Ernst Peter Tamminga

A happy event: DNN Events 06.00.00 is released!

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:12:59 GMT

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.

Tags: Events

Category: Development

Was our release event of 05.02.03 a happy Event?

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:16:51 GMT

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.

Tags: Events

Category: Development

A happy event: DNN Events version 05.02.03 is released!

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:47:28 GMT

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.

Tags: Events

Category: Development

Category: Events

Version 05.02.03 and 06.00.00 of DNN Events are in the works

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 13:10:43 GMT

In the last months, Roger Selwyn and I have been working on a new release of Events. Our first aim was to create a DNN 6 UX/UI compliant version of Events, which we named Events 06.00.00. While we were working on this version, some small issues on the current stable release of Events 05.02.02 popped up. So we have now 2 versions of Events that are available and can be tested.

DNN Events 05.02.02 Released

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:09:40 GMT

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.

Tags: Events

Category: Development

A serious release update for DNN FAQ: 05.00.00

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:34:16 GMT

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.

Tags: FAQ

Category: Development

Events version 05.02.01 released

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:42:13 GMT

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.

Tags: Events

Category: Development

A release update for the DNN Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) module

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:04:19 GMT

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 this weekend and is available for download.

Release notes DNN FAQs 04.05.01

FAQs 04.05.01 will work for any DNN version 5.6.1 and up. Full details on the changes can be found in detail at dnnfaqs.codeplex.com.

BUG FIXES

Corrected typo in text element in settings
Date/time of creation/update are saved in export/import

ENHANCEMENTS

The XML export is indented XML formatted for better readbility
.js file is minified in the PA install pack (not in the source pack)
All categories are included in the export, not only the categories used

CHANGES

Increased question to max text size of 400 chars.
Implemented new version of DNNtcMSBuild for automatic PA and Source packaging

Where can you download DNN FAQ 04.05.01?

The DNN FAQ module can be obtained via the DNN FAQ project's download page on CodePlex. I appreciate it if you want to give this release a review/rating while your are on CodePlex... Feel free to do so.

What is next?

I have created a blog with the steps that I have in mind for DNN FAQ. Have a look at: my blog and you will get an idea of the next steps: converting it to C# and improving the UI and UX with DNN wrapped Telerik controls.

More ...

Tags: FAQ

Category: Development

The Events module team is proud to announce the release of a new Events version: 5.2.0!

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:30:11 GMT

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 code for the Events list view to be rewritten. Roger has implemented a repeater control for which (of course), several templated elements are defined. Documentation for this enhancement can be found on CodePlex in the Wiki documentation pages of Events.

Major enhancement: SEO optimalisation

We have extended the options for the Events module for Search Engine Optimization. This includes:

The possibility to set page title, description and keywords on Event detail display. The complete layout for this is templated with tokens, so you can complete set the content for these elements yourself
Dynamic input to the search engine sitemap that is generated by a DNN site (sitemap.aspx). I think that Events is the first DNN core module to implement this feature. A new handler is created and added to the core sitemap setting in web.config to process the URL's of all Event detail pages for Event modules that you have enabled for this option. The result: your Events will be better indexed by search engines like Google or Bing (if you have enabled sitemasp.aspx to be your dynamic sitemap xml file generator in the search engine webmaster tools)

Major enhancement: extended iCal (Calendar export) support

The option to export iCal calendar has been improved and enhanced. Most important improvement is that the iCal connection can export a whole selection of Events, e.g. to import those automatically into a Facebook calendar.

But wait, there is more

The above list is far from complete. There are many more enhancements. There is also a change in the minimal required DNN version: the new enhancements will need at least DNN 5.5.0 if you want to run Events 5.2.0, but we assume that you might even want to step forward to DNN 5.6.1 or 5.6.2. Not a bad idea BTW, seeing the security bulletins related to issues fixed in DNN 5.6.1.

The complete release notes can be found in the posting in the DNN Events forum.

The downloads can be found on the Events Project page on CodePlex.

What is next?

