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!

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.

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.

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...

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.

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!
 

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.

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…

It has been two years since I moved from Denver, CO to San Mateo California to work for DotNetNuke Corporation, (3/1/2010) and I am finally headed back to Colorado! This time I am not staying permanently, though I know very much that I will be tempted to.

I’ll be presenting at the Denver DotNetNuke User’s Group meeting on Wednesday, March 21st, 2012, at 6pm, here is the pertinent...

If you follow me on twitter (@christoc) or read my personal blog, facebook, or google+ you likely have seen that I am riding for 100 miles on a bicycle charity in June of this year. If you didn’t know that, check out the Philanthropy page on ChrisHammond.com.

As part of my fund raising efforts for the event I decided to try and use my website a bit more to see if I could raise some additional funds. The website gets a decent amount of search referrals to the site on a daily basis (it should, I’ve been blogging there since July 2004 so it has almost 2600 posts). I had a couple of ways I wanted to utilize the website, the first was as a way to keep track of my fundraising efforts.

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.

For the March meeting of the Bay Area DotNetNuke User’s Group (3/6/12)at the DotNetNuke World Headquarters Adam Humphrey from Adammer LLC will be presenting “Pushing Pixels in the DotNetNuke Ecosystem Principles of DotNetNuke Skin Design”

You must RSVP via Meetup.com

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.

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.

When it comes to open source licensing the discussion usually falls to either complete, nonchalant dismissal of concern or full-on crusade style battle to the death.  Why is that?  And should you be concerned?

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.

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?

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!

 

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.

If you have downloaded and installed DotNetNuke 6.1 you have probably noticed that the core modules are “missing” from the DotNetNuke packages. This is a large change from every previous version of DotNetNuke. Ever since Shaun first released DotNetNuke in 2002, we have included a number of modules in the core platform. How these modules have been packaged has changed over the years, but customers have become accustomed to seeing them.

In DotNetNuke 6.0 we provided a great new capability that integrates the DotNetNuke Forge and DotNetNuke Store (SnowCovered) into the core platform. This feature means that every module in the Forge can be quickly discovered and installed into the platform in just a couple of clicks. If you haven’t tried this feature, I definitely recommend you give it a try. It is definitely one of the great new features in the DotNetNuke 6 platform.

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

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…

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.

While developing Mobile solution in DotNetNuke 6.1, one of the key objectives was to ensure that the Mobile APIs are part of Core Framework, and available to entire DotNetNuke Community. Module and Skin developers can leverage these APIs to provide a solid Mobile Solution to their...

As I sat to write my column for this month’s newsletter the news reached me that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, Pixar visionary, husband, father, had died; a solemn moment to be sure.  Steve, still a young man of only 56 years had lost a private struggle with pancreatic cancer.  What does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Nothing. Everything. Something at least.

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.

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).

If you have ever used Gemini please pay attention!

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.

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...

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…

DotNetNuke in French or Spanish?  How about German, or Farsi or Simplified Chinese?  Historically DotNetNuke has been installable only in English.  But when we teamed up with Microsoft to install DotNetNuke through the Web Application Gallery, we knew it would create opportunity to better serve and support our international community.  We’re currently working with a few key volunteers to establish ongoing publication of a few localized versions of DotNetNuke.

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. 

We are extremely enthusiastic about the upcoming DotNetNuke World Conference, which will be held in Orlando, November 9-11. We expect this to be a unique and unparalleled opportunity to learn about DotNetNuke while having a great time in one of the happiest places on earth. I would like to thank our customers, partners, sponsors and community members for the overwhelming support they have already shown for this event. DotNetNuke World 2011 is already on track to be our largest event ever!

In order to give everyone a chance to get back from their summer vacations and make their travel plans we are extending our discounted summer pricing until after labor day (September 14, 2011). However, If you are planning to attend the event I encourage you to register now. The conference price is now only $499 and the 3-day conference package that includes a full day of pre-conference training on designing, developing and administering DotNetNuke sites is only $799. After September 14th, prices will increase to the regular rate of $599 and $949 respectively.

It’s been a month since I first announced the user group contest for DotNetNuke World.  This is actually two contests in one.  First, all DotNetNuke user groups are encouraged to compete to get the most members to register to attend DotNetNuke World.  The other contest involves the members of the ODUG trying to get the most referrals to register for the conference.  Both contests have some amazing prizes.  Here is an update of who is in the lead right now.

DotNetNuke makes the Inc 500/5000 list!

Late last year, I began work on getting DotNetNuke to run on Windows Azure. After a few months of research and numerous dead-ends, I finally had a fully working prototype. During this same period, David Rodríguez, was also doing some work with DotNetNuke and Azure as well.

After working through a few dead-ends of his own, David found the Azure Accelerator project from Slalom Consulting and decided to use this as a base for developing a DotNetNuke version.

