This is a serious release of Events, completely in line with the DNN6 UX/UI guidelines and ready for Windows Azure.
A special thanks from me goes to Roger Selwyn, colleague team member of Events, who did splendid development work for this release of Events.
 

The release of the DotNetNuke 6.2 Beta 2 was really the first chance users had some insight into what their installs might look like after upgrading to 6.2. In the previous beta of the blog module, the majority of the changes were on the administration side of the module or behind the scenes. In this beta release, the majority of changes are around things content authors and blog readers typically see. So similar to the core beta 2, this module beta 2 will offer blog module users some insight into what they should expect to see in the final release. Also similar to the core beta 2 is that this is the last chance to test and submit your issues to the project's issue tracker.

New version of the good old User Directory released.

It is quite often that when working on a new version of a site that you will have a development, test, upgrade copy of the site that might be around for a while.  It is also possible that if you are working for a third-party that you might stage client sites on your server for a period of time before go-live.  At first glance this all seems common place and not something that you would be concerned about.  However, that is not the case.  Search engines have become overly aggressive in indexing sites, including those that have no direct back links but have been e-mailed to individuals or similar processes. In this post I'll discuss some important considerations when working with these "non-production" installations to help you ensure that search engines will NOT index the content and cause confusion.

Over the last many months the Engineering Organization at DotNetNuke Corp. has been making many process changes to deliver high-quality Software. As Scrum Master and Lead Developer, I’d like to dedicate a blog series on what we did, how it helped and the lessons we learned.

In this blog, I’d like to talk specifically about Peer Code Review that we implemented over 10 months ago.

If you are an open source extension developer for DotNetNuke who is also a github fan, we have some good news for you. As of today, developers can choose either CodePlex or github when creating a new Forge extension project on our site. This support also includes the ability for github hosted project releases to find their way to the DotNetNuke extension feed, available in all DotNetNuke installs as of 6.0.

+

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...

Just a few days ago we released the first beta of DotNetNuke 6.2.  Right before the release, Will Morgenweck informed me that he had integrated the blog module with the journal (using 6.2). After grabbing the latest source (including his changes), I decided it was time to give the Blog module a quick makeover and investigate this 6.2 social stuff. The result of this is the Blog 5.0 beta.

Seems not that long ago that we released 6.0 with its new UI and infrastructural switch to C#. Even more recently, in November, we added Mobile support to the platform in the form of 6.1, and have been incrementally enhancing 6.1 each month. This culminated in the 6.1.5 release made on Wednesday, April 4th, in which we changed to using the 51 Degrees.mobi device detection and database. Besides bringing benefits to Professional and Enterprise Edition customers, our CE customers now have Device Detection Management and Site Redirection Management built-in. 

But the real story today is 6.2...

This blog has been cross-posted from my personal blog.

DotNetNuke has a rich eco-system of Modules, both Open Source and Commercial.  In many ways this is our biggest strength as a CMS platform.  No matter what you want to do with your site – there is often a module that already does it.

In my opinion this is due to the flexibility provided by the core DotNetNuke Framework.  Many other platforms are very prescriptive – as an extension developer you have to follow a fixed shopping list of rules – there is invariably only one way to create an extension, which may not work for what you want to do.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been on the top of most minds in the website design and development for many years now, so I won’t bore you with details about what it is and why it’s important. At this point, that should be obvious. However, maintaining your SEO is a never-ending challenge. This is never more apparent than when you switch platforms on the web, no matter how big or small that platform may be. I have recently run into such a challenge.

Experiences from the fields

Last week I blogged about the new release of DNN Events: version 05.02.03, which replaces the previous one (05.02.02) and is mainly a bug fix release.

Currently, we (Roger Selwyn and myself) have worked on 2 versions of Events: a bug fix release (05.02.03) and a new version (Events 6) for the DNN6 environment. And there is a story to go with it.

This version solves all know issues of the current version (05.02.02) of Events. The amount of code changes is limited, since we did not want to add new functionality to this version, only bug fixes. We have released Events 05.02.03 and this version can be downloaded from CodePlex.

Events 05.02.03 will work for any DNN version 5.5.0 and up. Full details on the changes can be found in great detail at http://dnnevents.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic.

In Part 1 of this series I discussed the basics of data binding in KnockoutJS. In this post, I’ll dive a little deeper in the the binding behaviors of KnockoutJS and show how you can build really responsive web apps using client side development techniques.

While data binding is an important part of KnockoutJS development, it is only part of what makes KnockoutJS so attractive. KnockoutJS is a JavaScript based implementation of the MVVM design pattern which is a derivation of the Presentation Model as described by Martin Fowler. Martin Fowler sums up the Presentation Model like this:

The essence of a Presentation Model is of a fully self-contained class that represents all the data and behavior of the UI window, but without any of the controls used to render that UI on the screen. A view then simply projects the state of the presentation model onto the glass.

As Fowler explains, the Presentation Model class should represent both the data and the behavior which are then bound to the view. Let’s dive into how KnockoutJS handles binding behaviors to your HTML.

So here it is – the first real post in our series on DotNetNuke Patterns and Practices.  How do we make our “Controllers” testable.

Historically, DotNetNuke has used a “Repository” style for manipulating entities in the business layer (rather than an Active Record style) – a lightweight Entity class – usually suffixed with Info, and a Repository class which has traditionally used Controller as a suffix. 

This naming strategy was present initially  in the iBuySpy Portal Starter-Kit upon which DotNetNuke...

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.

DotNetNuke 6.2.0 removes the maximum roles limitation of previous versions.

Many developers are aware that, prior to version 6.2.0, a semi-colon delimited list of roles was saved in the user's cookie.

As the cookie has a fixed size, this effectively limits the number of roles to which a user could belong to about 50 (the actual limit depends on the names used for the roles – shorter role names would increase the maximum limit slightly).

It’s always kind of difficult to tell what modules will become popular when you create them. For the most part, I really don’t care because usually the modules I release to you and the rest of the DotNetNuke community are those that I built specifically for a specific need I had anyway. However, Content Slider module was meant to fulfill a need. There was a gap in the Forge. As a result, this module has had over 3,500 downloads in about 6 months. THANK YOU for enjoying this module so much!

I am getting started on development for version 06.00.00 of the Documents module and wanted to provide a quick update to everyone regarding the items that will be included in this release and the proposed timeline for the release being placed into the Tracker to make it public.

Today, I finally dedicated some time to give the Content Injection Module for DotNetNuke some much needed love. Fortunately, there aren’t too many reported issues or requested features, so the update went quickly and smoothly.

Welcome to a new series of blogs/articles on Patterns and Practices for development using DotNetNuke. 

In this series I will be asking members of the Engineering Team  at DotNetNuke Corporation and Community Members to contribute articles describing Patterns and Best Practices for DotNetNuke development.

Recently I started using KnockoutJS as a key component in my web development toolset. KnockoutJS has simplified my code while also allowing me to create richer web UIs. I have always disliked the amount of postbacks I was doing using a more traditional ASP.Net development approach. KnockoutJS eliminates many of the pain points associated with ASP.Net development and lends itself to a more modern AJAX based style of development. In this series of articles I’ll discuss some of the basics of developing ASP.Net applications using KnockoutJS. In future articles I’ll walk through some of the more advanced features of KnocktoutJS and show how you can use it in your DotNetNuke development.

 

 

It’s that time again… This is one of my more popular modules, so I need to make sure it gets some attention from time to time. There was plenty to do too. Thankfully, all of the scoped updates for this release were fairly easy to implement, requiring minimal time. Don’t tell anyone I said that though… It was really, really hard work! Hahaha!

For this point release, we focused on stabilising by fixing a small number of bugs that popped up, sometimes as a result of new versions of DNN.

After working with ASP.Net Webforms for the past decade, the time has come to move on. I have enjoyed using Webforms and I was pretty good at bending ASP.Net to my will. Having recently tried some newer web frameworks I find that I am more productive than ever before. Over the past couple of years I have dabbled with ASP.Net MVC, jQuery and even WebFormsMVP but none of them truly held my interest for long. I never felt like they really offered solutions to problems that I was worried about. Because of my involvement with DotNetNuke, and the fact that it relies heavily on Webforms, I found that I couldn’t justify the use of some of these technologies. Things like WebFormsMVP added too much friction to the way I was used to working. ASP.Net MVC couldn’t really work in any meaningful way with DotNetNuke. And jQuery was a nice add-on, but it didn’t fundamentally change the way I developed modules.

