Well another Movember has come and gone, we are now 2+ weeks into December, and I am finally getting the time to get this blog post together. It has been a busy 6 weeks with DotNetNuke World, holidays here in the United States, and planning for 2012 here within the DotNetNuke Corporation.

This past weekend I attended the DotNetNuke Corporation holiday party. Being a remote worker at DotNetNuke, this provided me with a great opportunity to see some co-workers as well as some old friends. The company did an excellent job putting us remote workers up at a place to stay, and make us feel like part of the company. I had a great time with fellow DNN old timers (and remote workers), Scott Willhite, Chris Paterra, Bill Walker, and met for the first time Nathan Rover. Later at the party, I got to talk to my friend Joe Brinkman who was attending along with his wife.

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!

 

So you edited your DotNetNuke web.config  and you still cannot upload that 40 Megabyte file?

Read on!

I can’t believe that I’m at this fine company, working with such wonderful people, for four months, and only now writing my first blog! Bad Bob!! That behavior will have to change right away.

Let’s begin with some first impressions…

Recently I wrote about how DotNetNuke 6.1 introduces exciting new ways for developers to manage CSS and JavaScript. The release represents a significant first step in optimizing the client side impact of the framework by focusing on reducing the number of requests using dynamic page-based resource combination.

This release represents a large shift in the strategy for delivering JS and CSS resources to the client. While this is undoubtedly a net-positive to both DNN developers and users, there is also a bit of a learning curve, an adjustment period, and a few strategic changes to make along the way to insanely great performance.

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.

This is part 1 of a 7 blog series that will give you the information you need to turn an idea into a Smartphone Website that captivates your audience. In this blog series you will learn 4 key areas needed when creating mobile websites. These include:

• Planning for mobile success
• Selecting a Web Content Management System (WCMS) for your mobile website
• Testing your mobile website
• Achieving mobile success

It has been a little over three months since the official release of DotNetNuke 6.0.  While many of us were downloading, installing and upgrading our sites, the DotNetNuke team was already working hard on the next release.  DotNetNuke 6.0 was our first big step on the path towards redefining C.M.S. as Cloud, Mobile and Social. 

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.2 is officially released. This maintenance release further solidifies DotNetNuke 6.0 and resolves a few outstanding issues which were not addressed in the 6.0.1 release. Like with the 6.0.1 release, our goal was to continue providing quick resolution of outstanding issues to ensure that customers could upgrade to the 6.x platform with little difficulty.

We’ve all seen the numbers. There are currently over 1 billion smartphone users worldwide and many analysts predict that by 2014 more people will be accessing the web from their phones than from their PC’s. If you look deeper into the numbers you’ll probably agree with one of Mary Meeker’s predictions: “businesses that adapt well to the mobile web will win big, while the others will wonder what just happened”.

If you’ve already started considering a mobile strategy, you’ve probably run into someone who’s asked the question: where should we start? An App and a Mobile Website?

If you have ever used Gemini please pay attention!

If you follow any of my blogs, you may remember all the discussion last fall about Movember. Yes, you read that correctly, Movember, take the N in November and replace it with an M, Movember!

Why would you ever rename November to Movember? To raise awareness for cancers that affect men, primarily prostate cancer, but others as well. The basic premise of Movember is this, for the entire month, you grow a mustache. How simple is that? Start on November 1st, clean...

DotNetNuke makes the Inc 500/5000 list!

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.

Buzz? Bees know that 6 is a magic number. And there’s much buzz about DotNetNuke version 6, recently released in its second beta.  DotNetNuke 6 promises to be a game changer for web based content management, or CMS as redefined by Shaun Walker… Cloud, Mobile, Social.

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.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.6.3 is officially released. This release resolves a number of security issues with previous versions and resolves a few outstanding issues from 5.6.2 including:

• Updated Telerik Version – 5.6.3 includes the Q1 2011 SP2 version of Telerik ASP.Net AJAX controls. This version of Telerik includes support for the final version of IE9 along with dozens of bug fixes.
• Improved Security – This release includes 6 different security enhancements and fixes.

