The next version of the Media Module for DotNetNuke is once again here!  In previous releases, ground-breaking features like oEmbed were added.  In future releases, expect to see mobile rendering and HTML5 to be in the mix.  Today, there were a handful of things that needed to be taken care of before taking this module to the next level.

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.

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. 

It’s once again been a while, but this version of the Media Module for DotNetNuke has been sitting in the hopper for a while.  Since before DNN 6.0 was released!  As of this moment, I am proud to say that the next version of the Media Module is available to you in the form of version 04.01.00.

Any of you that attended DotNetNuke World this year would probably agree… There were few moments when you didn’t see me holding a camera.  Most often, I was pointing it at you too, hoping to catch you having the fun time that we all know you were.  While I am not a professional photographer, I definitely do my best to create the best images possible.  Hopefully the pictures below reflect that.

If you’ve been in the DotNetNuke community for as long as I have and attend any event, you have undoubtedly run into people that haven’t used DNN in years.  In fact, the most common type of person I run into with this situation is someone that last looked at DotNetNuke when it was version 3!  I wanted to take some time and generate some videos to hopefully invite those people back to take a new look at what is essentially a totally different platform today!

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. 

We just had the first Bay Area DotNetNuke User Group (BayDUG) meeting after having a break for over a year now.  It was a great presentation.  Chris Hammond did an overview of the features that DotNetNuke now offers to people that enable them to being rolling out their mobile-friendly websites.  As great as the overview was, it was missing something…  Why would you use one feature over another?  What should I think about before deciding the “best way” for my website when building my mobile-friendly site?

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. 

It was quite a fun thing to run the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan contest for the first time ever.  Though it really was a lot of work both for me and each of the entrants, it was more than worth the effort.  I was very honored to be able to run this contest, because as you probably realize, being a self-proclaimed super fan of DotNetNuke myself, I couldn’t wait to be able to officially designate and announce “the” SUPER fan.  This is just what we did at DotNetNuke World.

Gizmodo originally publish an article where they editorialized the most recent video released by Microsoft.  They even took a light-hearted jab at them, joking about needing a lot more hand sanitizer due to touch interfaces.  I would be more concerned about there needing to be a lot more screen cleaners everywhere to counter-act our greasy fingers!

Originally, Chris Hammond and I were planning to go to the #KloutDevNight meetup tonight to hang out with the good folks at Klout.com. Well, Chris got a hamstring cramp or something from too much DotNetNuke training and decided not to go.  So, I invited Kim to go with me, and off we went to the offices of Klout!  Overall, it was a great idea and I’d love to do it again!

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting with and giving a presentation to the Queen City DotNetNuke User Group (QCDUG) in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Clint Patterson had been asking me to visit the user group for the better part of a year now, so I decided to finally make that a reality.  Last Thursday, I joined many others in attending their meeting – but I also had a presentation to give…

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.

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.

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.

I love to see success in any shape in the DotNetNuke community and ecosystem.  I especially love the successes that we see in user groups.  I blogged about an up and coming user group in Charlotte, NC not too long ago.  They have been experiencing incredible growth for a niche topic user group (as all DNN user groups are).  I knew then that it wouldn’t be long before I would find myself in Charlotte presenting at the Queen City DotNetNuke User Group (QCDUG). 

Many of you probably already know who Matt Cutts is.  If you’re unaware, he’s one of the first engineers hired at Google.  He is now responsible for their Webspam team, but he is also behind tools like safe search.  Anyhow, he has a very well-populated blog.  He blogs much more than I do.  One of his reoccurring blog themes is the concept of trying something out for 30 days and letting his readers know how it worked out. I guess it’s my turn…

We hopefully all know by now that there is a contest going where several people have submitted entries to try and win the honor and title of being called the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan for 2011.  I cannot express to you how jealous I am about the fact that I myself cannot participate, but I do get a but of satisfaction of seeing the entries and interacting with the world’s biggest fans of DotNetNuke.  Unfortunately, today I get to talk about a late entry.

A littler over a year ago, I was hungry and was looking for a new place to have a meal.  During my online search, I found a local place that claimed to have the world’s hottest hamburger.  It is at The Swingin’ Door and the burger is called the Habanero XXX Burger.  You have to sign a waiver just to eat it!  I just had to have it…

The time has come…  Many of you have seen and been part of the buzz leading up to and after the announcement of the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan Contest entries.  There are entries of all kinds. There are images, websites, videos, and more.  There are evangelism examples, parodies, a rap, and even marriage announcements.  If you wanted to voice your opinion and tell everyone which contest entry is your favorite. today is the day…

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!

A little over a year ago, I was given the opportunity to work for DotNetNuke Corporation.  This was an amazing opportunity, which I announced in my usual over-obsessive way in a previous blog entry.  This opportunity meant many things, but the most overwhelming thing was that we had to move from Orlando, FL to San Francisco, CA.  That’s right.  We had to move from one side of...

It has been such an overwhelming task to have to keep all of the entries for the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan Contest under wraps.  There really are some very creative and simply outstanding entries for this first run of the contest – even some surprises!  We’ve had entries from some people that you probably would know, and some new people as well. 

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.

It’s been a month since I first announced the user group contest for DotNetNuke World.  This is actually two contests in one.  First, all DotNetNuke user groups are encouraged to compete to get the most members to register to attend DotNetNuke World.  The other contest involves the members of the ODUG trying to get the most referrals to register for the conference.  Both contests have some amazing prizes.  Here is an update of who is in the lead right now.

Do you LOVE DotNetNuke?  Do you find yourself running to DotNetNuke events, or jumping to the front of a line just to get a DotNetNuke t-shirt?  Have you had the uncontrollable urge to take a picture with the logo, put the logo on something, or meet and greet with some of the most well-known folks in the DotNetNuke community?

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.

I was one of many, many people that opted to begin implementing the Advanced Control panel into my websites, offered by Oliver Hine.  And why not?  It was and continues to be a great alternative to the built-in control panel that is found in DotNetNuke.  This true for me until version 6.0 of DNN was released.

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.