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.

The past couple of months I have spent a decent amount of time working on DotNetNuke 6.0. To be a little more specific, I (and several others) have been focusing on updating the user interface. If you have seen CTP 3, or read Joe’s blog post, you have already been introduced to some of the user interface changes we have going on. Although it may not seem like it, there was a lot of work and planning that went into overhauling the user interface in 6.0.  

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.

If you’ve ever needed to send a backup of your DotNetNuke database to a developer for testing, you likely trust the developer enough to do so without scrubbing your data, but just to be safe it is probably best that you do take the time to scrub.

Before you do anything with the SQL below, make sure you have a backup of your website! I would recommend you do the following.

1. Backup your existing production database
2. Restore a backup of your production database as a NEW database
3. Run the scripts below on the NEW database
4. Shrink the NEW database
5. Backup the NEW database

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.

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.

In a number of my blogs here on DNN.com, I talked about the achievements of the DNN Reference team. I illustrated the creation of a MSDN style help file for the DNN core API, and the fact that the help file is now an integral part of a DNN release.

In this blog, I invite YOU to be of assistance to every DNN developer, including yourself! Please read on.

Have you ever installed a piece of software but weren’t sure where to go from there? Have you struggled to find that feature that you know is there, but you’re not quite sure how to turn it on?  Have you occasionally had problems just getting some complex piece of software installed?  These are challenges faced by the average user of almost every piece of software ever created.  Few software applications are so straight forward and simple that no documentation is required.  As software becomes more and more complex, the documentation and training requirements increase as well.  You need documentation and training that caters to the beginner as well as the expert.

I have heard many DotNetNuke users recite these same challenges.  Like every content management system or application framework I have ever encountered, DotNetNuke is a complex system, so it is not unusual that some new users will find it challenging to get started.  It is also not unusual that many experienced DotNetNuke users and developers will find new features and capabilities that they never knew existed.  The biggest hurdle for many users is the perception that DotNetNuke is not well documented or that the only place to find information is in the forums.

Over the last 8 years, the DotNetNuke team, and the DotNetNuke community has created a wealth of documentation, videos and books covering all aspects of DotNetNuke.  As an Open Source project, DotNetNuke has relied heavily on community members not just for coding and design skills, but also for providing much of the documentation that is available for the platform.  Unfortunately, we have not always done a very great job of making that information easy to find for users.  Some of the information is available on DotNetNuke.com, but often you may need to venture out to other websites to get information provided by the broader DotNetNuke community.

My purpose with this post is to provide a good starting point for anyone who is new to DotNetNuke, and even for many long-time DotNetNuke users, administrators, designers and developers.  This list is far from exhaustive, but will provide a very solid foundation that should answer a lot of questions.  I have used everyone of these resources and know that they are all provide high quality material that is fairly up to date.  If you have been using DotNetNuke for any period of time, I am sure you have your own list of resources that you find valuable.  Feel free to leave a comment and tell me what documentation and training resources you have found helpful.

In the first part of this blog, I illustrated the creation of a MSDN style help file for the DNN core API, and the fact that the help file is now an integral part of a DNN release. In the second part I illustrated what has been achieved for the DNN 5.5 release. In this last part of this blog cycle, I will explain how YOU can be of assistance to every DNN  developer, including yourself!

We (the people at my company XCESS) use DNN for almost 7 years now, mostly for developing custom web applications. A long time I was puzzled by the fact that DNN had a large codebase, but very limited documentation for developers to orientate themselves to reuse the existing DNN code. In other words, use the DNN API.

About 2 years back, I stopped wondering and spend time to create a solution, resulting in a project on CodePlex: the DotNetNuke Developers Help File. This way, I shared our efforts with the DNN community.

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!

While working in the DNN Reference team, I wanted to create a new version of the MSDN style help file for DNN 5.4.2. This was not a piece of cake. I could not easily reuse my previous Sandcastle project for generating the documentation: the project structure of the SandCastle Hep File Builder GUI (SHFB) has changed significantly. But today I managed to make time available and I extracted API information from the source code comments of the core of DNN version 5.4.2 into .chm format, most notably resulting in a MSDN style help file in 2 formats: stand alone .chm file and website (html) based.

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