As a kid, I remember the giddy feeling of anticipation as I crossed the threshold into Walt Disney’s homage to global unity, “it’s a small world”.  I’m starting to get that feeling again... DotNetNuke World 2011 is approaching!

There are many different ways that Facebook could be your competition depending on your business model.  Quite often I hear site owners talk about how they are loosing users to Facebook.  I hate to tell you this, but you have already lost them.   Do you think you can provide users with a better reason to use your site over Facebook?  Possibly.  Do you think you can provide users with a reason to use your site in addition to Facebook?  Most likely, but you need to understand what you are up against.

According...

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!

It has been a few months since my last blog post on activemodules.com.  I have to admit that I’m going through blog withdrawal.  In the past, most of my blog posts have been to share product ideas, provide status on development progress or collect general feedback.  Blogging has been a great way for me to interact with DotNetNuke customers in order to learn more about the day-to-day challenges and solutions. Now that I’m settled in at DotNetNuke Corp. it’s time for me to start blogging again. 

I plan...

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.

 

Just a short general commentary on the state of QA at DotNetNuke as we march toward DotNetNuke 6.0 Release

Today marks a big change for me. As of today I will be working for DotNetNuke Corporation. There, I’ve said it!

The past couple of weeks have been very exciting for me. Last January I was approached by DotNetNuke Corporation with the question whether or not I was interested in becoming part of a new European office, to be established in Amsterdam. I would be wearing multiple hats: helping out with both support and sales, and also doing evangelism.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.6.2 is officially released. This release resolves a number of outstanding issues with the 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 versions and adds a few new significant enhancements including:

• User Management – 5.6.2 now includes the ability to restore or remove soft-deleted users. For more information on this feature please see the recent blog post by Ash Prasad and my follow-up video post.
• Improved Performance – This release includes 20 different performance enhancements that continues our focus on providing a fast, scalable web platform for delivering your content and applications to your users.

DotNetNuke is a web content management system and an application framework that has grown over the past 8 years to solve many of the challenges faced by developers when building websites and web applications. Because of this rich feature set, it is possible that there may be areas of the platform which you have yet to explore. In this ongoing series, I plan to use short video clips to highlight some of my favorite features of the platform.

A few weeks ago, Ash Prasad, a software engineer at DotNetNuke Corp. discussed a new feature he worked on for 5.6.2. Ash did a really great job on the feature and I thought it would be worthwhile to show this feature in action. The new user management features definitely make deleting and restoring users much easier and restores the ability to permanently delete users from you DotNetNuke site.

If you didn’t see Shaun’s blog post earlier this week you should give it a good read through. The post announced the fact that starting with Version 6.0 (targeted for Q2 2011) DotNetNuke will no longer be developed/released as a VB.NET Application. All development of the core platform will be in C# (this does not mean that the community modules for the platform will change languages).

...

While I’ve been in the ecosystem for DotNetNuke since the beginning, I wasn’t employed by DNN Corp until 3/1/2010. So today marks the anniversary of my first day here. It’s been a heck of a year! I can’t even begin to list off all the things that have happened in the past year, but I will try to list off a few of them (with links to the obligatory blog post where appropriate).

Last week Microsoft released a new tool called WebMatrix, a tool for developing web applications and easily installing existing web applications. You can learn more about WebMatrix by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/. What does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well WebMatrix makes installing DotNetNuke very easy! Even easier than before when just using the Web Platform Installer also from Microsoft.

To be honest,...

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

A short "how to" entry regarding adding issues in Gemini so that DotNetNuke can serve the Community!

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.

Every January people start thinking “oh crap, I need to update the copyright statement on my website”. And everyone runs out and makes the change to the current year.

Well, if you use DotNetNuke you can easily change the Copyright statement on your site from the Site Settings page, found under the Admin menu. You’ll find a setting like the following.



...

Eight years ago, on 12/24/2002, IBuySpy Workshop (renamed a few months later to DotNetNuke) was released into the wild, and for many of us here who visit this website our lives were forever changed.

A huge thanks to Shaun Walker for doing what he did back on that Christmas Eve in 2002.

From my family, and all of course the DotNetNuke Family, Happy Holidays to everyone around...

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.