First, I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and support since the original release of this module. It’s been quite interesting. This module has many things planned for it, but I did want to make sure it lived in the wild for a bit to fix any issues that have been found before I begin adding more features. As it turns out, there were two significant fixes that were required.

The Active Directory provider has moved from RC to Release

Many of you are not even aware that the Open Graph Protocol even exists. However, it has been the backbone of inter-connected websites ever since social sharing of content and web pages has existed. This is the standard that Facebook, Google+, and others have adopted to properly connect, share, and display content from site to site when a visitor decides to share it. Of course, like any other standard, every site varies on how well they adopt this particular standard.

In March of this year I made some blog posts about my intentions with FAQ and I have (or I should say, we have, since Torsten Weggen joined the FAQ team) reached a serious new target: a complete conversion to C# and some major enhancements. The result: FAQ 05.00.00, which available for download on CodePlex.

 

This month DotNetNuke Corporation put some extra muscle behind community reported issues.  And comparing issue logs with Wordpress and Drupal the difference is impressive.  Check it out.

The Events team is proud to announce that Events 05.02.01 has been released. Events 05.02.01 will work for any DNN version 5.5.0 and up. The downloads can be found on the Events Project page on CodePlex.

 

I am by no means an expert on open source licenses. I am not a lawyer. I have, however, been part of the overall open source software community since roughly around 1999 or 2000. During this time, I’ve dealt with open source software almost exclusively. It’s a blur at this point. I began at a time where PHP was king, and Microsoft’s (now Classic) ASP was trying to get in on the party. Long story short, I found out immediately that I loved open source software and I never looked back.

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.

Murphy’s law has it that real issues in DotNetNuke (core. modules, skins) don’t manifest themselves until you’ve rolled out in production. We can test all we want, but the fact of the matter is that this has become a highly complex eco-system with many interacting bits and it is next to impossible to test for all scenarios. And I’m pretty sure the kind folks at the Corp’s helpdesk will agree with me on this as well. So let’s not kid ourselves: sh*t happens. It’s our ability to deal with it that separates the...

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.

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

Read on!

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

Let’s begin with some first impressions…

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.

DotNetNuke has undergone many changes over the last 8 years in the way the product is developed and managed. Having been part of the main engineering and product teams from the early days of the Open Source project I have had a number of roles on the team. Last year I moved from being focused on application development as part of the Engineering team to being more focused on product management. A big part of my role on the product management team was handling release management.

...

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

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

There are all kinds of ways to make a skin (or design) in DotNetNuke react in a dynamic or personalized fashion, and it can be done in any number of ways. To date, my favorite article on how to do this was written by Vassilis Terzopoulos (@thinkofdesign). As his Hook Your DotNetNuke Skins blog post illustrates, a "user control" style skin allows you to use and reuse the DotNetNuke API in your skin design. This has potentially limitless potential in customizing the user experience from a very high level across your entire site.

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.

Have you ever had the need to blog a range of IP Addresses from accessing your website? Or perhaps, setup a website that is only accessible to a specific range of IP Addresses? DotNetNuke Request Filters are a great tool for getting such functionality configured, all configurable within your browser, without needing access to the settings in IIS.

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...

Client side performance is something that a lot of us in the web world feel passionately about, and recently I’ve had the pleasure of working on some very exciting DNN enhancements in this area. I'll lead with a fun fact: number of CSS/JavaScript requests in DotNetNuke 6: twenty-two. Number in DotNetNuke 6.1: eight. But, before I give you all the details, let me set the “client side performance” stage.

DotNetNuke and SharePoint: what a powerful combination. Think about the heavy SharePoint document management features like versioning, WebDav and not to forget the perfect Microsoft Office integration; combined with the flexibility of DotNetNuke. Not to forget the same technology base. That’s why there are professional solutions available on the enterprise market to integrate DotNetNuke and SharePoint.

There is yet another release of the most popular image gallery module for DotNetNuke, the Lightbox Gallery module. I am very proud of this release, as it marks a few important milestones for this module. All the while, it continues to be one of my favorite open source modules to work on. With this release, it continues to also improve upon the number of features it has and the number of people that use it as their standard image gallery module for DNN.

If you're running an online business I assume you have already designed your fan pages on Facebook. If you haven't I don't think it's too late to jump into the bandwagon and join everyone out there. Many companies like Intel or Nokia have their own design on this social network and it creates quite a nice experience for users instead of staring at the old blue default color of Facebook.

I need to get back on track with having a blog post ready for each and every DotNetNuke module release I make. In this case, I definitely wanted to make it a point to have an update here in the blog. There have been 4 different releases of the Content Slider module since this module was first made available two months ago. As it turns out, there is a lot of demand for this module. After all, there have already been over a thousand downloads so far. Not bad for being in the wild for 8 weeks.

It was nearly a month ago for the first official release of the Disqus Module for DotNetNuke. The initial releases focuses on just getting some minimal functionality out there to gauge interest in the module, and to attempt to get a deeper knowledge of Disqus itself before the deeper levels of integration were attempted. Well, that time has come… Welcome deeper integration!

Now that DotNetNuke 6.x has been out for a while and with the recent release of DotNetNuke 6.0.1 while I was on vacation I thought I'd take the time to write a must requested blog post regarding my thoughts on the DotNetNuke 6.x platform and performance.  Keep in mind, these points are my own personal opinion and should be considered that only, so without further delay, I'll answer the most common questions that I get.

I was speaking with another member of the community about general DotNetNuke stuff, and the conversation turned to modules.  It was mentioned that there wasn’t a single known open source module that offered the ability to integrate content sliders or banner rotators into your DNN website.  There are of course a ton of ways to implement such a feature.  Snowcovered has numerous modules that allow you to do this.  So, I decided to create a nice and easy one for the Forge.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.1 is officially released. This maintenance release was focused on resolving a number of issues that were found in the 6.0.0 release. Given the extensive set of changes in DotNetNuke 6.0 we recognized the need to quickly identify and resolve issues discovered by our customers as they tried the new release in production environments. This maintenance release further improves what many customers have already told us was a pretty stable release.

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.

You may or may not be aware of a highly useful and engaging third party comment platform called Disqus.  Disqus was created and founded in 2007 to allow websites to replace their comment engines with one that offers a much simpler and socially enabled alternative.  With features like single sign on, centralized comment management and viewing, enhanced spam controls, consistent cross-site standards, and being able to use the same comment identity and information across multiple sites, it’s a no-brainer to want to use Disqus as your comment engine of choice.  So, I chose to build a module to integrate it into DotNetNuke.

To our second installment on this two part series on handlers and modules in ASP.NET web applications, their significance and how to begin debugging situations where things have gone haywire. Like I mentioned in the previous post on handlers: modules and handlers go together like peas and carrots. The main difference is the following: whereas a handler...

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!

If you’ve been following my activities on Twitter or in the Forge, then you already have an idea of what the title of this blog entry is referencing.  As of the writing of this post, I’ve had 5 different projects updated to be specifically installed on DotNetNuke 6.0.  I was more than excited to get my most popular open source projects updated, to say the least.

There are many hidden gems in DotNetNuke 6.0 that you will find once you begin using it.  You may have heard of some already.  For example, there’s creating numerous pages all at once with the page manager, the mega menu, jQueryUI plugins, module categories, standardization around module messages, and more.  There is another beauty hidden away in the new text editor provider too…

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.

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.

There are many exciting updates around jQuery in DotNetNuke 6. This post will provide an overview of the changes and a recap of some of the existing functionality to give you a good picture of the many ways jQuery is used, and how you may use it moving forward.

I know it hasn’t been that long since the last release, but it certainly feels like it.  The last release of the Lightbox Gallery module was in February of this year – 5 months ago.  Okay…  Maybe that is a long time after all…  The newest release is here though!