Do you LOVE DotNetNuke?  Do you find yourself running to DotNetNuke events, or jumping to the front of a line just to get a DotNetNuke t-shirt?  Have you had the uncontrollable urge to take a picture with the logo, put the logo on something, or meet and greet with some of the most well-known folks in the DotNetNuke community?

Barely 3 weeks since the release of DotNetNuke 6 the response has been overwhelming!  Dramaticimprovements in the user interface, cost effective SharePoint integration, cloud folder providers and numerous other features are piquing the interest of business and technology users alike.  But not only does DotNetNuke 6 delight users, it also has some capabilities which are going to delight extension developers!

I am pleased to announce the launch of DotNetNuke 6.  This release marks a significant milestone in the history of DotNetNuke platform.  Keep reading to find out all that DotNetNuke 6 has to offer both seasoned users and those just seeing the platform for the first time.

Have you ever had one of the co-founders of DotNetNuke Corporation speak at your user group?  How about the founder of DotNetNuke itself, Shaun Walker?  Not many user groups can say that they’ve have a co-founder present a session at their user group.  With the contest I am announcing, any user group can make this happen!

DotNetNuke 6 introduces brand new Icon API to be used by module developers and skin designers to access icons and images in a unified way all across the framework. Simply pass a key (e.g. Add, Edit, or Delete) in ascx file or code-behind and get a Url back to an image without worrying about the physical location. No need to type that tilde in the path any more.

After 8 months of effort the finish line is in sight. With almost 3000 code checkins touching more than 2000 individual files, this release has been monumental in it’s scope compared to most DotNetNuke releases. Not since the days of DotNetNuke 2.0 and 3.0 have we accomplished so much in a single release. In spite of the sheer number of changes we have made, DotNetNuke 6 is one of the most stable platform versions in quite a while. That is not just my opinion but the opinion of the vast majority of people participating in our beta testing.

Besides other goodies in DotNetNuke 6, the Time Zone support has been enhanced to provide a much richer feature-set including support for Daylight Savings. Pre 6, Portal and User Time Zone settings were offset value in minutes, now they are referred through a first-class .Net object called as TimeZoneInfo. Video can be watched here.

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.

The clock is winding down on the DotNetNuke 6 release. All of the features have been integrated and we are now focused exclusively on polishing the app before we ship later this month. At this point we have identified all of the issues we plan to resolve for the initial launch and are working through final phases of the testing process. In order to assist people in planning for a smooth upgrade process for 6.0 we are providing a second beta release so that people can retest upgrades and installations which may have had serious issues with Beta 1. If you find an issue we ask that you enter it in the bug tracker so that we can evaluate whether it a showstopping issue or whether it is something that could be held for our first 6.x maintenance release which we expect to be about a month after the DotNetNuke 6.0 launch.

Starting DotNetNuke 6.0, all the editions of DotNetNuke Platform (Community, Professional, Enterprise) will natively support SQL Azure. In order to help the Module Developers and everyone else in the community to use SQL Azure with DotNetNuke, we’d like to note down the methodology we implemented to complete the integration.

Every year since the first North American DotNetNuke conference (then named OpenForce), it was nothing short of the who’s who of the DotNetNuke community and ecosystem.  The buzz resulting from people before, during, and after the event was simply gravitating, and was sure to make anyone who didn’t attend jealous of those that did.  If you pay any attention to the blogs, forums, and twitter during this time, this proves true every year.

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.

It was exactly one year ago that I showed up for my first day of work at DotNetNuke Corporation.  The past year has flown by.  A ton of things have happened in the 365 days since. 

As you may have read here, I recently visited the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group, and Dallas DotNetNuke User Group to show them the latest and greatest version of DotNetNuke – version 6!

The image above is from a Geico Insurance commercial.

It’s been a long time.  It’s been a long time since the DotNetNuke community was this excited about anything, much less a new release.  The community hasn’t been sleeping or anything by any means, but the passion and amount of activity over the past few months has been incredibly higher than usual.  As it turns out, this is for a good reason.

Over the last 6 weeks, the DotNetNuke team has been hard at work preparing for our first Beta release of DotNetNuke 6. The DotNetNuke 6 Beta does not include a lot of new functionality but does include significant refinements of the features we had previously highlighted during our CTPs. Even as we were putting the finishing touches on the beta release, the team has been actively out promoting the upcoming launch and demoing DotNetNuke 6 at every opportunity. We have used these opportunities to get feedback from the community and have incorporated some of the suggestions into this release.

For the past 4 years I had the task of working with the speaker selection committee to solicit speakers for the annual DotNetNuke conference. This is a challenging task as we must filter through almost two hundred submissions to find the handful of sessions that will be presented at the conference. With few exceptions the submissions are excellent and we would be lucky to have any of the speakers presenting at the conference. This year was no different. Not only did we get submissions from speakers who have spoken at past conferences, but we also received a number of entries from new speakers as well. In total, we had 177 sessions that we had to whittle down to 27.

