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.

As you may know, I’ve been working on an official UX Style Guide document for DNN. It’s almost ready and should be made available to the community around the same time that DNN 5.5.0 is released in August.

Working on this document required quite a lot of research.  I’d never pulled together a complete style guide from scratch before and I wanted to be sure that every guideline I included was backed up by information and evidence that was available from the greater user experience design community....

An article was recently written by CMS Critic, where they interviewed Navin Nagiah.  For those of you who don’t know, Navin has been the CEO of theDotNetNuke Corporation pretty much since it got funded.  Those events happened just around the same time anyhow.  CMS Critic thought highly enough of DotNetNuke and Navin to write an article, asking him various questions about the DNN product, its history, and its future.  It also does a fair job of giving you an idea of Navin and his background.

Last year at OpenForce Connections in Las Vegas, Shaun Walker announced an updated release policy.  The goal in 2010 was to move to a monthly maintenance release schedule along with Quarterly major releases.  Prior to this policy announcement, releases were quite sporadic which made it difficult for our internal planning purposes, and also made it difficult for our users to schedule their own upgrade testing and deployment.  When we first committed to this new release schedule, we knew that it was going to take a little time before we could get into the groove with the new release cycle.  By February we had 3 monthly releases under our belts and things looked to be going pretty well, so much so that I blogged about it.

We are now 8 months into the release schedule and following some issues with a few of our recent releases we’ve had a lot of feedback from customers and community members regarding the release schedule. Some users have indicated that monthly releases just didn’t give them time to properly test and upgrade their sites before a new release was coming out and they had to start the cycle all over again.  Other users worried that committing to monthly releases was hurting the quality of our releases.  Conversely, some users liked the frequent releases because it meant they could get bug fixes quicker.  Some users also liked the predictability of the release schedule.

I’ll start by admitting that when I came to DNN module development I did not have a very profound vision of version numbering. For me version numbers were simply an indication along the lines of “version 1.2 is better than 1.0”. But DNN has a very rigid xx.yy.zz scheme for both it's own as well as module version numbers which meant that I had to pay attention to this. 7 years later it has become quite a hobby horse of mine and I thought that this holiday season I should let this hobby horse roam a bit.

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Ever since an updated version of Telerik assembly was shipped with DotNetNuke 5.4, people have continued to report that the Telerik assembly is missing from the \bin folder in the upgrade package.  Given the number of reports related to this issue, it is clear that there is a lack of available documentation for how DotNetNuke is packaged.  Some of these problems will be helped by the new wiki project that is being worked on by the Core Reference team.  The wiki will provide a place where we can document application behavior.  Since the wiki is not quite ready to open for public use, I’ll try to document what is going on with respect to Telerik in this post.

During the 5.3 release we originally intended to include an updated version of the Telerik controls. Our goal is to include new Telerik assemblies with each major release.  Since 5.3 was the first major release following the introduction of Telerik controls in 5.2 we had hoped to make the shift.  When we first created the 5.3 package, we found that attempting to upgrade from any of the 5.2.x packages resulted in a yellow screen when you first start the upgrade.  As a result we pushed the Telerik upgrade to 5.4 so we could better study the problem and find an appropriate solution.

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...

As Chris Hammond posted a few weeks back in regards to the annual St. Louis Day of .NET event, I’d like to keep everyone who has an interest in attending it posted.

Our of the 50 speakers from across the country presenting on various platforms, we have 6 speakers in DotNetNuke community got invited to present at the event (and more are coming), those include Joe Brinkman, Chris Hammond, Ian Robinson, Mitchel Sellers, Shaun Mehaffie and myself. You can see a full list of speakers on their site here:http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/Speakers.aspx

If you keep up on the dotnetnuke.com blogs, you have probably seen over the past month or so I have been releasing forum betas. So far these have been under the 4.6 and 4.7 versions (I didn’t blog about 4.7). I have created a new one, which is technically 4.8, but after many changes I have decided that the final release version will be 5.0. This is because I have changed so much that a major version was due (there was also a lot of cleanup in the module code besides bug fixes and enhancements). As for plans...

Like many other folks involved with Open Source, I will be attending OSCON 2010 in Portland, Oregon this coming week. OSCON is an annual convention for the discussion of free and open source software. It is organized by publisher O'Reilly Media and is held each summer in the United States.

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When I started up here at DotNetNuke Corp. in March, I spent quite a bit of time planning and tweaking our plan in regards to the DotNetNuke Training that we would be offering. The initial phase launched when we started offering our paid DotNetNuke Training Webinars in May 2010 covering a variety of DNN topics. Since then we have conducted...

 

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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One of the most common questions throughout the DotNetNuke community and ecosystem overall is, “Where can I learn about DotNetNuke?”  Of course, this question has several variations like, “How can I learn to skin in DNN?”  There are many places and ways to learn DNN, as with any other software out there.  I hope to be able to point you in the right direction for DNN with this post.

There are going to be more resources than the few I list here, so feel free to leave a comment with your favorite...

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

Just as I was wrapping up for a new release and testing the new package with the brand new DNN 5 manifest, I noticed that IUpgradeable.UpgradeModule had not been called in DNN 5. I was puzzled as I had labelled the module as IUpgradeable in the manifest. One of the changes in the DNN 5 manifest is that you have to do this explicitly (it used to be determined by the...

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

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

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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.

Ah, now that was a non-trivial task. I think I requested about half a year ago that we should be able to leverage the DNN 5 manifest enhancements without sacrificing the ability to target DNN 4. The first step was for DNN to allow multiple manifests to exist in a PA (= Private Assembly = the zip file that you distribute as your module). In DNN 4 if you have multiple .dnn files the installer immediately throws you out. So the solution was to be able to have a new extension for the DNN 5 manifest: .dnn5. I was...

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...

In this section of the “DotNetNuke and WCF” series, we will use the WCF service methods we built in Part #6 to do some offline data management.  We defined a couple of OperationContracts to enable offline moderation of Repository module uploads.  Now, we’ll build a desktop application that will monitor our portal for new uploads requiring moderation and allow us to review/approve them from our application without having to browse to our website

Click the link below to view the full blog on Gooddogs.com...

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.

Peter Donker is a long time supporter of DotNetNuke, since 2003.  He has been involved with the project longer than many, and is also a well-known vendor in the DNN ecosystem, being the steward of the wildly popular Document Exchange Module (or DMX), which allows you to manage documents on your DNN website.  Since 2007, Peter has been part of the DNN core team.