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 into a single instance of DotNetNuke – leaving you to manage just a single hosting plan.  You can!

Just so you know, I am just going to talk about how to add new sites to an existing DNN site in this post.

The Web Host The first thing to consider when planning to host all of your sites into a single installation of DNN, is your web host.  While DNN places no restriction on you in terms of how many sites...

When you run a user group, or any other event that has one or more people presenting topical information to others, you know that your presenter is coming prepared with some great information.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked them to come, right?

At the very least, your speaker is knowledgeable in a specific area, has real-world expertise, is able to communicate to others, and will come prepared with a slide deck, or other visual presentation tools. 

However, that’s only half of the battle.  Those are simply the things that we as recruiters or leaders should expect and maybe event take for granted in terms of setting these events...

I just successfully upgraded this website from DotNetNuke version 05.04.04, to version 05.05.00.  Fortunately, I didn’t run into any hiccups at all.  Everything just upgraded as expected.

The upgrade view show all successes, and the Event Log didn’t show any upgrade related errors.  Whew!  (Yes.  Make sure you check your Event Log as a Host user upon upgrading.)

Should you upgrade?  Absolutely!  There are at least a few must-have features:

Enhanced performance in the default URL provider Dynamic content localization Prevention of a DoS attack Send HTML e-mail again There are a large number of other stabilization updates as well.  What are you waiting for?

DISCLAIMER:  As with any other release, and with any other software, 3rd party software that is integrated with DNN can affect your upgrade abilities.  Back-up your site and database diligently, and test the upgrade in an offline site first.

Technorati...

This book review will serve as numbers 2 and 3 in the three total that I promised you in my review of Confessions of a Public Speaker.  The reason being is that the first book in this review is Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. ...

I have been doing technical presentations and training for several years now.  Like any level-headed person though, I know that I don’t know everything, and that I can always use more training myself, and do plenty of other things to make myself better at what I do.  So, I came across and read a few books about presenting.  This is the first of three book reviews.

One of the first books...

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 Facebook, which allows you to instantly “like” a page, and reflect this in your Facebook profile for all of your friends to see.  These buttons look something like the image below.

...

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 state.  For example, you might want to remove functionality from the default toolbar.  Imagine removing advanced functionality like image maps, code validator, flash manager, etc. 

The editor allows you to customize this user experience very easily.  Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to do this through any of the administration of the website at this time.  You have to have file-level access to modify the files.

DotNetNuke...

It doesn’t matter what kind of user group you’re running, it’s a must for you to evaluate how your user group meetings are ran.  Even if you’re not the leader of the user group, the group exists for you.  So, if you have input on how the meetings will work better for you, speak up! 

When I think of user group related things, I first force myself to think, “How will this add value to the attendee?  Will they want to come back?  Will they...

A long time ago, in a galaxy, far, far away…  There was an affiliate program that allowed for great flexibility and provided features for DotNetNuke® vendors and others to make money easily and quickly.  People were rolling in the dough!  Money was raining from the sky, and we were all bathing in tubs full of gold coins!

A ‘Bit’ of History Okay… That’s not entirely true.  This story took place in OUR galaxy!  Fine, fine…  Maybe no one was bathing in gold coins either.  Okay, okay…  But people were...

Running a user group has many responsibilities.  You’re recruiting and creating speakers, recruiting attendees, finding sponsors, getting venues, finding topics, managing attendance, and more.  One of the least trivial of these tasks is getting a website hosted for the user group.  Sure, you might work at a company that’s willing to allow you to host it, but what happens when you leave that company? 

With the average IT employee staying at company for only 3 years, this leaves one more thing to worry about, even if it is only every 3 years.  But even worse,...