As we all know and as written here, DotNetNuke and SharePoint is a powerful combination. After the open source DotNetNuke SharePoint Folder Provider my ITM-colleague Jie Hou built a more user-centric DotNetNuke SharePoint extension: an open source DotNetNuke SharePoint File Explorer.

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.

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.

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.

Whilst the out-of-the-box experience with DotNetNuke is pretty good, we all know that it’s with extensions such as skins and modules that the power of the platform comes into play. The ecosystem has created thousands of them and they can be integrated effortlessly like Lego blocks that snap together to build virtually any shape without the need to construct and maintain your own blocks. Whilst experienced DotNetNuke users know the common places to find new extensions such as SnowCovered...

One of the new major additions in DotNetNuke 6.0 is the Extension Gallery. If you read this blog post from Joe, you may already be familiar with this feature. If not, the DotNetNuke Extension Gallery is an integrated section in the Extensions module (under Host –> Extensions in the navigation menu). This interface permits the searching, as well as the downloading and deployment of third party extensions made available from Snowcovered...

Last week Beta 2 of 6.0 was released, as many of you already know, and my colleague Joe Brinkman took the time to highlight a few of the lesser known features/enhancements introduced in 6.0 as well of some of the updates we made based on feedback from previous CTP’s and Betas. Since reading his blog, I have been reminded of another feature/enhancement that has been overlooked thus far: Telerik wrappers. Before diving into what exactly was added for developers to take advantage of, it might be good to provide some history related to the controls as well as our usage in the updated user interface for 6.0.

It has been a long time in the running, honestly too much time, but finally the DNN Documents Module version 05.00.00 has been released.  This release was critical as it resolved a number of issues that existed with the last "stable" version and the more problematic issues with some of the other releases that were completed in the interm.  Now that we have this milestone behind us, where does the module go now?

On July 3rd, an updated version of the DotNetNuke Gallery module successfully completed its passage through the DotNetNuke Release Tracker testing process and has been officially released on it's CodePlex project site. Both the install and source versions may be downloaded from http://dnngallery.codeplex.com/releases/view/62511.

When CTP 2 was released for 6, Joe dedicated a brief section to Module Branding in his blog post. This enhancement allows module developers to associate an image with their extension product. However, to take advantage of this addition, extension developers would normally have to create two separate releases: one to use for DotNetNuke 5.x, and another for DotNetNuke 6.x (even if there were no other changes) This was the only option outside...

The Events team is proud to announce that Events 05.02.00 has been released.

For this version, more than 50 issues were covered. A detailed list of these issues involved can be found on CodePlex. The For the record, I will note a some major enhancements here.

Major enhancement: templated list view A long term request: "Please enable the list view to be templateable". We finally did! This required the complete...

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.

...

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

One of the biggest complaints of anyone using XSLT in .Net is that we are stuck on XSLT and XPATH 1.0. While 1.0 provides a lot of capability it is easy to run headlong into the shortcomings of the language. For a number of reasons which I’ll never understand, Microsoft has not chosen to support XSLT 2.0 or XPATH 2.0 in .Net which forces developers to either live with the limitations of 1.0 or use a 3rd party XSLT engine. Neither of those options is really great.

There are a number of modules in DotNetNuke which rely heavily on XSLT for advanced formatting: Reports, Form & List and XML module are three that come immediately to mind. It would be great if we could break out of the limitations imposed by the reliance on XSLT 1.0.

Well, in fact you can. .Net has supported the concept of XSLT Extension Objects for quite a long time. Essentially, extension objects are .Net code that you can call from within your XSLT. With this capability you can easily code whatever functionality is missing from XSLT 1.0. This is just what a group of Microsoft MVPs did with the EXSLT.NET module which is a .NET implementation of EXSLT. Much of the work done in EXSLT was subsequently incorporated in XSLT 2.0.

Over the last month or so all coordinators of DotNetNuke "core" extensions projects such as Gallery were asked to provide new releases that would be tested via the DotNetNuke Release Tracker process in time for possible inclusion with the DotNetNuke 6.0 release.

A long time (4 years!) there was no DNN FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) module coordinator. The result: no new release since March2007!

At the start of March 2011, I decided, for several reasons, to pick up FAQ and give it a boost. And the first results is visible: a new release of FAQ available for download on CodePlex.

My objective for this first FAQ release after 4 years was to:

migrate the solution...

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.

Last week I created a blog about my intention to pick up DNN FAQ and make that as an example for a session during http://www.web-connections.eu (Day of DotNetNuke Europe) on Jun 16-18 in Hamburg Germany. FAQ is a standard core module that did not get any attention in the last 4 years, by lack of a team. I want to illustrate how you...

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.