DotNetNuke 6 development has been underway for quite a while and the user interface has been getting a huge overhaul.  One of the key components of a website user interface is its menu.  And for DotNetNuke 6 we’ve chosen to work with Mark Allan...

One of the great things about being in the DotNetNuke community is meeting new people.  I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a couple of folks from all over the world.  Recently, I finally met a couple from North Carolina that are co-leading a DNN user group there.  I’d known them for a long time, but never met them in person until the Day of DotNetNuke in Orlando.

Hurry up now and register now for Web Connections 2011, the European DotNetNuke Conference!
Two days, packed with information about DotNetNuke 6 and the DNN eco system and speakers from Europe and the U.S.

DotNetNuke 6 has been a release experience unlike any in the history of DotNetNuke. We have had more packaged releases, more visibility into the code, more discussions with the community and a greater iterative approach to development than at any point in our past.

The community has been able to follow along with us as we progressed from the early UI concepts to a much more polished and refined look. If you were really adventurous, you could watch this transition on almost a daily basis as we kept up a steady stream of code updates on CodePlex. Because we intentionally moved to a longer release cycle, we have been able to go through many iterations, getting community feedback all along the way. With each release our community has told us what they liked, and what they didn’t. After each CTP we have been able to incorporate some of the feedback to help arrive at a much better product. As a result we have been able to progress to what we think is a much more contemporary look, even while taking into account the needs and desires of the overall community. This is just not something that was possible when we were operating under shorter release cycles.

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!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to speak at a user group meeting.  I think the last time was December of 2010.  While that doesn’t sound like a long time, it was nearly 6 months ago!  I am attempting to make up for it next month with two DotNetNuke user group meetings in June.

If you haven’t checked out the DotNetNuke Video Library lately, you really should, there is a lot of great content in there. I just uploaded 5 new videos as part of a new series that I am recording.

Beginning DotNetNuke Module Development, creating a Task Manager module for DNN. This will be a series of videos that get created over the next couple of months revolving around the creation of an open source Task Manager module. The module will be part of the DotNetNuke Forge, and the source code will be hosted on Codeplex.com.

...

We are very happy to announce the winners for this years DotNetNuke Design Challenge!  A field of 16 designers submitted 20 entries which have been reviewed by a panel of qualified judges. This yearscategories include Smartphone (mobile) as well as Traditional and “Zen Garden”.  Additionally, from amongst all the entries, a Community Favorite has been selected by your votes!

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

It is once again that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years North American DotNetNuke user and developer conference. This years conference has a new name, a new location and a significantly reduced price. DotNetNuke World will be November 9th through the 11th in lovely Orlando, Florida, with registration costing as low as $349 for those registering early. So make sure to save the dates on your calendar, and you should definitely plan to register early for the best conference pricing.

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 years conference will focus on the “Cloud, Mobile, Social Revolution” so keep that in mind as you are developing your session abstracts.

DotNetNuke has always shipped with a lot of functionality in the form of modules. Some of the modules that ship with DotNetNuke are fairly shallow, while others have very rich functionality. One of the modules which is often overlooked on many sites is the Form and List module. This module has a lot of rich functionality for defining tabular data structures as well as a complete templating system for displaying or collecting the data defined by the structure.

Recently, I saw some examples from Armand Datema at 2DNN which showed that Form and List can be leveraged for building sophisticated website functionality. I decided to use this same technique in my CMSExpo talk on DotNetNuke Core Modules. For my demo, I wanted to use the Form and List module to create a banner rotator.

Some of you may have noticed that the Design Challenge voting for Community Favorite has been extended for a few days.  You may also have noticed that there are a few additional entries in the field. Early last week I received a cordial email, anxiously inquiring why submitted skins were not on display in the contest.  Our immediate response was that the submission date had passed and that...

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 4 weeks since our last CTP release. The DotNetNuke development team has been working hard and it definitely shows in this latest release. CTP 3 includes major improvements to features spotlighted in previous CTPs but also includes some new features as well. We are making good progress on 6.0 which is scheduled for a mid-summer release, but we still have a few features to finish up and quite a few places that need some UI cleanup, but I think you’ll see that this release is definitely making huge strides in terms of stability and polish.

We continue to get a lot of great feedback from the community on the previous CTPs. Don’t assume that what you see in the CTP is how things will work in the final release. We are spending a lot of time trying out different designs and implementations to get community feedback on particular features. Often, it is only when using a feature in a more realistic environment will you find the limitations of a design or implementation. I encourage you to take a few minutes to try out the new CTP and join the conversation. With your help we can make DotNetNuke 6.0 a truly great release.

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

Wow! It may be cold outside, but summer at DotNetNuke is seriously heating up!  And we’ve just made available a number of sizzling desktop backgrounds to keep you fired up until the thermometer catches on!  From our first excellent hires in The Netherlands and China to free mobile skins for your site and hints of a huge UI makeover in the latest 6.0 CTP (due any day!)… the blistering pace of progress means big wins for your DotNetNuke website!

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.

