have and attend any event, you have undoubtedly run into people that haven’t used DNN in years. In fact, the most common type of person I run into with this situation is someone that last looked at DotNetNuke when it was version 3! I wanted to take some time and generate some videos to hopefully invite those people back to take a new look at what is essentially a totally different platform today!

Any of you that attended DotNetNuke World this year would probably agree… There were few moments when you didn’t see me holding a camera. Most often, I was pointing it at you too, hoping to catch you having the fun time that we all know you were. While I am not a professional photographer, I definitely do my best to create the best images possible. Hopefully the pictures below reflect that.

I am by no means an expert on open source licenses. I am not a lawyer. I have, however, been part of the overall open source software community since roughly around 1999 or 2000. During this time, I’ve dealt with open source software almost exclusively. It’s a blur at this point. I began at a time where PHP was king, and Microsoft’s (now Classic) ASP was trying to get in on the party. Long story short, I found out immediately that I loved open source software and I never looked back.

We just had the first Bay Area DotNetNuke User Group (BayDUG) meeting after having a break for over a year now. It was a great presentation. Chris Hammond did an overview of the features that DotNetNuke now offers to people that enable them to being rolling out their mobile-friendly websites. As great as the overview was, it was missing something… Why would you use one feature over another? What should I think about before deciding the “best way” for my website when building my mobile-friendly site?

I look forward to many things at DotNetNuke World – the networking, the events, the people, and more. But one of the things I enjoy immensely is preparing a presentation for people. This year, my presentation for DNN World was DotNetNuke Widgets, from A to Z. Widgets (a.k.a., skin widgets) in DNN are largely misunderstood and seldom used.

It was quite a fun thing to run the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan contest for the first time ever. Though it really was a lot of work both for me and each of the entrants, it was more than worth the effort. I was very honored to be able to run this contest, because as you probably realize, being a self-proclaimed super fan of DotNetNuke myself, I couldn’t wait to be able to officially designate and announce “the” SUPER fan. This is just what we did at DotNetNuke World.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting with and giving a presentation to the Queen City DotNetNuke User Group (QCDUG) in Charlotte, North Carolina. Clint Patterson had been asking me to visit the user group for the better part of a year now, so I decided to finally make that a reality. Last Thursday, I joined many others in attending their meeting – but I also had a presentation to give…

There are all kinds of ways to make a skin (or design) in DotNetNuke react in a dynamic or personalized fashion, and it can be done in any number of ways. To date, my favorite article on how to do this was written by Vassilis Terzopoulos (@thinkofdesign). As his Hook Your DotNetNuke Skins blog post illustrates, a "user control" style skin allows you to use and reuse the DotNetNuke API in your skin design. This has potentially limitless potential in customizing the user experience from a very high level across your entire site.

There is yet another release of the most popular image gallery module for DotNetNuke, the Lightbox Gallery module. I am very proud of this release, as it marks a few important milestones for this module. All the while, it continues to be one of my favorite open source modules to work on. With this release, it continues to also improve upon the number of features it has and the number of people that use it as their standard image gallery module for DNN.

I need to get back on track with having a blog post ready for each and every DotNetNuke module release I make. In this case, I definitely wanted to make it a point to have an update here in the blog. There have been 4 different releases of the Content Slider module since this module was first made available two months ago. As it turns out, there is a lot of demand for this module. After all, there have already been over a thousand downloads so far. Not bad for being in the wild for 8 weeks.

I love to see success in any shape in the DotNetNuke community and ecosystem. I especially love the successes that we see in user groups. I blogged about an up and coming user group in Charlotte, NC not too long ago. They have been experiencing incredible growth for a niche topic user group (as all DNN user groups are). I knew then that it wouldn’t be long before I would find myself in Charlotte presenting at the Queen City DotNetNuke User Group (QCDUG).

We hopefully all know by now that there is a contest going where several people have submitted entries to try and win the honor and title of being called the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan for 2011.  I cannot express to you how jealous I am about the fact that I myself cannot participate, but I do get a but of satisfaction of seeing the entries and interacting with the world’s biggest fans of DotNetNuke.  Unfortunately, today I get to talk about a late entry.

The time has come… Many of you have seen and been part of the buzz leading up to and after the announcement of the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan Contest entries. There are entries of all kinds. There are images, websites, videos, and more. There are evangelism examples, parodies, a rap, and even marriage announcements. If you wanted to voice your opinion and tell everyone which contest entry is your favorite. today is the day…

It was nearly a month ago for the first official release of the Disqus Module for DotNetNuke. The initial releases focuses on just getting some minimal functionality out there to gauge interest in the module, and to attempt to get a deeper knowledge of Disqus itself before the deeper levels of integration were attempted. Well, that time has come… Welcome deeper integration!

It has been such an overwhelming task to have to keep all of the entries for the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan Contest under wraps.  There really are some very creative and simply outstanding entries for this first run of the contest – even some surprises!  We’ve had entries from some people that you probably would know, and some new people as well.