In June 2011 there will be a Day Of DotNetNuke Europe in Hamburg, Germany. I have submitted several session proposals, one of them a session on how to apply the Telerik controls in order to improve User eXperience (UX) of any DNN module that you have created. For the DNN Events module (for which I am team lead), we are currently busy on a new version that has the first implementation of Telerik controls in place. I could have used Events as an example, but this is a complex module, which makes it difficult to illustrate the advantages and the how-to of Telerik controls.

...

I am pleased to announce that earlier this afternoon, DotNetNuke Blog 04.01.00 passed the final checks in the community release tracker and is now officially released. Blog 4.1.0 will be included with DotNetNuke 05.06.02 which is due out mid march. In the meantime, you can download 4.1 directly from CodePlex. The blog team is now moving full steam ahead on the many changes we have planned for the 05.00.00 release which we expect to coincide with the launch of DotNetNuke 06.00.00.

As previously announced, Blog 5.0 will include dependencies on several features coming in DotNetNuke 6.0. One of the major changes coming in DotNetNuke 6.0 is an updated UI. The blog team will be working hard to make sure that Blog 5.0 supports the new UI standards of DotNetNuke 6.0. Not only will this help to provide a more unified experience between the blog and the core framework, it will also help other module developers who can use the blog module as a reference for how to take advantage of the new core UI enhancements.

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...

This past weekend a new DotNetNuke Blog release candidate was posted on CodePlex. This version of the blog addressed several longstanding issues with the Blog module and should be the final Release Candidate prior to the official release. In 4.1.0 we really focused on fixing some of the biggest problems with 4.0 and doing some security hardening based on feedback from our security team. In addition we added support for custom JS and CSS and temporarily removed support for Twitter (we’ll be bringing back an improved Twitter option in the next release).

One of the features that I was really excited about including in this release was the ability to support code formatting in the blog module. There are many different methods that I have used over the last several years to format code in my blog posts. The common denominator in every case is that it generally required me to add some custom JavaScript and CSS in the blog post so that it could be displayed properly. In addition to code formatting, we also wanted to support the ability of administrators to include their own CSS to override defaults.

Gallery v 04.03.03 has passed the Release Tracker testing required for "core" extensions project and has been officially released as the recommended version. However, because of the module's very antiquated design, lack of full XHTML compliancy, and legacy code it will not be included in DotNetNuke framework packages. If you would like to install  it on your site or upgrade from v 4.03.00, please visit the project's CodePlex downloads page at: http://dnngallery.codeplex.com/releases/view/54533...

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.

A few weeks ago I came across a project in the DotNetNuke Forge which caught my attention, the Page Management module. After playing around with it locally I found that I really liked several things about it: Easy to use, looks good, little usage (if any) of post backs (it’s a great little module overall, I am just focusing on the items that caught my attention at the time). These few points I noted are an area I feel many modules (including...

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 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)

The DNN Events core module is a popular module from the forge. The cumulative download counter for Events module (all time downloads) is nearly reaching the mark of 100.000 downloads!

A couple times we were asked if there is more detailed technical documentation available for the Events module. In order to provide an answer, I spend this weekend time to create 2 documentation files for the upcoming release of Events, version 5.1.5.:

• A MSDN style help file with the Events API
• A Word document which list all the Events tables, indexes, relationships, Primary and Foreign keys

You will find these files in the download section of Events on CodePlex.

A much-enhanced and bug-fixed Feedback module v 5.00.02 has successfully made its way through the Release Tracker testing process required for "core" extensions that will be included within DotNetNuke framework packages. Although there are no differences between this official release and the 05.00.02 RC release candidate that was available several weeks ago, this "official" release may now be used on live production sites. The most recent framework release (v 5.05.01) package includes the new Feedback module...

Very early in the life of DotNetNuke, modules were fairly limited in their functionality.  Modules could have multiple behaviors attached to them by the framework which were displayed as a list of link buttons.  Very quickly this UI became very cumbersome as we continued to add more and more behaviors to the standard list of behaviors. This UI greatly limited the amount of actions that could be attached to a module and at the time the list of behaviors was fairly static. 

One of the first enhancements that I worked on for my own modules was the ability to create a menu that was attached to the module.   This menu was intended to be customizable by the module developer and the framework and would remove the space limitations that plagued the early framework.  When I showed Shaun the menus he instantly saw the potential and we incorporated them into the framework.

The module action menus were originally designed to be extremely flexible.  I wanted to be able to create links that could perform client-side actions as well as trigger events on the server side, depending on the needs of the module developer.  Many module developers have taken advantage of the server side functionality over the years, but I have not seen many modules which have taken advantage of the client-side functionality.  When I first created the menus, I documented the API using XML Comments, which were not being used anywhere else in the framework.  Until recently the project was not even publishing the API documentation, so these comments went largely unnoticed by the developer community.  I am happy to say that with 5.5 that has changed and the API documentation for the core framework is now available with the rest of the Community Edition download packages.

