Over the last 10 weeks we have been looking for our final 2 speakers for DotNetNuke World.  After thousands of votes I am happy to say that we can now finalize our speaker lineup.  We had a diverse range of sessions and speakers that participated.  Speakers represented both Europe and North America and covered topics ranging from voice-enabling DNN apps to developing social modules for DotNetNuke.  In the end the community selected two speakers and sessions above all others.

Earlier this summer Will Strohl announced the DotNetNuke Super Fan Contest for 2012. I love our community and how passionate they are about DotNetNuke.  I was really excited last year to see some of the great Super Fan entries.  This year I wanted to participate even if I couldn’t “officially” enter.

Over the last 20 years I have been to a lot of developer and user conferences. Most of them follow the same format, and generally the standard format works very well. However, over the last 7 or 8 years, I have seen a few twists on the session format which provides some additional excitement to the conference.

Recently, I attended and spoke at the Charlotte Day of DotNetNuke where the organizers had put together an Ignite session. This format allows for a greater number of speakers and a little wider scope of topics. Because of the somewhat chaotic nature of the Ignite session, it generally has a higher level of energy. Even if the attendees don’t care for one speaker, just wait a couple of minutes and a new speaker will be on stage.

After six weeks of voting we are down to just a handful of speakers remaining in the running for the final two speaker slots at DotNetNuke World. While I think all of the sessions would be great, we just didn’t have room to fit them all in. Voting is definitely heating up, but now is not the time to stop. Your votes will determine who’s session makes it to DNN World and who’s session is burned up in the summer sun.

DotNetNuke is a great platform.  Over the years we have added a ton of features.  In many ways DotNetNuke is like a pile of Legos.  A lot of users get too focused on looking at one single feature and trying to force that feature to do everything they want.  The key to getting the most out of DotNetNuke is understanding how to use the many different features together to create something that is greater than the sum of the parts.

Week 4 of the DotNetNuke World Session Survivor contest sees another long-time member of the core team voted off. Throughout the summer we’ll be announcing the latest speaker to be voted off the previous week in the community voting for the last 2 DotNetNuke World speaker slots. Last week, Lee Wise’s session on Creating Accessible Mobile Menus and Content using DNN and jQuery was voted off. This week we must say goodbye to Vicenç Masanas and his session on Social + Mobile (WP7) + Services = DNN 6.2.

One of the worst experiences you can have with your website is to end up with a bad hosting provider where servers seem to drop offline for no apparent reason, or you have convoluted configuration options in the hosting control panel which complicates application installation, or you are left with poor technical support which takes forever to resolve your issues. These experiences don’t just happen with new or small hosters. Sometimes even great hosting companies can falter and provide substandard service. Hopefully they recover in time to satisfy the customer, but there are times where even the best follow up after a bad customer service experience is not enough and the customer feels like they need to find a new host.

Another week and another speaker is out of the running for speaking at DotNetNuke World. Throughout the summer we’ll be announcing the latest speaker to be voted off the previous week in the community voting for the last 2 DotNetNuke World speaker slots. Last week, Peter Donker’s session on The Future of Localization did not find favor with the community. This week we must say goodbye to Lee Wise and his session on Creating Accessible Mobile Menus and Content using DNN and jQuery. While the title may have been long, I’m sure the session would have been excellent. Good thing for us there are still a lot of great sessions left.