DotNetNuke 6 introduces some really cool new features – especially the new User Interface – but there are also quite a few smaller enhancements that make it easier for Admins and Host users to manage their site.

One of these is the concept of Module Categorization.  Module Categorization allows Host users to categorize their modules so that finding a module in the Control Panel is much easier.

Lets look at how it works.

When logged in as a Super User browse to the Host >> Extensions module...

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.

You may or may not know, but I just submitted the Media Module v04.01.00 to the release tracker.  This version has it’s entire user interface (UI) updated to match the DotNetNuke v6.0 standards and form patterns, among other updates.  It was definitely a learning experience, but a very fun one!  One of the cool things I got to learn…  Reusing the built-in message types!

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.

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.

Like many people I have been building DotNetNuke Modules using Chris Hammond's DotNetNuke Module Template.  It is a great template set and works well in 99.9% of cases.  However, recently I have been building more and more complex module solutions for customers where within a single project I have a need to package up two or more "distinct" modules.  Therefore I have one DotNetNuke Module Manifest and it will install multiple modules.  Overall the process works great, but there is one small nuance, the filename, if you have two modules you will get xx.xx.xx.yy.yy.yy as the filename, which is the version of module 1, and the version of module two.  In my case I just want the first module to show, and in this post I'll show you how.

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.

A release update for FAQ: 04.05.01 A long time there was no DNN FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) module coordinator. The result: no new release since May 2007. At the start of March 2011, I decided to pick up FAQ and give it a boost. I made some blog posts about my intentions and quickly released an updated version (04.05.00). Based on feedback from users (thank you!), I fixed some small issues and brought some additional enhancements. The result: FAQ 04.05.01, which passed through the DNN Release tracker...

I knew the challenges when I first took over the Media Module.  In it’s first series of releases, it was built to make it easy to simply add an image on a page in DotNetNuke.  Eventually, it was extended to also allow you to display videos in nearly the same way.  Unfortunately, for many end-users, it’s just as easy to simply add the requisite HTML code to the Text/HTML Module to display all of the media types that the module was supporting (depending on the user, of course).

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...

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.

Almost two years ago I blogged about How To Get Design-Time Support for DotNetNuke Controls on my personal blog, and back then the solution seemed to be the easiest, just change one setting in your project and everything was just fine.  Well, as the years have progressed and people have downloaded and worked with projects I've ran into a few issues with this route and now have a better solution for this.

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...

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.

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

I'll admit from the start that it has been a long time coming, but I am working on resolving issues and handling feature requests for the Documents Module.  As part of this, I would like to reach out to the community for some suggestions and feedback on the features that you would like to see.

It’s been a while since my last post here. Recently, DotNetNuke has begun releasing release candidates of DNN 6 and all of us extension makers need to keep a close eye on this development. If you aren’t already you definitely need to take a look at this prereleases and test any stuff you have to make sure you’ll be ready when it is released. I know they do all they can to avoid breaking changes, but (as they probably say in the Langley...

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.

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.

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.

In the last few weeks I have been busy trying to get the performance of our DNN based company website (www.xcess.nl) better. I was triggered by a tweet from Salaro with a reference to a blog on IIS settings to improve caching and performance in general. I was also triggered by the fact that there are issues in some cases with DNN 5.6.x, that will not allow to use http compression from the host setting.

As a reference, I used Google online PageSpeed...

A while back I blogged about Creating DotNetNuke Scheduled Jobs and promised a "part two" article, this is that article.  In the previous installment I talked about the process of creating and manually installing a scheduled job.  This article is designed to take this to the next step and discuss how you interact with the Scheduler System to handle installation and other validation methods of scheduled jobs.  I will explain the finer points in regards to checking to see if a job exists and creating/modifying jobs.

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!

 

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

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’s that time again…  The Lightbox Gallery module for DotNetNuke needed some attention.  There were a few minor bugs that were annoying people that needed to be fixed, and a couple of enhancements as well.

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...

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.

You may or may not be experiencing a problem with your DotNetNuke website after upgrading to version 05.06.02.  There is a chance that following your upgrade, there will be folders missing from the image manager when you go to edit content, like shown in the image above.  In some cases, ALL folders will be missing from the window.  This doesn’t appear to be an all inclusive bug, but many of you either have or will see this issue on your site. 

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.

DotNetNuke 5.6.0 introduced a new feature that automatically creates Portal Aliases as they are needed.  This feature is great for people who are developing a new site, or who are changing the domain of their site.  Unfortunately there were some unintended consequences that came with this new feature.  The new Automatic Portal Alias feature can interfere with custom code that is not in the traditional locations for module content.

...

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

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

I cannot honestly tell you where the time has gone.  I first embarked upon doing something about the Media Module as a team member in 2008.  Unfortunately, for many reasons, the module never really was updated until last year.  I was able to get a release out the door last June.  Somehow, nearly a year has flown by since that release.  Where did the time go?!!  Well, I was able to put my head down a few times over the past few months, and I am very happy to say that I have another release nearly ready for the release tracker.

There should be a new release of the Media Module submitted to the release tracker by the end of the month.  There are many really cool updates coming to this release, but I would very much like to remove a feature – that is, if it doesn’t have an adverse impact upon anyone that is currently using the module.

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.

Whoa…  I cannot express to you enough – how much of a whirlwind the last few weeks have been for the Widget Suite for DotNetNuke project.  Many late nights have been spent going into this release.  Over this time, we’ve been tweaking and building widgets, automating the widget packaging process, adjusting the scope of the next and future releases, and most of all – releasing and managing a brand-spanking-new website!  All that has led to today’s announcement of the much anticipated version 01.03.00 release.

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...

"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.

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.

...

A development build of the Repository module 3.5.2 (Beta) has been released on Gooddogs.com. If no issues are found within a reasonable timeframe, this is the version that will be submitted to the DotNetNuke release tracker as an official module release. This will be the first official release of the module in quite a long time.

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.

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).

...

The Widget Suite for DotNetNuke launched in late November of 2010 with a very simple purpose.  I wanted to document a few of the widgets I had created for technical presentations, and make them easy for others to use.  As with any other open source project that sees a little success, I had no idea how popular it would become – nowhere near as successful and DNN mind you – but unexpected just the same.

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.

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.

If you have any interest in doing DotNetNuke Module Development you should check out the Module Development Webinar that starts next Tuesday. The class runs from Tuesday the 1st through Friday the 4th, and runs 8am-12pm Pacific Time the first three days, the 4th day runs from 8am-10am.

Here’s a brief description of the webinar

Module Development in DotNetNuke is the primary delivery mechanism of extended functionality...

 

For the last year or so there has been a lot of interest in the DotNetNuke community about how to run DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.  Many people have looked at the problem and could not find a viable solution that didn’t involve major changes to the core platform.  This past fall, DotNetNuke Corp. was asked by Microsoft to perform a feasibility study identifying any technical barriers that prevented DotNetNuke from running on Windows Azure.   I was pleasantly surprised by what I found and over the course of the next few weeks I’ll present my findings in a series of blog posts.  Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Clause, and he is running DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.

• Understanding Azure
• SQL Azure
• Azure Drives
• Web Roles and IIS
• Putting it All together

Part 1: Understanding Azure

Background

Prior to the official launch of Windows Azure, Charles Nurse had looked at running DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.  At the time it was concluded that we could not run without major architectural changes to DotNetNuke or to Windows Azure.  Since that time several other people in the community have also tried to get DotNetNuke running on Windows Azure and have arrived at the same conclusion.  David Rodriguez has actually made significant progress, but his solution required substantial changes to DotNetNuke and is not compatible without also modifying any module you wish to use.

DotNetNuke already runs on a number of different Cloud platforms and we really don’t want to re-architect DotNetNuke just to run on Azure.  That approach was rejected because ultimately Azure support is only needed by a small fraction of our overall community.  Re-architecting the platform would require significant development effort which could be better spent on features that serve a much larger segment of our community.  Also, re-architecting the platform would introduce a significant amount of risk since it would potentially impact every Module and Skin currently running on the platform.  The downsides of re-architecting DotNetNuke vastly outweigh the anticipated benefits to a small percentage of our user base.