I haven’t seen or heard anyone mentioning it yet, so I guess no one noticed…  DotNetNuke Corporation is hiring!  That’s right folks…  Do you love DNN?  Would you like to work with DNN on a daily basis?  Do you fantasize on being paid to help build the CMS platform that you love and use on a daily basis?  Do you dream...

There have been several blogs about the Movember effort, in order to raise awareness and funds to support the effort to reduce prostate cancer in Men.  You can think of this as the male version of breast cancer month.  This is very relevant since 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their life.  We as a company jumped on the chance to participate, as did several DNN community members.

All in all, the DotNetNuke Movember team had 37 members...

Have you ever created a skin in DotNetNuke? Have you ever wanted to or needed to? Getting started with skinning is actually fairly easy, we show you how to do so in our DotNetNuke Skinning webinar which starts tomorrow morning.

So if you’ve followed my blog over the past 6 months you likely recall a post about some module development templates that I released early in the summer.  I’ve put out a new release of the templates (C# and VB.NET), changing some things around a bit with the structure and how they work.

Before going too far with this post I would encourage you to take a look at my previous blog posts on module development, then check out the list of changes to the template below.

Previous posts:

• Setting up your development environment
• Customizing development templates
• Automated Packaging using NANT (NO LONGER NECESSARY W/ NEW TEMPLATES, READ FULL POST FOR MORE INFO)

Next week, I will be holding a public webinar covering the topic of “content staging” in DotNetNuke.  Content Staging is the concept of having a “staging” environment that your normal website visitors cannot access.  Within this method of content editing, all of the content updates would take place on that internal or “staging” server.  Then, when you decide, you publish those content updates to your production site, without your content editors ever having to login to your production web server.

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.6.  In 5.6 we spent a lot of time enhancing existing features addressing bugs and including a few minor features.  One of the goals during 2011 will be to not only add great new features, but to also add some depth to existing features.  The 5.6.0 release is a good first step in that direction.  The DotNetNuke Community Edition 5.6 includes new features such as:

• Improved Search: 5.6.0 includes an enhanced indexing capability which allows the standard core search feature to index page names, tag attributes and other metadata for improved search results
• Performance Enhancements: Optimizations to the database architecture and handling of web analytics tracking codes which will result in faster performance for all Editions of the product
• Configuration Manager:  A new configuration manager provides DotNetNuke administrators with greater access and control over their website configuration files without requiring the user to have direct file access.

DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise users also have some significant new enhancements as well including:

• Site Search: Exclusive to the Professional and Enterprise Editions, the new Site Search engine allows site users to quickly locate files and pages in the site. The search engine includes rich query syntax with support for Boolean searches, phrase searches, relevance searches, wild cards, fuzzy searches, and groupings. Based on Lucene, the system includes a true web spider that is capable of indexing any site, whether it is built on DotNetNuke or not.
• Enhanced Analytics Support: The DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise Editions include Enhanced Analytics Support, which allows users to take full advantage of Google Analytics. The system has been upgraded to the latest integration best practices from Google and now enables tracking of sub-domains as a single entity as well as the use of up to five segmentation rules per page.
• Content Approval Workflow Enhancements: The Professional and Enterprise Editions now allow managers to configure approvals in a top-down hierarchy at the site, page, and module level. In addition, content locking improves efficiency and reduces the chance of workflow conflicts. Approvals ensure that users throughout the organization that are impacted by a content change can review updates before they are published. The business rules engine enables workflows with an unlimited number of states and reviewers.

Have you donated to the DotNetNuke Movember team? You can donate to the team as a whole, and when making a team donation you can split it among the team members individually, or just go straight to the team. The team donation link is at http://cjh.am/dnn-mo Read the full blog post for all the info about who is in the photo above and what Movember is

 

Hello! There is now a Public Beta for 5.6.0 available on CodePlex: http://dotnetnuke.codeplex.com/releases/view/54637 Please download and play with it and if you find bugs or issues with it log them in the Public Beta forum: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/190/scope/threads/Default.aspx Please note this MAJOR known issue with the Forums module: If you are running Forums in your current installation AND your current release is below DNN 5.4.1 you will need to upgrade to 5.4.1...