 

In case you missed the announcement made earlier this week and you have yet to see it on the site, the DotNetNuke Extension Forge was recently rewritten and made available to the community on the www.dotnetnuke.com website. In order to help acquaint users with the recent updates to the Extension Forge, I decided to start “The Forge...

Today is the first day of the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas.  And to help celebrate the Open Source Fest this evening, we're proud to launch a completely redesigned version of the DotNetNuke Extensions Forge!

 

Building software is a challenging business. That is one of the things I like about it. There is always a new obstacle to overcome or new technology and techniques to better solve an old issue. In short, building software is like solving a giant puzzle that has multiple correct answers. Some of the answers may require brute force or crude techniques where others may be elegant in their simplicity.

There are never any shortage of challenges in software development. Even when your own code works correctly, sometimes external factors can conspire against you and create new challenges.

It has been a scant two and a half weeks since we released the first Community Technology Preview for DotNetNuke 6.0 and we are now ready to follow that up with another CTP release. In this release we have a number of new features which are approaching completion and where we would like some feedback. While many of these features are fully functional, we are still working on cleaning up the user interface to provide a unified look across the core platform. Please take a few minutes to install the latest CTP and let us know what you think.

Time is passing by quickly - only a few days left to submit your session for the European DotNetNuke Conference 2011...

When DotNetNuke was first launched back in 2002, website navigation was just beginning to undergo a major shift. At the time most sites still used a relatively static navigation structure with very little interactivity beyond a few simple hover animations and hyperlinks. In fact, the original navigation structure for DotNetNuke was only a single level deep. Over the course of the following 3 years things progressed very rapidly. Sites began borrowing UI elements from desktop applications in order to provide users with a more familiar look and feel.

In 2003, DotNetNuke explored a number of navigation options and finally settled on a menu control provided by a developer from a company up in Naperville, Illinois. Solutions Partner Inc., was home to Jon Henning, an experienced JavaScript and .Net developer who had crafted his own menu control that was completely customizable using JavaScript, CSS and .Net. The Solpart menu was highly configurable and provided designers with the ability to fully integrate the navigation structure into the overall site design. If you have ever seen a DotNetNuke 1.x website, you would realize what a major advance this was.

Don’t take your eye off the stove! DotNetNuke is preparing an impressive array of tasty morsels for users of all interests and skills. Employees and Community members alike are doing everything they can to prepare for a summer feast! Are you hungry?

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.

Today marks another milestone in the upcoming Hadron release of DotNetNuke. For the first time ever, DotNetNuke is offering a Community Technology Preview that will allow you to begin testing the latest version long before we have completed all the features. As I discussed last week, the CTP is not intended to be production ready software but is an opportunity for the community to get a chance to start kicking the tires. The CTP is an important milestone as it will allow us to gather feedback from the community much earlier in the release cycle and thereby allow us more time to incorporate that feedback into the final release.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Sometimes a name is everything. It can convey meaning and emotion. In the world of software, a name can convey the stability or instability of a release. The name, or label, that we apply to a release is our way of communicating to you some important information about our product.

Next week, for the first time since DotNetNuke was created, we will be releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP). This CTP will be for the upcoming DotNetNuke 6.0 release. Later this spring we will release another CTP, a Beta or two and a Release Candidate (RC).

Each of these terms (CTP, Beta, RC) represents a specific milestone in our release process and it is important to understand the distinction to know what you can expect in each release. Most developers in the Microsoft ecosystem will understand the terminology, but this post is intended to be a refresher so that as we discuss these releases in our community everyone will know what we are talking about. Our definitions may be slightly different than the way it is used by other companies and that is ok, as long as we are consistent in our usage.

In my position as the release manager for DotNetNuke, I end up installing DotNetNuke numerous times every week. While I have a set of PowerShell scripts which makes this process relatively painless there were still some areas that I felt needed improvement. In the past I have created all of my sites as applications in a virtual directory under the default site in IIS 7.5 (Windows 7). This usually results in some URL for my site that looks like this: http://localhost/myDNNsite.

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.

Last week Facebook announced a new feature that websites can use to get Facebook Comments onto their web pages. I thought this was interesting as I have a few car racing sites that are using Forums, but also have the DNNSimpleArticle module for main page content. The forums are active, but the DNNSimpleArticle module doesn’t allow for comments as of right now (or in the foreseeable future) so I started to look into the Facebook comments a bit.

Over the past year the DotNetNuke team has been working hard to improve the pace of our releases and to provide the community with the opportunity to participate in beta testing in order to provide feedback prior to a release. As of this morning DotNetNuke 5.6.2 beta packages are now available for download from our Beta Downloads page. We have made a number of fixes to the platform and incorporated a couple dozen performance enhancements. 5.6.2 further stabilizes the 5.6 platform and should be a solid foundation for your DotNetNuke site. Please keep in mind that this is just a beta and is not intended for production use. Upgrades to the final 5.6.2 release are not supported. We still have a few additional issues that we expect to be resolved prior to our Mid-March release but welcome any feedback.