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

This isn’t really a “whitepaper” in the literal sense, but rather a cheat sheet to help you identify all of the areas in DotNetNuke that you can take advantage of in order to effective leverage your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.  Nearly all of these SEO settings and features have been around for a long time too.

Search Engine Optimization is simply a term used to describe the process of constantly optimizing your website to be indexed easier and faster – and better indexed than competitive websites.  The exact methods and techniques you use will sometimes change from week to week, but the tools used to employ your strategy generally remains the same.

If your website is publicly visible, and if it has ANYTHING to do with your business making money – SEO SHOULD BE IMPORTANT TO YOU.  Most companies that are serious about this have one or more people on-staff or contracted full time to get the most out of SEO.

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...

What’s this?  You haven’t heard of widgets in DotNetNuke?  Just in case that really is true, I will give you a bit more background information about what a widget is in DNN.  Simply put, widgets are client-side applications that run in the web browser using any form of JavaScript that you’d like.  Primarily, you see them written in jQuery these days – but the beauty of this framework is that you can pull in ANY JavaScript library that you want!

Widgets are also called Skin Widgets.  This is because they are usually used within skins in DotNetNuke, but you can also add them to module headers and footers, the HTML module, and more.  You can’t use them just anywhere though.  For example, your forum posts are safe from guest widgets. 

On January 13th, Microsoft unveiled a new weapon in the Microsoft arsenal at CodeMash… WebMatrix!  And Shaun Walker and Joe Brinkman were onsite to show off DotNetNuke using the long anticipated release of Razor!

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

• Razor Scripts – 5.6.1 includes the new RazorHost module which allows you to use Razor scripts in your DotNetNuke installation.  For an example of what can be accomplished, checkout the recent entries in the Razor Hackathon.
• Child Portal Aliases – In the past you were forced to designate a portal as either a child portal or parent portal at the time the portal was created.  In 5.6.1, you will be able to add Child Portal Aliases at any time, to any existing portal.
• Improved Portal Alias Handling – In the past, it was possible to create multiple Portal Aliases for your site.  This has always caused potential SEO issues.  In 5.6.1 we have taken portal aliases one step further.  You will now be able to designate a single portal alias as the default alias.  The administrator can specify special handling for the portal aliases including the ability to use the default portal alias as the base domain for the “canonical url”.  Alternatively, the administrator can choose to use a 301 redirect so that all portal aliases will be redirected to the default portal alias.

During the 5.6.1 development cycle our security team received a few reports of security issues that affected previous versions of the platform.  Based on these reports we did further testing on the platform and identified additional areas that we felt warranted additional hardening as a preventative measure.  Because of the number and seriousness of the issues identified, and the additional hardening work done to the platform, we recommend that everyone upgrade to the 5.6.1 version to ensure your sites remain secure.

DotNetNuke is the business engine behind a vast number of websites across the globe.  Many of those websites power local, regional, federal and even international government agencies.  In a webinar on January 20th, at 10 AM PST, you'll have the opportunity to hear "live" from the team that created an award winning government website.  Can't make it?  Register anyway to receive access to the recorded version.

So for a long time now I have been promising an article on creating DotNetNuke Scheduled jobs and finally I'm actually getting it written.  This article is actually the first in a series of two articles.  This one will start out with the programming process involved, and the general "manual" setup process to actually get the job going.  The second article will focus on using the DotNetNuke API's to be able to validate and configure a scheduled job from within a module, making the user setup process easier.

Today two of my mates / colleagues Alexander and Johannes (both also member of the DotNetNuke Links Module Team) released their new DotNetNuke Menu Provider. They thought working with the standard DotNetNuke menu providers is “a pain”. And they didn’t want to study XSLT before skinning a DNN site. So they decided to build their own. In my eyes they built a simple as well as powerful solution:

Easy to use templating system: developed for designers Flexible use of custom mark-up Access...

Today Shaun Walker and I had the pleasure of demonstrating how well DotNetNuke works with Microsoft WebMatrix and the new Razor scripting engine at CodeMash.  CodeMash is a great regional development conference that focuses on exposing developers to a wide variety of languages and platforms.  A common theme throughout CodeMash has always been how we can simplify our development processes without loosing power and flexibility.  WebMatrix and Razor

As you saw with the Razor scripts that were submitted as part of our recent Razor Hackathon, it is possible to build a wide variety of modules and scripts using Razor.  As you probably saw in the announcement during the WebMatrix launch event at CodeMash, DotNetNuke 5.6.1 Release Candidate is now available for immediate download from the DotNetNuke CodePlex download page.  The Release Candidate contains the final RTM version of the Razor engine and we expect the final DotNetNuke 5.6.1 version to ship next week on January 19th.

The Widget Suite for DotNetNuke continues to be one of the most fun that I have worked on in a long time.  I must say that this is not just because its focus is on DotNetNuke.  It is also because I have a couple of incredible people helping me with it, Mark Allan and Armand Datema.  They have been instrumental in the success of the development, scope, and continued overall success of the project.

Thanks to them, we have increased the number of widgets in the suite from 7 to 12!!!

The DotNetNuke wiki’s up to nearly 200 entries already, with a wide selection of content of interest to many different types of people. 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).

Whilst in the early days we concentrated on documenting lots of technical details such as providers, architecture, development and classes, the wiki also contains lots of...

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

Late last year I created a blog post and video about a new version of the module development template that I released on Codeplex. This new template uses MSBuild scripts instead of NANT scripts to automate the packaging process for the modules built with the template.

The MSBuild script works well out of the box, to package your module you simple change into RELEASE mode and then execute the build.

If your project contains references to DLLs (in the website’s BIN folder) that you also need to package up so that you can deploy them with the module however things become a little murky. Earlier today Bruce posted on that original blog post asking how to include those DLLs in the build script so they get packaged automagically.

With the New Year, why not resolve to learn more about DotNetNuke?

DotNetNuke is the most successful and widely adopted open source project on the Microsoft Stack. Its been around for eight years and isn’t going away anytime soon. While the software itself is written in VB.Net you are not limited to VB.Net when developing custom extensions for the platform, in fact, when I do my module development I do it primarily in C# out of preference.

If you’re a developer out there who shuns learning a framework such as DotNetNuke, you should really take a look around. With hundreds of thousands of websites being powered by the platform it has created a demand for people with technical knowledge of the system. There are job postings almost every day looking for developers and designers for DNN, so it would make sense to learn it and start to understand how it works if you want to take a look at some of those opportunities. There are even job openings here at DotNetNuke Corporation.

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

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



...

THANK YOU, Event downloaders and users! The Events module on Codeplex reached the 100.000 download mark on Christmas night! That was a very nice Christmas present for all members of the team. Have a look at dnnevents.codeplex.com/stats and...

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!

This evening I was working on creating a Full Width skin for a car racing site I’ve worked on for a number of years. The site has a very active Forum running on DotnetNuke 5.6.0 and the 5.0.0 release of the DotNetNuke Forum module. The problem with the site is it is a fixed width design and that doesn’t’ work well for many forums.

Basically I wanted a three column layout where the middle column stretched out as wide as possible, and depending on if there was content in the Left and Right columns, I wanted them to not display at all, causing the Middle column to expand to fill the void.

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...

The beta release of DotNetNuke 5.6.1 is now available for download on CodePlex.  In the past we have not made public beta’s available for the maintenance releases because there wasn’t much time between when we started QA and when we actually released.  Given the recent change in our maintenance release to every 2 months, and the extra time afforded by the winter holidays, we have decided to release a beta for 5.6.1 so that people have a chance to test what we’ll be releasing in January. 

At this point, the code is pretty stable and we have a very small list of outstanding regression issues we are working on for this release.  You can see the list of outstanding issues on the DotNetNuke Roadmap for 5.6.1.  If you find an issue, please log it into Gemini and we’ll take it from there.  It is unlikely that any bugs found at this point will make it into 5.6.1, but it will give us a good head-start on identifying issues to be fixed for 5.6.2.

There was a ton of buzz surrounding the first release of the Widget Suite for DotNetNuke.  Like most open source projects the buzz – while always appreciated – was very unexpected.  It led to the addition of two project team members in just a couple of days!