I have finally completed work and a moderate amount of testing on Gallery v 04.03.02 Beta which fixes the AddFolder exception when running under DotNetNuke 5.05.00. I also took the opportunity to fix a number of more minor issues. Please visit the downloads page http://dnngallery.codeplex.com/releas... for this beta release on the project's CodePlex site. Here are the major issues that have been addressed in...

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

As long-time DotNetNuke users well know, DotNetNuke contains an extensive API that makes the platform extremely powerful and flexible.  Over time the core APIs have continued to expand as new features were added and existing features were enhanced.  One of the core APIs which has been part of DotNetNuke since 4.6 was released three years ago today is the XML Merge API.

The XML Merge API was developed to enable developers to define changes that need to occur to any xml based file within the website.  It is primarily used by the core framework to make updates to web.config but has utility beyond just updating web.config.  Web.config management was a huge problem in early versions of DotNetNuke.  Managing and applying the web.config changes every time you upgraded DotNetNuke was a time-consuming and error-prone process.  The XML Merge API was developed in part to address this need.

When I first created the API, I needed a way to merge dozens of custom URL rewriter rules into the siteurls.config for the AspDotNetStorefront module.  These rules could change with new versions of the ASPDNSF module and so I also needed to support the ability to apply these changes in a version specific manner.  My first version was included as part of the ASPDNSF module, but due to a contractual arrangement, I was able to make this API available in DotNetNuke as well.

In this post we’ll explore how to better expose this functionality and take advantage of it within your DotNetNuke website.

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.

During DNN 5.5 was developed, supported by the DNN Corp. (thanks for that!), the open source localization component for DotNetNuke EALO and the open source Workflow module were improved by my ITM colleague Steffen Ivanowtisch. They now run on DotNetNuke 5.5. You can download all new releases directly at codeplex.

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...

So we’re getting down to the final hours before the Hackathon, and those of us attending are getting ready for our trips! Nik and I both arrive from California tomorrow afternoon, while Joe is coming into St. Louis earlier in the day.

Wednesday (the 18th, tonight, depending on when you read this) we will be broadcasting the Hackathon kickoff from St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group. You will be able watch the session live, or watch the recordings later on.

The Hackathon contest will run until the 25th,...

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,...

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.

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...

Since blogging several months ago about the many fixes and enhancements made to the DotNetNuke module Feedback and announcing the availability of version 05.00.00 Beta for download from the project's CodePlex page, the module has undergone some community testing (but not enough unfortunately) and several iterations from the first beta to today's 05.00.02 release candidate.

It has been one week since I posted the Forum 4.6 Beta and a few issues have been brought to my attention (Thanks Matthias!). Well, in the Beta 2 I have addressed those issues that I verified and a few others. We also installed this very same version on www.dotnetnuke.com (this site) just before I posted the Beta 2 download (which means I consider it safe for production use). While I feel it is safe for production...

I have posted an installable forum 4.6 over @ CodePlex. This is marked as a Beta and requires DotNetNuke Core 5.4.1 or greater. This is basically the same version of the module that we are currently using here, with a few additional changes (which I am sure will make it here shortly). While I feel the module is very capable of being one used in production, there are a few reasons I decided to go the beta route but the main one is I only have tested it using it the way we do here on www.dotnetnuke.com. As per...

First of all, welcome to my very first blog post on the DotNetNuke® website.  I am very excited to be able to bring you information here, especially about the Media Module.  I have been working on many areas of the Media Module for some time now, and I have laid out the details of the current planned release...

This video provides step-by-step instruction for creating a project in the DotNetNuke Extensions Forge.  The Forge is the premier destination for open source enthusiasts to publish and promote open source extensions for DotNetNuke.  Enjoy!

Two days ago I posted a blog about configuring a DotNetNuke development environment, in preparation for today’s blog post about a C# module development template that I recently released on Codeplex. So today’s blog post is about how to utilize the template, customizing the VSTemplate file to fit your needs with company name, namespace, email, and URL. Installing the template, and then creating a quick and easy module using the template.

If you haven’t read my post about setting up your development environment I encourage you to do so before proceeding, as the steps I’m going to walk you through below assume you are running a similar environment to me. The following assumes you are using DotNetNuke V5+ and Visual Studio 2008, if you are using an older version of DNN and Visual Studio there are no guarantees that this template will do anything for you except cause pain. It’s time to upgrade folks! DNN 5 rocks!

So this is the first in a series of promised blog posts that I am long overdue on! These posts are a follow up to a Beginning DotNetNuke Module Development webinar that we provided back on May 17th. If you didn’t attend the webinar you missed out, but you do get to benefit from these blog posts if you want to easily get setup and running with C# module development for DotNetNuke.

This first post will be discussing the development environment that I configure when I am doing DotNetNuke module development, in addition to this post I’ve got a post about a free Visual Studio template that I am releasing on Codeplex that makes setting up your first DNN module very easy. As well as another blog post about using NANT to automate the packaging of your DNN modules so that you can easily deploy them to other environments.