There was a twitter contest this morning to see if anyone could accurately guess who the keynote speaker would be at this years Day of DotNetNuke Orlando event.  Originally, a DotNetNuke shirt was offered as a prize for the right guess.  There were plenty of guesses, but no one hit the target.  Next, the deal was sweetened with a DNN boomerang.  Still, no one guessed the right person – but there certainly were plenty of entertaining guesses!  Finally, the stakes were raised to include not just a DNN t-shirt and boomerang, but also a frisbee.  At the time of this writing, the keynote speaker was not guessed, so no one gets the swag.  That shouldn’t prevent you from knowing who the speaker is though!

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).

If you haven’t heard (or read the details), Active Modules Inc. has been acquired by DotNetNuke Corporation. Since the announcement, there has been a great deal of discussion going on throughout the community. While these discussions cover many different topics and view points, I noticed several people asking about the core forum module team and how they feel. Because of this I figured...

The Core team meets IRL (in real life) via conference call every other week.  These are a few notes from today's meeting.

As announced previously, the Day of DotNetNuke is back in Orlando, where it all started.  The event is co-located...

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,...

It’s always so cool to be able to tell you about the great things that the community gets to participate in and/or benefit from.  This is perhaps one of the cooler things…  A brand new program for competing to be the DotNetNuke site of the month!  Anyone can enter their site to the contest, but the contest is being hosted exclusively within Facebook and open to anyone to submit and win (except for lowly employees like me).

Mix is another conference-type event where developers from all over gather to learn the greatest and newest things about technologies that work with or on the Microsoft stack.  This year, it’s being held on April 12-14 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV.  For those of you that are familiar with or have attended DotNetNuke Connections (formerly known as OpenForce North America), this is the same hotel on the Vegas Strip.

The organizers had an open call for sessions to be submitted for the event, gaining an incredible number of submissions from very talented speakers all over the world.  Among those speakers are the DotNetNuke community’s very own Shaun Walker and Charles Nurse.  Each have two sessions submitted for consideration – and YOU can help get their sessions approved!

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.



...

As I get back into blogging here on DotNetNuke.com I thought I would take a quick moment to answer publicly one of the most common questions that I am asked: Why do you use DotNetNuke?.  So in this posting I'll give my short description on why I started using DotNetNuke back in 2006 and why I'm still so fond of the product today!

Enterprise Architecture Integration (EAI) and DotNetNuke go well together. Enterprise solutions such as SAP R3, Web-to-Print Modules based on Adobe InDesign-Server or even individual workflow systems based on the Microsoft Workflow Foundation 4 can be integrated easily as the DotNetNuke framework (basing on Microsoft .NET-Technologies) comes with an Open Source License that allows editing source code just as needed. Not only during integration but also in service, DotNetNuke keeps a high level of flexibility...

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...

All I can say is “wow”!  We were very excited to use Microsoft’s Razor technology as the theme for this Hackathon programming contest and our entrants did not disappoint!  The winning entry from Ian Robinson, “Razor’s Edge User Map”, features integration of DotNetNuke’s user profile data with Google’s geolocation API to produce driving directions from a users location to a local business!  And using Razor technology in DotNetNuke made this amazingly simple to do!

As many of you may know already, we had a Hackathon in Seattle last week focused on Microsoft Razor (check the link for full details) which was held in Seattle. After one week of time (and lots of effort from the participants) we now have all entries posted and voting is underway...

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.

Occam’s Razor is an often referenced heuristic that basically states that the simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one.  This principle has many corollaries in computer science as we often strive to find the simplest solution to a problem in order to keep the complexity of our applications under control.  The new ASP.Net Razor view engine embraces this philosophy and certainly shows that even simple solutions can be very powerful.  Charles Nurse has a recent series of blog posts which discuss how you can even use Razor within DotNetNuke, with the focus being on lowering the barrier for creating DotNetNuke modules.

In keeping with this focus on simplicity, On December 6th, the Seattle DotNetNuke User Group (SEADUG) will be hosting the DotNetNuke Razor Hackathon.  Like previous Hackathons, we’ll be live streaming the kick-off event on DotNetNuke.com. 

The DotNetNuke wiki continues to grow with more new pages added every week. If you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, please visit http://wiki.dotnetnuke.com/ (and while you’re there consider adding to it).



We’ve already added lots of much needed documentation, but last week we also posted a note in the forums asking for topics people would like pages drawn up on. We’ll be working on those community suggestions over the next few...

There have been significant updates to the User Group Wizard module on the DotNetNuke site this year.  Many of the updates that are there are nothing short of monumental in terms of helping to better support DNN user groups world wide.  However, one of those features has flown under the radar… until now!

There are literally DNN user groups all over the world.  Some of the most active...

DotNetNuke 5.4 Cookbook was the first book project I contributed to - get some details about the background and why I like the outcome - in fact, in my opinion it is the best book on DotNetNuke, currently available...