New Project Contributors

I cannot thank the Widget Suite team enough for their passion and helping to get the latest release of the project out the door so quickly.  I was (not surprisingly) the bottle neck in this release.

The Events module is a very popular module for lot of DNN users. The current Events team (essentially Roger Selwyn and myself) have been working hard in the last years to bring this module up to date, enhancing it, creating new versions, making documentation, provide instructions, and (especially Roger) answering a mega load of questions from users and when they were posted in the Events forum. The activities of the Events team was rewarded by recognition of the DNN community and sometimes by compliments...

The DNN Events module seem to be popular over the years.  This can be seen from the # of downloads that is available on CodePlex, if you select the complete project lifetime.

The Events project team has been actively releasing new versions of Events 2 or 3 times a year, over the past 3 years, improving functionality, solving bugs, adding features and hardening the table...

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)

The Events team is proud to announce that Events 05.01.05 has been released.

The objective of this Events release is to fix every known bug of the previous 05.01.04 release. There were a few small issues, in "corners" of the module under special conditions. And we have fixed or circumvented those. We believe we have produced a very stable release, install it on your site let your events happen!

This new release covers 14 issues. Events 05.01.05 will work for any DNN version 5.2.0 and up. A complete...

Around a year ago, I began talking about the widget framework that is in DotNetNuke, first introduced in version 05.00.00.  The widget framework is a powerful feature that allows you to do nearly anything you can think of using JavaScript.  In DNN, that would typically come in the form of using jQuery since it’s built in to the product, and the widget framework is built on it.  I have seen it used to create more user-friendly...

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

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...

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...

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)

Have you ever been given a technical challenge that just seemed to interesting to pass up? This past weekend I was asked the question about extending the blog module to add an author biography to the footer of the blog post.  The gist of the question was how could we do this without causing problems on upgrade.  Since I always like a good challenge, I thought this would be a good opportunity to also show how a little creativity will allow you to solve many of the challenges that you face in DotNetNuke.

I have felt for a while that the DotNetNuke blog module was quite capable, but needed a few helper modules to give it a boost.  This is a perfect showcase on how to extend a module without actually changing the module or any of it’s data.  I also thought this would be a good opportunity to learn a few new techniques so I included the use of the new jQuery Templates which were added in jQuery 1.4.3, but which are also available as a separate download.

The DotNetNuke wiki has more than doubled in the month since I started this series of blogs. 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).

This week I’d like to touch on the providers section. At present DotNetNuke supports 16 different providers, allowing users to...

Those that attended one of the OpenForce events (or were paying attention in the forums or on Twitter) may have heard that DNN Corp is contemplating switching the programming language of the “Open Core” from VB to C#. There are a number of reasons for this. Notably that it is easier for them to find software engineers for the project and that it would attract more (C#) developers. There is now a Twitpoll on the issue as this is not a trivial matter and DNN Corp would like your input on this. In this post I’d like to weigh in on the discussion.

I am very happy to announce that I released a first beta version of the DNN_Chat module for DotNetNuke 05.05.00 and above.  To run this, to a WAP module moved, version you need have to installed the .NET Framework 3.5.  This Chat module want also make a file cleaning if you test it with a upgrade of the previous version. But noticed, that if you install the Chat 01.00.01 on DNN 5.5.x there is an known issue on the App_Code\Chat\DnnChatCodeHelper.vb you have to modified manuelly the way you find on this Forum...

After I started with developing my first own module on C# I noticed that the DNN_Chat module is brocken when used in any of the DNN versions. I got in contact with its team lead Stefan Kamphuis and noticed that existing team was very small.  Accordingly I offered my contribution helping the module to work on DNN5.x.

Early this week I was at the great OpenForce Europe conference organized by the SDN at The Netherlands.
As always it's been a great conference with lots of great sessions and plenty of opportunities to meet some old DNN friend and made some new ones! Networking (and drinking beers) is as important as good sessions, and we have had both of them!

At my session "DotNetNuke installation manifest file (.dnn) explained!" we took a deep look at all the options provided by DotNetNuke for a installing all kind of Extensions (libraries, modules, providers, skins, ...).

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...

Earlier this Week a public version of the DotNetNuke 5.6 Beta was made available on CodePlex.  For information on how you can help with this release and to get access to the current version please visit our Beta Release page on DotNetNuke.com.  In this release we have spent quite a bit of time cleaning up some lingering issues from Content Localization, Telerik HtmlEditorProvider, user Profiles along with dozens of other miscellaneous issues.

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.

For quite a while now, jQuery has become one of the things that I am passionate about.  It’s very powerful in getting you up and running with an interactive and robust user interface in your modules.  There is literally nothing that I can think of that you cannot do with your designs and interactions in DNN using jQuery.  In this post though, I am going to focus on a specific area though, which is hiding and showing a module using jQuery.

When you think about showing a module, it would first need to be on the page somewhere.  Showing the module obviously requires for the module to initially be hidden though.  Hiding any HTML element on a page is best done through CSS, and prior to your jQuery running.  It’s for this reason that I’d suggest that you have a special container that hides the module, or use the Header and Footer settings in the settings for your module to “hide” it before the page loads.

With everything going on, I have been neglecting my most popular open source module, the Lightbox Gallery module.  There were a couple of bugs, but the rest were enhancements.  A change log is below, along with a video showing how to use the module.

Probably the most notable change in the change log below is that the project and .Net framework was updated.  You cannot use this module with versions of DotNetNuke lower than 05.02.00 any longer.  A line had to be drawn in the sand eventually, so I apologize if this affects you.

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.

I was recently asked in the DotNetNuke Forums to provide some videos to show how to use the Media Module.  As soon as I read that, I thought, “Duh!”  Of course there should be videos on this!  I quickly set out to planning and getting some videos generated for the Media Module.

I broke down the Media Module into a series of 5 videos of 2 minutes or less to make them easy to watch.  They allow you to get an introduction, and show you how to use it’s basic features.  To make things easy for you, the videos are embedded here in the order that you’re intended to watch them.

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Over the last couple of years, I have been doing more and more work with JavaScript.  Whether it is work on web pages with jQuery or work in mobile applications with Appcelerator Titanium, I often find myself needing to transfer data to and from the server as JSON.  In DotNetNuke I frequently found myself constantly converting my .Net objects to and from JSON and it seemed to be a waste of time to constantly figure out what framework I should use to handle the JSON serialization/deserialization tasks. 

I have tried the JavaScriptSerializer,  the DataContractJsonSerializer  and even JSON.Net but I always keep coming back to the JavaScriptSerializer because it is the simplest solution that doesn’t impose any 3rd party dependencies.  The problem with all of these solutions is that I am constantly having to remember how to use them.  The API, even for the JavaScriptSerializer, still requires several lines of code whenever I want to use it.  I wanted something that was drop-dead simple, yet still powerful enough to handle 95% of my serialization/deserialization needs (for the really tough stuff I can still use one off code with an appropriate serializer)

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 :)

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...

I’m sorry but I couldn’t let myself write a post about portals without making a Portal reference. In the title.

One of the things that always got me when working with DotNetNuke was how...

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

One of the issues that every DotNetNuke skin designer faces is how to design skins for multiple browsers.  Often, getting a skin to work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require much tweaking.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Internet Explorer.  Making your skin work with IE6, 7 and 8 along with all the other browsers can be a bit of a nightmare.

I previously addressed this issue in DotNetNuke Tips and Tricks #3: Conditional StyleSheets.  In that post, I created a skin object that allows you to conditionally add a stylesheet to the skin based on a condition defined by the designer.  This skin object was subsequently added to the core framework and is currently being used by many designers.  In fact, Artisteer uses it in all the DotNetNuke skins that their software generates.

Recently, I found a method that I like better than using conditional stylesheets.  One of the downsides to conditional stylesheets is that you end up causing stylesheet bloat.  Conditional stylesheets add round trips to the server which we should be trying to minimize.  Conditional stylesheets also require you to maintain multiple stylesheets which can be a little painful.  If you make a change in your main stylesheet, you will need to find the corresponding section in your IE specific stylesheets and potentially make changes to them as well.  From a maintenance and development perspective, this is far from optimal.