We are working on an implementation of DNN Wrapped Telerik controls for a intensively enhanced User Experience and User Interface. This is a major task, which also might incorporate some breaking changes with regard to the visual design, but we are very confident that you will like the end result!

Thank you

The Events team would like to thank everyone who contributed to this release. It is nice to experience positive feedback on the work that we, DNN Event team volunteers, are carrying out.

More ...

Tags: Events

Category: Development

Category: Extension Forge

Category: Events

Make your DNN based website faster

ernstpeter.tamminga@dotnetnuke.com — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:28:26 GMT

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 (http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com) which can give you a figure on a 100 scale. Apart from the basic user experience about poor website speed, badly performing websites will get a penalty in the SEO ranking. I set the page speed of Umbraco.org as my target: this site has a 93 out of a 100. Really good.

The start

When I started, I measured a PageSpeed figure of 62 out of 100 for our website. So this was not very good (BTW I measured DNN to be 72 out of 100). I did a lot of reading about IIS7 settings, experimented with various settings in IIS and tried several tools for image optimization. During a week I spend some time on and off. The main things I finally changed were:

Enabling dynamic content compression (IIS Setting)
Set .NET framework 4 for the application pool (IIS setting)
HTTP response headers: Expire web content after 7 days (IIS setting)
Enable output caching for .css, .gif, .jpg, .js and .png files (IIS setting)
Use hosted jQuery (DNN Host setting)
Minimize the images used on the pages (the right compression level, exact sizing for display)

After al this, I achieved a PageSpeed of 90 out of 100. Our website is really more responsive, reacts quicker, loads faster.

Please note that these settings will generate more workload onto the webserver, and if you have a tight, small, low resource webserver, these changes might not give a result as good as mine, or might even make things worse…

There was more

PageSpeed can give you advise what to improve. I already covered the high priority things with the above changes. So I started with the lower priority stuff, which included minifying .js and .css files. Mostly, these files contain a lot of “air”: new lines, spaces, indents, tabs, comments that make the source more readable for the human eye, but also make them bigger in file size. And although .js and .css files are text and compress well with the IIS content compression set to ON, less is more in these cases.

I manually minified the most important (as to the advise of PageSpeed) .js and .css files, which included several DNN core files. I tried various tools to do this, both command line as well as on-line tools. If you want to do the same, just Google on “compressing JavaScript” or “compressing CSS” and you will find a lot of references. Most routines will give you .css and .js files that are about 30-75% of the original size. Less is more!

Back to Google PageSpeed: yep, I have done it, I reached a PageSpeed of 94 out of 100! I have beaten Umbraco.org (on PageSpeed that is).

Did upgrade to DNN 5.6.2 help or not?

Our site was still running with DNN 5.6.1, so I decided to upgrade it to DNN 5.6.2 to see if that would improve it a bit more. But oh oh oh, I forgot that I compressed several .js and .css files form the DNN core. Due to the upgrade to 5.6.2 I lost my manual compression work. Grr...

Well, people who do not think well enough, have to work harder. So I repeated all minifying and compression work on several core .js and .css files. And I am back at 94 out of 100. The upgrade to DNN 5.6.2. did not improve that, but also did not make it worse.

There is still things left: JavaScript deferred loading

I did not touch a medium priority advise: deferred loading of .js libraries. I did not have the time to analyse every .js library loaded to see if this can be changed into deferred loading. I also do not have access to every part of each module to influence this. My assumption is that using .js deferred loading will improve DNN site performance even more and that It can beat my current 94 out of 100 if this is covered as well. So DNN and module developers: please have a look at deferred loading of .js libraries…

Conclusion: DNN production sites can have a structural better performance

DNN sites can be made much quicker. A number of the improvements can come from IIS, since in my opinion the default settings for IIS for a site focus on limiting resource usage, and not on site performance. You can change these settings for the benefit of your production sites,. If you give a DNN site even more attention and focus on compressing and minifying things, performance can become even much better. And these one time improvements work for every page hit, your work multiplies itself to the benefit of the site visitor as well as search engines. It is a win-win.

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Category: Development

Category: User Experience

Category: Health