Orlando was home to me for most of my life – from grade school to high school, and the my adult life after the military.  Then, DotNetNuke Corporation snagged me up earlier this year, causing me to move to San Francisco in June.  Oh, darn! :D  December will officially be the 6th month that I have been away from the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG), but I WILL BE BACK!

When you think about presenting any topic to an audience, there are quite a few things that are common to presenters, no matter what the topic or type of presentation it is.  You want to be well-prepared.  This sounds super simple, and even trivial enough to not have to mention, but it’s not.  Not even for the most seasoned presenters out there.

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.

Is this really an introductory post, or "Hey guys remember me?" You may remember me from my old website wwwcoder.com which ran on DNN, it actually started out on version 1. Remember those days, when DNN wasn't DNN, but IBuySpy Workshop? Or you may remember me from "Professional DotNetNuke 4" that I co-authored. Or if you have teenage girls, that are Jonas Brothers fans, you may know me from another project I did with my own daughters, and that was starting the largest fan site for the Jonas Brothers...

With everything going on leading up to DotNetNuke Connections, something that didn’t receive its due attention was Movember.  If you’re not aware of what Movember is, Chris Hammond did a great job of explaining Movember to those of us who are less informed.  Basically, for the entire month of November, men are encouraged to grow a mustache and get donations to help support men’s health, including cancer.  This is kind of the men’s version of the women’s breast cancer movement.

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...

Hopefully you have all already heard that the long overdue DotNetNuke facelift was rolled out today.  Go ahead and check it out if you need to, but clear your schedule when you do, because it’s simply too fun to play with now!  This is the update that I have been hinting around in some of my recent blog posts, especially those that centered around adding your user group events to the DNN site.

Another week, and the wiki continues to grow. Up to now I’ve mostly pointed out items of interest to developers, but today I’d like to point out something of broader interest – DotNetNuke AppSettings. Did you know that DotNetNuke has 11 separate AppSettings in the web.config? Whilst the default configuration is fine for most people have you ever wondered what some of them do, or thought that perhaps you should consider tweaking some of them ? Well, now all 11 are detailed here...

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.

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed my very first experience at the Silicon Valley Code Camp.  I have to admit, with all of the stigma and mystique surrounding Silicon Valley, I was quite intimidated walking into this event.  With this being the 5th time actually holding a code camp here in Silicon Valley, I knew that they were going to know what they were doing, and they didn’t disappoint.

The DotNetNuke wiki (http://wiki.dotnetnuke.com ) continues to grow with new, valuable content being added on a daily basis. In the past 2 weeks it's grown by nearly 50% with a number of new pages created by DotNetNuke corporation staff, core team members and the community.

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

Hopefully, by now you know that there’s a new and improved area on the DotNetNuke website for you to find and maintain your user group information. ...

Since the previous build used on this site (what I labeled 4.6 Beta 2 on CodePlex), not too much has changed for end users. The majority of the changes I made were in the backend of the module (caching, bug fixes, removing legacy table columns and tables, etc.). Having this installed on here, in combination with the 5.0 version of the module being in the release tracker, means the module could be a part of the next core release. A few key changes since 4.6 Beta 2:

New Feature: Auto Trust Users based...

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 :)

This post is cross-posted from my personal blog.

You heard of that little event that has been traveling around and sprouting in various places around the world, called the Day of DotNetNuke, right?  Maybe you haven’t.  The most recent one just concluded in...

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 we introduced you to Cathal Connolly and Bruce Chapman, today I have the pleasure of featuring a cohort of Cathal’s on the Security team for DotNetNuke, Brandon Haynes. So sit back and enjoy our brief interview with Brandon, 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 have been blogging about and involved in user groups for a long time.  During this time, I have had the pleasure of seeing all kinds of things happen – some bad, but about 99% of the things were overwhelmingly good.  Great, in fact.  I want to talk about why and how the good comes about now.

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. 
 

I feel a bit overwhelmed right now.  I haven’t presented at any community events in at least a couple of months, and I have somehow found myself committed to 7 different public presentations at 4 different events in 4 different cities over the next 2 months – and that’s not including 2 huge presentations that are not public.

I am not complaining though.  I wouldn’t agree to any of them if I didn’t enjoy it.  I just didn’t realize how quickly they all sprung up on me!  :)

The year moves very fast or is it because I am getting old! Anyways, OpenForce Europe is again in the Netherlands.  As all ways, this is a good event and something not worth missing. Location : Zeist Cost: €695 (This is the regular entrance fee) Coverage:

Custom Authentication and Authorization in DotNetNuke Secure Module Development Exploring DotNetNuke?s Extension Points The Art of Unit Testing DotNetNuke Extensions Advanced jQuery & DNN: Putting the Asynchronous...