I have often heard it said that people have difficulty creating skins for DotNetNuke.  I am always baffled when I hear these comments especially in light of what I see in the competing skinning engines on other platforms.  In this series of posts I’ll be looking at the basics of DotNetNuke Skinning, creating a complete DotNetNuke skin and associated containers, dispelling a few Myths and Misconceptions about DotNetNuke Skinning and finally we’ll wrap up the series by comparing the DotNetNuke skinning engine with those of some other web platforms.

Over the past several years designers have expressed a number of frustrations about the DotNetNuke skinning engine.  Often these frustrations may be based on some particular difficulty they are having and therefore there is a kernel of truth to the issue.  What I frequently find when digging into these challenges is that there is a misunderstanding by the designer which leads to the frustration or the design is constrained by limitations in HTML and CSS.  Fundamentally, we need to do a better job of providing documentation to the design community which helps them to better address their points of frustration.  Below I present some of the common myths about DotNetNuke skinning.

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.

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.

When you run any website, there are inevitably changes to be made to it.  While you might get a point where your work on it pauses, the time comes back again when you need to perform updates.  Oftentimes, these updates will include new pages and/or new page structure.

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.

A must have for DNN 5 sites is WatchersNet ModuleActionsMenu - a lightweight action menu, which is easy to customize and provides great new user experience for your DotNetNuke 4 or DotNetNuke 5 web site.

Have you ever tried to write Unit Tests for multiple implementations of an Interface or Abstract Base Class.  I encountered this problem over the weekend in a personal project and after some poking around I realized that MbUnit supports this ability using the Factory attribute.

In DotNetNuke we make extensive use of the Provider Pattern, so as we develop tests for the core we will encounter this scenario.  In this post in my irregular series on Testing I describe how you can write a single Test Fixture that elegantly handles the testing of any number of concrete implementations.

Do you use Windows Live Writer and the DotNetNuke Blog module?  I do, and I just discovered a great new WLW feature which is going to greatly simplify the steps I have to perform for every blog post.

I have been using Windows Live Writer (WLW) for a few years now.  I really love WLW for writing my blog.  In fact I loved it so much that it was one of the reasons I had shifted my personal blog to BlogEngine.net.  At the time, the DotNetNuke Blog module did not support a posting API which could be used with WLW.  You don’t know real pain until you have tried to write a blog post with nothing but a web based rich text editor.  Once you lose one or two posts because of a session timeout or your post gets mangled because of the way the editor handles script blocks or xml blocks, you will quickly swear off all blogging with an RTE.

Once I started using BlogEngine, I came to really appreciate some of its features.  It really tries to leverage the capabilities of WLW to make the blogging experience as pain free as possible.  One feature that I use quite a bit is the ability to split my blog into a summary along with the full post just by including the “[more]” tag in my post.  Everything before the tag will be used when displaying the blog summaries.  The entire content will be displayed when viewing a specific blog post.  This is great, although it does limit your ability to craft a great summary that differs from the opening of your blog post.

Unfortunately, the DotNetNuke Blog module does not support the “[more]” tag.  If you don’t provide a summary when creating a post for the Blog module, then it will try to create a summary using the first 1000 or so characters.  This rarely works with my blog posts and even when it works it is generally not optimal.  Because I usually include an image at the top of my posts, the auto-summary feature usually just chokes and I am forced to hand enter a summary for my blog on DotNetNuke.com.  This is definitely a problem.  My blog posts often include coding examples.  When I edit a blog post just so I can hand craft the summary, it also has the side effect of opening the main blog content in the RTE which then reformats my code blocks when I go to save the summary.  Hello mangled code samples.

One of the great strengths of the DotNetNuke platform over the past 6 years has been the rapid growth of the ecosystem for modules and skins.  Very early in the project’s history we realized that in order to promote redistribution of extensions, we needed a standard method to package modules.  At the time, one of the community members contributed their code for reading a standard xml file located inside a zip file containing all of the module files.  Using this contribution as the foundation, I created the core module installation feature for DotNetNuke.  The xml file that controlled the installation process came to be known as the module manifest. 

The purpose of the manifest file was to identify key files within the package and designate where they should be installed.  This manifest also contained some additional metadata that was necessary for creating the needed entries in the different module tables within DotNetNuke.

Over time, Charles and myself continued to extend the module manifest and the packaging standard so that we could handle more and more installation scenarios. Even with these additions, the manifest and packaging standard was still basically the same as what I had originally built in 2004.

When Skinning was introduced with DotNetNuke 2.0 it used a different packaging standard.  Instead of relying on a manifest, it used a convention based approach and depended on having files follow a specific naming standard.  This worked well, but it had a number of limitations.  Like the module packaging standard, this remained largely unchanged until fairly recently.

In a previous blog entry, I spoke about how you can add portals to your DotNetNuke website, but one of you pointed out that I didn’t speak to why one might choose to have multiple portals on a single instance of DNN versus having an instance of DNN for each website.  At first, I was shocked, “Why did I not think to speak about that?!”  However, as it sunk in, I am happy that I didn’t speak about it then.  This topic certainly deserves its own post.

What is an Instance? Before I begin, I want to specify...

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

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

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!

A question arose today about .Net Framework - 3.5 and 3.5 Client, as well as 4.0 and 4.0 Client.  In Visual Studio 2010 you are able to select your Framework target.  This is not new, but which one to select! So what is the difference between the Framework and the Framework Client?

The differences are the components that are installed. The "Client" profiles are intended to be slimmed down releases that include only what is needed by client/desktop applications. For example, it doesn't include the ASP.NET...

One of the great strengths of DotNetNuke is the fact that you can host as many sites as you’d like, from a single installation of DNN.  Did I confused you?  Imagine that you are currently managing 5 or more websites, each with its own web hosting plan.  If they are each DNN, or otherwise a .Net and database enabled website, you’re easily spending over $7,000.00 just in hosting fees.  Imagine being able to spend a fraction of that amount by consolidating all of your websites...

Visual Studio, by default, displays a splash screen on start-up.  I have noticed through the versions this is getting longer and longer.  The splash screen just displays the branding information of Visual Studio and also includes information (if supplied) for all packages installed.  This information can take sometime to display and I and my fellow developers do not want to see this every time Visual Studio is started.  It is basically preferred instead to get right to the job at hand and start coding.

...

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?

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!

In case you missed it, there is a Hackathon that is going on right now (the submission deadline is tomorrow so you still have time to throw a quick mobile project together).

As part of the Hackathon event in St. Louis last week I gave a brief presentation on how to quickly and easily...

I am happy to announced that my ShoutcastStats 05.01.00 module now is released on http://dnnshoutcaststats.codeplex.com . The module renders on 2 module definitions the statistics from an Shoutcast broadcasting server.  This is mostly used from internet radio stations.

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...

In a previous post I described how WebMatrix can be used to download DotNetNuke and install it on your local computer.  In this blog I will describe how you can use WebMatrix to publish your DotNetNuke site to a Hosting Provider.

First lets slightly modify the content from a plain vanilla DotNetNuke site, by deleting the modules on the front page and adding a single HTML module...

The release release of DotNetNuke 5.5. marks a serious new version. Part of the changes involves a serious change in the core table structure of DNN. If you are using a version of Events in DNN 5.5, you must upgrade Events to version 5.1.4. This Events version is included in the Upgrade & Install packages of DNN 5.5.

 

Just go to Host > Extensions > Install Available Extension and install Events 5.1.4!

One of my main tasks working at the United Nation and the European Commission Joint Research Centre was to get all developers on the same page with developing in DotNetNuke.  This is a difficult task in itself as everybody has their own flavour.  So the best way to tackle this was to introduce the DotNetNuke templates.  I used the ones from Chris Hammond on CodePlex both C# and VB to do this.  They ran straight out of the box and with...

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,...

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 .chm help file is now an integral part of a DNN release. In this part I will illustrate what has been achieved for the DNN 5.5 release. In the last part of this blog cycle, I will explain what can of will be done in the future.

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,...

Someone on the DotNetNuke Forums asked recently how to add a Like Button for Facebook to their blog.  They mentioned something that I had also found out – the Windows Live Writer plugin that’s supposed to do it, but doesn’t work.  So how can us DotNetNuke users add a Facebook Like Button to our blogs?