If you’ve seen www.dotnetnuke.com today, you know what I mean!  As of today we’re sporting a brand new look, an extreme reorganization of our website content and increased visibility of community activity!  The change in our homepage alone should tell you a lot about what we’ve done and where we’re going.

Some of you have likely heard of Movember, some of you have likely not. So here’s the quick and dirty basics about the Month of Movember borrowed from the Official site.

“Movember challenges men to change their appearance and the face of men’s health by growing a moustache. The rules are simple, start Movember 1st  clean-shaven and then grow a moustache for the entire month.  The moustache becomes the ribbon for men’s health, the means by which awareness and funds are raised for cancers that affect men.  Much like the commitment to run or walk for charity, the men of Movember commit to growing a moustache for 30 days. ” http://us.movember.com/about/

So what the heck does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, not much, except that cancer effects everyone, man and woman, geek and jock. the same. I’ve created a DotNetNuke Movember team for the Employees and Community to join and participate in for 2010. To join the team visit http://us.movember.com/register/104438 and follow the steps. I’ll personally donate $1* to every person’s donation campaign that joins the DotNetNuke team on Movember.com to help you get started. 

If you are attending the pre-conference training for DotNetNuke Connections next week here’s the information you need to know prior to coming to the class!

First off, if you aren’t registered for the training yet get signed up soon! http://devconnections.com/shows/FALL2010DN/default.asp?c=3&s=158 If you are registered for DotNetNuke Connections but not the training you can add the training on, so get to it!

So here’s what you need to know about the training on Monday. We will be developing a module that you can walk away with at the end of the session, in either VB or C#. In the morning session I will go through the basics of what we will be creating, the afternoon will be spent actually building the module in lab sessions. I, as well as other DNN Corp employees, will be walking around helping everyone with the process of doing the building of the module. You can do your development in either C# or VB, whatever you choose, we will provide source code examples and support for both.

I have many passions, as I would imagine you probably do too.  They are, in no particular order: positivity, the San Diego Chargers (not doing too well this year), customer service, beer, photography, tea, being eco-friendly (green), social media, and of course – DotNetNuke. 

DotNetNuke is a web content management system and an application framework that has grown over the past 8 years to solve many of the challenges faced by developers when building websites and web applications.  Because of this rich feature set, it is possible that there may be areas of the platform which you have yet to explore.  In this ongoing series, I plan to use short video clips to highlight some of my favorite features of the platform.

 

 

 

If you’ve never been to the annual DotNetNuke convention in Las Vegas Nevada your first time there you are going to be overwhelmed. The Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino is enormous, if you’re staying in the Mandalay Bay or THEHotel, plan on giving yourself 10-15 minutes to walk to where the convention is each morning, you won’t go outside, but you’ll definitely go for a hike.

First things first, THEHotel is another hotel (a fancier/pricier one), attached to the casino that is Mandalay Bay, you can think of them as being on opposite corners of a square. The convention center is on one of the corners between the two, if you consider that corner stretched way the hell out of place, and a long way away from the other corners :)

Recently, I’ve been working together with Chris Hammond on the DotNetNuke Connections speaker profiles.  Today, I wanted to get out the word about three current promotions, incentives, and awards we have underway, with a special emphasis on each of their deadline dates.  One of those deadline dates is October 1st!
 

As we lead up to DotNetNuke Connections November 1-4, 2010, Bill Walker and I are highlighting some of the speakers who will be presenting sessions at this year’s conference. Last week we introduced you to Brandon Haynes, today we’ll introduce you to one of the guys who has had the most influence on DotNetNuke in the past 4 or 5 years, Charles Nurse. So sit back and enjoy our brief interview with Charles, and stay tuned as we feature more speakers in the coming weeks. You might also check out some of the recently announced Offers for DNN Connections, some expire soon!

 

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.5.1.  This release includes many bug fixes for the most critical issues identified in DotNetNuke 5.5.0 which we released last month.  As a result of the recent ASP.Net Padding Oracle Vulnerability, which was discussed by Shaun Walker and Cathal Connolly in their recent blogs, we have added additional checks and upgrade enhancements in this release to ensure that DotNetNuke sites running the latest version are using the recommended CustomErrors configuration.  