I see user groups of all kinds and types, all over the place.  They all serve a purpose.  Typically, that purpose is to gather like-minded individuals together in one place, to network and learn about whatever it is that brought them together.  For pretty much anyone that reads my blog, this common thread is probably DotNetNuke.  However, I could just as easily be talking about SQL Server, .Net, PHP, Java, etc.  Name the technology or cause, and that’s the only thing that changes.  The principles remain the same.

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?

The DotNetNuke Mobile Hackathon, conducted in cooperation with the St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group, Appcelerator and HyperCrunch, has been an awesome event and generated some really nice applications!  Typically, the short duration of the event (only a week of development) results in applications which are small, limited or even simple examples.  But this event has drawn some really terrific talent and produced some very interesting, very functional entries!

On August 18th we kicked off the Mobile DotNetNuke Hackathon at the St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group.  During the kick-off we had a great demonstration of Appcelerator Titanium from Kevin Whinnery.  Kevin is an Appcelerator Engineer and Product Evangelist and it was clear from his presentation that he was both passionate and knowledgeable about Titanium.  Almost everyone we spoke with was extremely interested in giving Titanium a try and the Hackathon was the perfect opportunity to kick the tires and build a great mobile application.

If you have been following the voting this last week, you know that we had 5 great Hackathon entries, 4 of which were built with Titanium.  The voting has ended and Scott Willhite should be announcing the results shortly.  Regardless of which mobile app is declared the Hackathon winner, the real winner is the entire DotNetNuke community.  We have gained valuable knowledge about a great tool that can aid in extending the reach of websites and web applications that we all build.  We have also added 6 more Open Source applications to the DotNetNuke forge which will provide great starting points when developing new mobile applications.

When you run a user group, or any other event that has one or more people presenting topical information to others, you know that your presenter is coming prepared with some great information.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked them to come, right?  At the very least, your speaker is knowledgeable in a specific area, has real-world expertise, is able to communicate to others, and will come prepared with a slide deck, or other visual presentation tools.

Last week we challenged DotNetNuke developers to create and submit applications for the latest DotNetNuke Mobile Hackathon.  Entries had to have a mobile application component and a DotNetNuke component that allowed the mobile application and a DotNetNuke website to work together to provide a compelling mobile DotNetNuke experience for the user.  Because the mobile development space is a bit new to many of us, we enlisted the aid of Appcelerator in sponsoring the event and giving a short demo of their Titanium Mobile product to the Hackathon kickoff event attendees.  Titanium simplifies mobile development and allows developers to target several mobile platforms using a single code base.  Apparently our developer community liked Titanium as well, since 4 of the 5 entries were created using the Titanium Mobile SDK.

I got my wife an HTC EVO last weekend (way cool, by the way).  Her first stop?  The Android Market to load up on all of her favorite apps for getting information and staying connected. But why is that interesting?

Last Wednesday night we kicked off the DotNetNuke Mobile Hackathon in St. Louis.  The focus of this hackathon is developing applications that span the DotNetNuke and mobile application space.  Participants have until the 6PM CST on August 25th to submit their entries.  As we mentioned at the user group meeting, we have been working on a community application that allows DotNetNuke users to stay connected even when they are not in front of their computer.  Starting today we are distributing the source code for DNN Pulse on the DotNetNuke Forge.

DNN Pulse is being built with Appcelerator Titanium and takes advantage of Xmlhttprequests, geolocation and mapping services to connect the user to the DotNetNuke community in their local area and on DotNetNuke.com.  During the coming months we will continue to add new features and functionality to the app so that no matter where you are, you can always stay plugged into the community.  Titanium was a natural fit for us since it allows us to target multiple mobile platforms with a single codebase, and because all of the code is written in Javascript we can re-use our existing coding skills without needing to learn a new language.

The initial code release is still beta quality code.  After the hackathon is complete we will incorporate a few remaining features which are not in the current codebase and clean up some of the error handling.  If you plan to use some of this code in your own app, then keep that in mind and code appropriately.

Over the past two days I’ve delivered a topic called Jumpstart: DotNetNuke Module Development, you can download the PDF for the presentation here. This session is a basic intro into quickly starting to do some DotNetNuke Module Development, and if you happened to have missed it you can actually watch a previous version of this presentation in the Beginning DotNetNuke Module Development...

A few weeks ago (heck it’s been a couple of months now, my how time flies) I put together a couple of blog posts about module development using the WAP project type. They were how to setup your environment, how to customize a visual studio template,...

Are you interested in going to the St. Louis Day of .NET next week? Did you fail to get your boss to approved the entry fee of $200 for this excellent two day event?

Well have I got a deal for you!

I’ve got a free entry to the St. Louis Day of .NET that I am going to give away. That means you have a chance to go for free, you don’t have to pay the $200 entry fee, but here’s the deal. You need to earn the free entry!

...

With the Mobile DotNetNuke Hackathon coming up in St. Louis next week Joe Brinkman and I are going to be blogging about how you can get started with doing some mobile development with DotNetNuke, that way you are prepared to enter the contest. If you win the contest you stand a chance at winning some cool prizes, so you better dust off your development chops and get started!