What is a ‘Like’ Button? A Like Button is an interactive button provided by...

The default editor in DotNetNuke has been the RadEditor (by telerik) since version 05.02.00.  This editor is very robust and feature rich, including things like spell check, XHTML formatting, and many other advanced features.  It is considered by many to be the best web-based WYSIWYG HTML editor available.  I tend to agree.

With all of those features, it is very possible that some less advanced end-users might not enjoy the toolbar in its default...

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Background

In preparation for the upcoming DotNetNuke Hackathon in St. Louis, I have been busy working on a new mobile application for the Android and iPhone platforms.  Nik Kalyani and I have been playing with the Appcelerator Titanium product for the past several months and have been intrigued by it’s promise to allow you to quickly develop mobile applications for multiple platforms using the coding skills that many web developers already possess.  When Nik started planning for the St. Louis Hackathon he decided to focus on building apps which bridge the mobile and DotNetNuke space.  He immediately thought that Appcelerator was a natural tool to use.

What attracted Nik and I to Titanium was the ability to program in JavaScript with a light sprinkling of HTML and CSS to create native iPhone and Android applications.  It also helped that Titanium is an Open Source product which is a big plus for the DotNetNuke community.  The real Titanium magic happens when you compile your application using Titanium Developer.  At that point a native application is generated for either Android or iPhone, and coming soon the BlackBerry as well.  Titanium Developer lets you run your app on the various platform emulators as well as allowing you to push your application directly to a physical device.  As a final step, Titanium Developer even assists with publishing your finished application to the Android Market and the iPhone App store.

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.

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.

The Events team is happy, and we hope you will be as well: there is a new release for the DNN Events module! A lot of things have improved for this version. Some basics (this Events version is for DNN 5.2.x and up, we left DNN 4.x behind), some restructuring and simplifications, and a lot of enhancements.

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...

A couple of months ago dnn-europe.net organized the first European Day of DotNetNuke; a free conference for DotNetNuke users. I had a session on Mobile Smart Phone Developement and how important it is to ensure that the DNN community is aware of the growing mobile market. With DNN's continued growth we need to be ready to embrace and reach out to this very important market. During the session SalarO released a free iPhone App and a companion DNN module to showcase a typical useful application that required custom development on both DNN and iPhone as an example.

This is a summary of the talk and will be followed up with another Blog next month’s on Skin Development serving both Web Users and Mobile users with varying requirements.

...

Last night we posted another beta of DotNetNuke 5.5 which you can access from the beta release page on DotNetNuke.com.  This is probably your last chance to provide feedback on the 5.5 release as we are nearing completion of the testing cycle.  You can have a direct impact on the quality of the 5.5 release if you act today.

Since the last beta release 2 weeks ago, the DotNetNuke team has been busy cleaning up bugs and validating the user scenarios for the new Content Localization feature.   During this time more than a 160 bugs and enhancements have been implemented.  Many of these changes have been as the result of feedback we received from the earlier alpha and beta releases.  In addition to all of the work on Content Localization we have fixed a number of longstanding bugs and made major strides on improving performance.  We are hoping to be able to wrap up testing soon so that we can get a final release out to the community this summer.

In software development version control is often associated with tool supported team work in projects. In these cases it supports the central storing of versions of files in a repository. Filing, change logging and providing the versions are the most common scenarios. Subversion (SVN) is a widely used, and license -free version control software. SVN and several free APIs facilitate the use of the version control via the application. But there is also an enormous benefit from the combined usage of version control...

 

There is a lot of talk about DotNetNuke’s performance and the general perception in the community is that DotNetNuke 4.9.5 is still the champion. Well... No More!

I joined DotNetNuke Corporation last November and have been spending some of my time optimizing the performance characteristics of the DotNetNuke platform. I made some small tweaks here and there, but no major improvements were realized until I made a breakthrough with our upcoming release, DotNetNuke 5.5.0. I think I have finally hit the target that everyone was hoping for; that is, to have a release that has better performance characteristics than DotNetNuke 4.9.5.

...

In the past 2 months I have been working together with Declan Ward (member of the DNN testing team for module releases) to create automatic UI tests for the (next version) of the Events module. And I can confirm that this experience has been very rewarding. Currently we have a set of test scripts that can exercise most parts of the Events module UI and functionality. And this saves a lot of time in probing a new release of Events.

I have often heard it said that people have difficulty creating skins for DotNetNuke.  I am always baffled when I hear these comments especially in light of what I see in the competing skinning engines on other platforms.  In this series of posts I’ll be looking at the basics of DotNetNuke Skinning, creating a complete DotNetNuke skin and associated containers, dispelling a few Myths and Misconceptions about DotNetNuke Skinning and finally we’ll wrap up the series by comparing the DotNetNuke skinning engine with those of some other web platforms.

• Part 1: Understanding the Basics


• Part 2: Building a Skin


• Part 3: Building Containers


• Part 4: Packaging


• Part 5: Myths and Misconceptions


• Part 6: Skin Engine Comparison

During the course of this series, we’ll be working towards building and packaging a skin that is based off of the Dreamy design template from the Open Source Web Design site.  This template uses a very simple design layout which should work well for explaining the basic concepts of DotNetNuke skinning.

Building Containers

DotNetNuke breaks up our “themes” into two different parts – skins and containers.  In part 1 and 2 of this series, I showed you how to make the page layout portion of a DotNetNuke Skin.  It can be a bit confusing to new users because the term skin is used to describe the entire “theme” and also to describe the page layout portion of a complete skin package.  Containers are a much easier term to understand and will be the focus of this post.

Since everybody is excited about the new DotNetNuke 5.5 release and its core content localization features, my colleague Steffen Ivanowitsch tested our own popular localization component EALO on the current DNN beta 5.5. Not to compete with the core component but to guarantee full functionality for the new release as well. As necessary some things have changed on how current language settings were handled. Therefore we've updated our EALO component...

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...

Earlier this week Microsoft released WebMatrix the new free lightweight web-stack for developing ASP.NET Web Applications.  As I discussed in my initial blog one of the potential uses of WebMatrix is its ability to open existing Open Source applications directly from the Web Application Gallery. 

In this blog post I will walk...

I was asked today how to use the Text skin object in DotNetNuke.  Instead of writing a long tutorial or e-mail about it, I tried looking for an existing blog or article describing this.  I would’ve been happy to recommend such a resource, but I was unable to find one despite several web searches.  This leads me to the post you’re reading.

This video is an excerpt from the Quality Team meeting today, where Dan Gilleland demonstrates how to practically implement the concepts of the TestDrivenDNN module project by his experience.

I have often heard it said that people have difficulty creating skins for DotNetNuke.  I am always baffled when I hear these comments especially in light of what I see in the competing skinning engines on other platforms.  In this series of posts I’ll be looking at the basics of DotNetNuke Skinning, creating a complete DotNetNuke skin and associated containers, dispelling a few Myths and Misconceptions about DotNetNuke Skinning and finally we’ll wrap up the series by comparing the DotNetNuke skinning engine with those of some other web platforms.

Part 1: Understanding the Basics Part 2: Building a Skin Part 3: Building Containers Part 4: Packaging Part 5: Myths and Misconceptions Part 6: Skin Engine Comparison During the course of this series, we’ll be working towards building and packaging a skin that is based off of the Dreamy design template from the Open Source Web Design site.  This template uses a very simple design layout which should work well for explaining the basic concepts of DotNetNuke skinning.



Building a Skin In Part 1 of this series I looked at some of the fundamentals of creating skins for DotNetNuke.  In this post I will walk through creating a complete skin based off the design I downloaded from OSWD.  The original OSWD design does not include several key elements that are quite common for modern websites, especially websites built with Content Management Systems.  As I progress through this post, I’ll point out when we deviate from the original to address some of these issues.

Before I get started let’s take a peek at what the source HTML looks like for the original Dreamy template.  This will give us something to compare with our final version.  Our goal is to stay as true to the original as possible and not introduce a lot of complexity into the design.  As you’ll see, it is possible to produce DotNetNuke skins that are every bit as clean as their plain HTML counterparts.

...