As we have noted in many of our recent releases, we continue to increase our Quality Assurance efforts with each release.  Given the critical nature of the ASP.Net vulnerability, we paid extra attention to more than 40 different upgrade scenarios to increase the stability and reliability of the upgrade process, and to ensure that once upgraded your site would be protected.  As always, even for those unfortunate few who have issues upgrading, the community stands ready to assist you with any problems you may encounter.  We highly recommend that everyone upgrade to the DotNetNuke 5.5.1 release as soon as possible.  For those who are unable to upgrade their sites we anticipate having a standalone module which we will make available later this week which provides the same benefits against the padding oracle vunlnerability as the core enhancements made in 5.5.1.

As we lead up to DotNetNuke Connections November 1-4, 2010, Bill Walker and I are highlighting some of the speakers who will be presenting sessions at this year’s conference. Last week Bill introduced you to Mitchel Sellers, today I have the pleasure of featuring DotNetNuke Corp.’s very own Cathal Connolly. So sit back and enjoy our brief interview with Cathal, and stay tuned as we feature more speakers in the coming weeks. You might also check out some of the recently announced Offers for DNN Connections.

It is often said that variety is the spice of life.  Perhaps that is why I enjoy the DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards so much.

We’ve now received over one hundred entries for this year’s edition of the awards.  The quality and variety of web sites entered across all categories - Most Creative/Original Site, Best eCommerce Site, and Best Informational Site – is really impressive.  I can’t wait to see which others come in before the entries deadline this Friday. 
 

If you haven’t been to Las Vegas Nevada for the annual DotNetNuke Conference you are definitely missing out on a good time! I look forward to going every year, and to be honest, I get the most enjoyment out of seeing all the people and talking outside of the sessions than I do in the sessions themselves. That being said, the sessions are well worth the price of the conference! But where else are you going to get to meet the big names in the DotNetNuke World each and every year?

This week, we officially launched the second annual DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards.  While the nominations period has only been open for a matter of days now, we have already received some high-quality and varied examples of DotNetNuke web sites.

So if you’ve been under a rock lately you might not have heard that the annual DotNetNuke conference is coming up. While in the past it has been branded as OpenForce, this year it is just simply DotNetNuke Connections, to better fit inline with the DevConnections banner.

This years event is once again going to be held in conjunction with DevConnections in Las Vegas Nevada, November 1-4. The conference is at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, a great venue that has been the amazing home to the DotNetNuke conference for the previous three years.

I am happy to announce...

A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away…  There was an affiliate program that allowed for great flexibility and provided features for DotNetNuke® vendors and others to make money easily and quickly.  People were rolling in the dough!  Money was raining from the sky, and we were all bathing in tubs full of gold coins!

...

Just over two weeks ago I blogged about a new offering in my role of Director of Training for DotNetNuke Corp. We announced that we were going to start offering some free DotNetNuke training in addition to our instructor led training courses that we’ve been offering since May.

This blog post is cross-posted from my personal blog site.

There are all kinds of polls, surveys, and awards that all of us try to get at some point in time.  Since DotNetNuke® first got popular, it was no different.  DNN has been honored by a wide variety of sources, including aspnetPRO Magazine...

An article was recently written by CMS Critic, where they interviewed Navin Nagiah.  For those of you who don’t know, Navin has been the CEO of theDotNetNuke Corporation pretty much since it got funded.  Those events happened just around the same time anyhow.  CMS Critic thought highly enough of DotNetNuke and Navin to write an article, asking him various questions about the DNN product, its history, and its future.  It also does a fair job of giving you an idea of Navin and his background.

Last year at OpenForce Connections in Las Vegas, Shaun Walker announced an updated release policy.  The goal in 2010 was to move to a monthly maintenance release schedule along with Quarterly major releases.  Prior to this policy announcement, releases were quite sporadic which made it difficult for our internal planning purposes, and also made it difficult for our users to schedule their own upgrade testing and deployment.  When we first committed to this new release schedule, we knew that it was going to take a little time before we could get into the groove with the new release cycle.  By February we had 3 monthly releases under our belts and things looked to be going pretty well, so much so that I blogged about it.