My first post is going to cover how to easily get started with Appcelerator’s Titanium, a tool from an open source company located not too far from DotNetNuke Corp’s headquarters here in the Bay Area in California. The Titanium project is a tool for packaging and deploying (and testing) mobile applications,  meaning you can develop an application that will work on IPhone or Android, and in future releases will include Blackberry. Besides mobile you can also develop desktop applications, but we’re going to stick with the mobile side of things for now.

I’m pleased to announce the call for speakers for the second Day of DotNetNuke event in North America.

This year we will gather in the Chicagoland area for this free event serving those who are interested in learning about this world’s largest open source .NET web content management system and development framework.

Our focus in organizing the upcoming Chicago event is to provide high quality educational content for the community and to provide opportunities for in-person networking and socializing. Of course, great speakers and quality content are key ingredients to a successful conference.

...

… The Dashboard was introduced to DotNetNuke sometime ago.  It details information about the Web Server, Database Server, Host, Portals, Modules and Skins.  It can also be extended.  Well I always thought that this was useful information but when would I need to refer to it.

A few weeks ago I was having some issues with my hosting provider.  My DNN solutions had been migrated to another platform.  This all being said, :

I was not notified My Email was not working as it did before My...

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.

Running a user group has many responsibilities.  You’re recruiting and creating speakers, recruiting attendees, finding sponsors, getting venues, finding topics, managing attendance, and more.  One of the least trivial of these tasks is getting a website hosted for the user group.  Sure, you might work at a company that’s willing to allow you to host it, but what happens when you leave that company? 

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...

If you haven’t been reading my blog lately (what’s the matter with you?) you may have missed the couple of blog posts about the upcoming St. Louis Day of .NET that is going on in St. Louis. If you’ve missed those posts, check them out.

In conjunction with that event (which is on a Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st) we’ve been planning another event more specific...

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

As part of one of my overall themes in my blog, I want to once again speak about user groups.  User Groups are excellent resources.  If you’re interested in any technology, like DotNetNuke as an example, then user groups can be an...

At our current rate of registration, we expect to cross the 800K user mark soon... very soon... we're talking imminently!  For all you diehard DotNetNuker's out there, I'll give a $50 Amazon gift certificate to the one who makes the closest guess to the exact date and time of the 800,000th registration!  And I'll through in a promise for DotNetNuke t-shirt to boot (considering designs now)!

I'm very pleased to announce that as of today, DotNetNuke has an official community wiki!

A few weeks ago I posted about the upcoming St. Louis Day(s) of .NET that is happening later this month (8/20-21). Well the event is only a few short weeks away, and guess what, I’ve got discount codes! If you are interested in going to the event email me (training@dnncorp.com)...

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.

While running a DotNetNuke user group for quite a while, I did all of the management of it myself.  Right or wrong, I wanted to set a tone, a precedent, and basically know everything around how it was going to work before adding on more help.  In doing so, I learned a great deal that rounded out my leadership experience in terms of user groups.

Am I saying that you need to do that?  Absolutely not.  I am simply giving you a bit of background about how I began.  Everyone is different and handles tasks...

Part of running any user group is to hold regular events where the members of the user group can gather at a single location to learn something new about the topic at-hand, and to network with each other.  The value of the user group meeting increase each time you return, until you reach a kind of snowball effect.  Eventually, user groups will become part of your routine – something that you just have to make sure you do and plan your vacations around.

Well, that doesn’t always happen, but believe it or not, it really does happen to many people out there.  But how did they get to that point?  What made them come to that first user group meeting?  I will speak to one of the first areas that answer that question in this post.

...

In my previous blog post, I spoke about early registration discounts available for this year's DotNetNuke Connections '10 conference in Las Vegas.  The deadline for these discounts - July 29 - is now only two weeks away!

This begins the first of hopefully a long segment entitled, “UG News,” where I highlight or announce something cool that a DotNetNuke User Group is doing somewhere in the world.  Please send me any UG news that you might have, and I will try to include it into a newsletter for you, but I will also highlight it here as well.

Ever since I first found the DotNetNuke community, I have fallen “in love” for a lack of better words.  (Perhaps those are the right words though…)  Now, I get to give back to the community I have fallen in love with more than ever before, and in a much more influential way that I’d ever thought was possible.

...

For a long while DotNetNuke has been having public betas, allowing you, myself, and everyone else to give the new versions a test run before it becomes an official release.  Unfortunately, few people ever do download the betas, much less test it, but I am hoping that I can change your mind about this, this time around…

It is well-known that DNN serves as both a website framework, and a programming API.  However, there are many modules that have been incorrectly using...

Unfortunately, it has been quite a while since I have been able to dedicate any time to this module.  Luckily, that changed this past week.  A new version is now available for you to download and use to your heart’s content!

What Is It? If you’re not familiar with the Lightbox Gallery module, it’s a module that allows you to specify folders in your DotNetNuke website to display thumbnails in regions called “albums.”  The great thing...