Today I released the Beta Version 05.00.540 of the ShoutcastStats module for DotNetNuke.  After I found the solution for the module settings using multible module definations, I added some selectable feature to all functions of the module.  So now you could select what you want to view to your page visitors. Also I added some more fuction to the module, so that I think it is now complete. The ShoutcastStats module renders detailed data from a Shoutcast broadcasting server.  Also it could create Image Links...

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Today Microsoft opened up the beta for Wave 4 of the Windows Live Essentials tools including Windows Live Writer.  I have been a long time user of WLW and have come to really enjoy both the simplicity and the power of the tool when writing my blog posts.  I really didn’t see a lot that needed “fixing”, and in this release of WLW it looks like that is exactly what I got – not a lot that has been fixed.

That is not to say that a lot hasn’t changed, because from a UI perspective, it is almost completely different.  The biggest change is that the new live writer now proudly sports a fairly standard ribbon bar just like those found in Microsoft Office.  And just like in Office, I find that the new ribbon bar is somewhat of a step backward.  People are by their natures creatures of habits.  Once we learn how to do something, we don’t want to have to relearn it without a very good reason. 

I have promised to let everyone know what I have planned for the Media Module.  This is a very important, and for me, a very exciting question.  When I first got asked to be part of the team to help build this module, I was only going to help.  Then various things happened to leave only me to manage it.  I was and continue to be very nervous about that, as most of my work doesn’t involve media.  So, the re-write of the...

In DotNetNuke Core 5.3 there was some work done around the Core search engine sitemap provider that was referred to as “The sitemap now allows module admins to plugin sitemap logic for individual modules” in the release notes. When I first heard about this in a Core Team meeting, it was explained that modules that have many pieces of content on a single page (Ex. Forum, Blog, Articles, etc.) can be picked up by the search engine sitemap provider. Having just finished my recent blog series on Taxonomy,...

...

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...

This is one of those posts that is always difficult for me to write.  Nobody likes to admit failure, but the only way to fix a problem is to admit when it exists.  Once again we have had to remove a release due to a severe bug making it through the release process.  We probably could have just left the 5.4.3 release as it was and worked on rushing out a new 5.4.4 release to address the bug, however, we felt it would be prudent not to put our users in the position of installing and trying to use a version that we know is going to break a lot of modules from 3rd party developers.

The bug in question is a breaking change that will break any module that uses the core ExecuteSQL data access layer function.  It is hard to gauge just how many modules use this function, but we know that this function impacted modules by at least 4 core team developers, including many administrative modules that we use to run DotNetNuke.com.  The fix for this bug is relatively simple and we have already checked in a fix and are working to test it.  We will have an updated package ready for testing tomorrow by a select group of commercial module developers with a final release of 5.4.4 coming later this week.  Given the security issues which were already made public we are limiting the scope of this release to ensure we don’t leave the community overexposed.

Thus far, we have covered everything but the user interface and the changes you will need to make in your module to actually expose taxonomy/folksonomy in it. Because of this, we simply have to focus on adding existing controls available in the core to your module interface (in the .ascx files) and hooking the controls into your existing load/update methods. As with the other parts of this series, I ask that you please read them prior to reading this blog entry.

You can find the previous parts of the...

This morning I updated the source code for the Silverlight Pages module that I am building as part of the DotNetNuke Hackathon.  Based on some feedback from Michael Washington, I did a little refactoring to separate out my XAML display markup into a separate view.  This makes the code just a little bit cleaner and allows me to develop the view in Blend (of course that is a whole new thing to learn which will have to wait for later).  For now I will continue to hack away in XAML, learning a bit more each day and shaking off some of the cobwebs from what I had learned 2 years ago.

Michael has a lot of good resources on Silverlight development for DotNetNuke on his site http://dnnsilverlight.adefwebserver.com/.  For my initial refactoring though, I found a video on the MVVM pattern by Todd Miranda which was a little easier for me to understand.  Using this video as a guide, I have re-organized the files as shown.

As with the other parts of this series, I ask that you please read them prior to reading this blog entry. The majority of this series has touched on Content Items and what they are and how to integrate them into your module. Well, for this portion we will reference Content Items but we will be covering a new topic: Terms. Compared to the previous posts in this series, this one is fairly short!

You can find the previous parts of the series here:

Part 1...

 

As part of the DotNetNuke Hackathon at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group on June 16th, I discussed using Silverlight to create rich DotNetNuke modules.  The example that I presented was a work in progress which I’ll be working on during the course of the Hackathon, even as participants are working on their own submissions.  You’ll be able...

In Part 4 we will be covering the DAL updates in order to properly integrate core taxonomy in your custom module. As with the other parts of this series, I ask that you please read them prior to reading this blog entry. While reading this particular entry, you may want to refer to parts 2 and 3 even though you have read them before (since lots of what is happening in this part references both of them).

You can find the previous parts of the series here:

Part 1...

In this part of the series I dive into details about Entities and what you, the module developer, must know when integrating taxonomy into your custom module. If you have not yet reviewed Part 1 and Part 2 of the series, please...

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!

If you have not done so already, please review the first part of this blog series: Part 1 – Getting Started. Part 1 provides information which is very important to understand prior to getting into the actual module development, which this part (and all future parts) of the series do. In this part, as the title suggests, we will be covering Content Items. One thing worth mentioning before we dive in here is that as you read this blog entry, pieces of code/variables may not be 100% clear until after you have read this part as well as Part 3 and Part 4. The reason for this is because my sample module (and based on my recommendations, your own module) was already complete and THEN I integrated taxonomy. The approach I took for writing this blog series is the order in which I tackled the integration and one that seemed the most logical to me (and the same approach, for the most part, I would take again in any future integrations). That said, let’s move on to the first section, Content Types.

In this blog series I will cover how developers can implement Taxonomy & Folksonomy in their own custom modules. Having spent the last few days trying to implement in my own custom module, I realized there is a lack of information on this subject available today which I found somewhat surprising (considering the demand for taxonomy integration into the core, which we finally received in 5.3). Hopefully, this blog series will help fill that void and soon module developers will be adapting core taxonomy in their...

So this is the third and final post in the module development series of blogs I started last week. The first two covered

1. Configuring your development environment
2. Customizing and installing a C# module development template

This post is going to tell you how to utilize an open source project called NAnt to package up your modules quickly and easily, so that they can be installed on various DotNetNuke sites. The C# module development template that I released last week comes with a NAnt BUILD script included, so when you create a project using the template (as we do in blog #2) you are ready to use NAnt to package the module, you must get NAnt configure though, so let’s walk through that process.

Store has been continuously inproved in the passed years, and for every new version that has been published to dnnstore.codeplex.com, you will find a comprehensive history and list of enhancements. So I will just enphasize a few of the main changes, in this just released 02.01.36 vs the previous 'official' version. 

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 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.

When DotNetNuke 5.4.2 was released, it contained fixes for 35 issues, 14 of which were submitted by community members!  The following list identifies those issues and the community members who logged them.  Even more folks contributed via comments and forum discussion, which is always appreciated.

There are currently 27 items on the roadmap for version 5.4.3.

Shaun first launched DotNetNuke on December 24, 2002.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the first inquiry about a C# version came in on about December 25.  And they have continued to come in on a fairly regular basis igniting all sorts of “language wars” which continue to this day...

Since I beginning working with DotNetNuke in 2005 I missed a module that could view the statistic data from a Shoutcast Broadcasting Server.  After the years I become more inside the coding and I started with my own project to this.  Now I am happy to announce you that a first ALPHA release I have posted to http://dnnshoutcaststats.codeplex.com .

NOTE: Updated 11/22/2009 - Added "Part 5: Exposing Data From Your DotNetNuke Web Site"

Over the coming weeks I will be posting the slides and code samples that I used in my OpenForce09 presentations. As sections are published, I will update this blog with hyperlinks to my blog on Gooddogs.com where this series is being published.

SESSION: DotNetNuke and WCF

Agenda/Intro: 
•Why use WCF with DotNetNuke?
•Quick Look at WCF
•Demos / code examples
    –Monitoring your web site
    –Offline management of your content
•Questions

 There's a first version of updated DNN 5 skin objects list available.

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