We are now 8 months into the release schedule and following some issues with a few of our recent releases we’ve had a lot of feedback from customers and community members regarding the release schedule. Some users have indicated that monthly releases just didn’t give them time to properly test and upgrade their sites before a new release was coming out and they had to start the cycle all over again.  Other users worried that committing to monthly releases was hurting the quality of our releases.  Conversely, some users liked the frequent releases because it meant they could get bug fixes quicker.  Some users also liked the predictability of the release schedule.

When I started up here at DotNetNuke Corp. in March, I spent quite a bit of time planning and tweaking our plan in regards to the DotNetNuke Training that we would be offering. The initial phase launched when we started offering our paid DotNetNuke Training Webinars in May 2010 covering a variety of DNN topics. Since then we have conducted almost 80 hours of live webinar based training,...

If you haven’t heard before now, I was recently asked to join the DotNetNuke Corporation as an employee.  This was somewhere around a month ago.  After settling my affairs, I finally was able to make plans to fly into San Francisco for my first day of work, that is, today.  Originally, I was slated to start later in the month of July, but the DNN moons aligned, and I was able to make it out to California much earlier than expected.

Travel Woes...

The evolution of DotNetNuke branding is well chronicled in chapter 1 of the Wrox Professional DotNetNuke 5 book but a lot has happened since Shaun and Nik originated the current logo concepts way back in 2005. The ever increasing capability of digital media processing has increased our appetite for resolution, detail and as Hollywood has proven, dimension!

Ever since the localization framework was first introduced in DotNetNuke 3.0, it has always been our intention to go back and complete the localization story for DotNetNuke.  When localization was first introduced in DotNetNuke, we only tackled the localization of static strings.  This support for the localization of static strings was sufficient to address the needs of many international users, however it was not adequate for addressing multi-lingual sites.

We realized from the beginning that content localization was a tough issue to address, and one which could be solved in numerous ways.  Every time we looked at tackling content localization, the effort always seemed to be a bigger than we had the resources to be able to tackle.  We wanted to make sure that whatever solution we put in place would meet the needs for a large portion of our community.

I am pleased to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.4.4.  This maintenance release resolve’s two significant breaking changes that slipped through in 5.4.3 and resulted in us pulling the 5.4.3 release. Below are the highlights from this months release. As usual, you can see a full list of changes in the changelog.

I am pleased to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.4.3.  This month’s maintenance release focused on resolving major issues with page management and with the Telerik HTML Editor Provider.  The page management fixes should resolve all major outstanding issues in this area.  The HTML Editor Provider fixes addressed some of the larger issues with the provider, although we recognize there are still several fixes and enhancements that remain for this particular item which we hope to address in the upcoming 5.5 release.  The 5.4.3 release also includes a number of security fixes.  As always our community continues to work with the security team to identify potential security issues and to help test the subsequent security fixes. As an Open Source project, the DotNetNuke platform and the community benefit tremendously from this collaborative relationship that allows us to discover security issue in a timely manner and quickly work to resolve them.  Finally, I want to thank those community members who provided bug fixes for this months release.  Their efforts help to create a better product for all of us.  Below are the highlights from this months release.  As usual, you can see a full list of changes in the changelog.

Isaac Asimov was once quoted as saying “The only constant is change”.  That has certainly been true of my time with the DotNetNuke project. Over the last seven years of working on the DotNetNuke project and working at DotNetNuke Corporation I have held a number of different roles within the organization.  I have defined and coded major product features, built and managed the DotNetNuke Marketplace, managed the release process, managed both OpenForce Conferences, oversaw the QA function, and created and managed the DotNetNuke Professional support team.  During this time there have been a lot of things for which I am proud to have hand in developing and a few that I wish I could go back and do differently.  Through it all, I have been extremely proud to be a part of this organization, both as a volunteer and later as a co-founder and employee at DotNetNuke Corporation.

 So earlier this week I posted a blog post ranting about issues I was having trying to get DotNetNuke running on a Windows 7 virtual machine.

THIS IS AN OLD BLOG POST, for my latest instructions on How to Upgrade DotNetNuke check out this new post....