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.

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!

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.

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). 

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.

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!

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.

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…

Have you ever had one of the co-founders of DotNetNuke Corporation speak at your user group?  How about the founder of DotNetNuke itself, Shaun Walker?  Not many user groups can say that they’ve have a co-founder present a session at their user group.  With the contest I am announcing, any user group can make this happen!

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!

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!

Every year since the first North American DotNetNuke conference (then named OpenForce), it was nothing short of the who’s who of the DotNetNuke community and ecosystem.  The buzz resulting from people before, during, and after the event was simply gravitating, and was sure to make anyone who didn’t attend jealous of those that did.  If you pay any attention to the blogs, forums, and twitter during this time, this proves true every year.

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).

It was exactly one year ago that I showed up for my first day of work at DotNetNuke Corporation.  The past year has flown by.  A ton of things have happened in the 365 days since. 

The image above is from a Geico Insurance commercial.

It’s been a long time.  It’s been a long time since the DotNetNuke community was this excited about anything, much less a new release.  The community hasn’t been sleeping or anything by any means, but the passion and amount of activity over the past few months has been incredibly higher than usual.  As it turns out, this is for a good reason.

As you may have read here, I recently visited the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group, and Dallas DotNetNuke User Group to show them the latest and greatest version of DotNetNuke – version 6!

One of the great things about being in the DotNetNuke community is meeting new people.  I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a couple of folks from all over the world.  Recently, I finally met a couple from North Carolina that are co-leading a DNN user group there.  I’d known them for a long time, but never met them in person until the Day of DotNetNuke in Orlando.

I was one of the lucky ones last year.  The two years prior, I was not able to get into the door of the annual DotNetNuke conference.   Last year was different.  I was finally accepted into the elite and mystical community of speakers that make up the annual DotNetNuke conference.  While last year it was in a different place and a different name, I fully expect DotNetNuke World this year to be the best DNN Corp conference ever!

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to speak at a user group meeting.  I think the last time was December of 2010.  While that doesn’t sound like a long time, it was nearly 6 months ago!  I am attempting to make up for it next month with two DotNetNuke user group meetings in June.

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.

There has been a program offered by Telerik for some time now, where they will sponsor speakers to give presentations to user groups and code camps.  This was partially an effort to further ensure the quality and existence of user groups since they saw a decline in user group activity in 2008.  The list was never very long, but until now, I didn’t realize how short the list really is.  Telerik announced their Insiders Program today.

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. 

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.

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,...

You might remember the Day of DotNetNuke in Europe last year.  If you do, you probably went to it or heard the immense amount of chatter about it on Twitter, and you know how awesome it was.  The organizers in Europe really know how to organize an open source event, and they are doing it again this year.

The event is called Web Connections...

There was a twitter contest this morning to see if anyone could accurately guess who the keynote speaker would be at this years Day of DotNetNuke Orlando event.  Originally, a DotNetNuke shirt was offered as a prize for the right guess.  There were plenty of guesses, but no one hit the target.  Next, the deal was sweetened with a DNN boomerang.  Still, no one guessed the right person – but there certainly were plenty of entertaining guesses!  Finally, the stakes were raised to include not just a DNN t-shirt and boomerang, but also a frisbee.  At the time of this writing, the keynote speaker was not guessed, so no one gets the swag.  That shouldn’t prevent you from knowing who the speaker is though!

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.

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.

It’s always so cool to be able to tell you about the great things that the community gets to participate in and/or benefit from.  This is perhaps one of the cooler things…  A brand new program for competing to be the DotNetNuke site of the month!  Anyone can enter their site to the contest, but the contest is being hosted exclusively within Facebook and open to anyone to submit and win (except for lowly employees like me).

Mix is another conference-type event where developers from all over gather to learn the greatest and newest things about technologies that work with or on the Microsoft stack.  This year, it’s being held on April 12-14 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV.  For those of you that are familiar with or have attended DotNetNuke Connections (formerly known as OpenForce North America), this is the same hotel on the Vegas Strip.

The organizers had an open call for sessions to be submitted for the event, gaining an incredible number of submissions from very talented speakers all over the world.  Among those speakers are the DotNetNuke community’s very own Shaun Walker and Charles Nurse.  Each have two sessions submitted for consideration – and YOU can help get their sessions approved!

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. 

...

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!!!

A looooooong over due blog post here is to reward you, my readers, Twitter/Facebook followers, and basically anyone who helped to support my effort to get to $1000 in donations to help support the Movember effort.  You all came through like rock stars and indeed helped me to raise over $1000, reaching my goal.  However, I promised something to you…  A crazy pic!

Well…  I have quite a few suggestions for the crazy pic, and most of them I cannot mention here – or should not, at least.  However, one suggestion was repeatedly mentioned, and you will see that result below.



Thank you again for your immense generosity!

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,Movember

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.

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 print views, replace style sheets, replace or move content, embed external site content, and more.

I had created a few widget examples for my presentations on the topic.  However, I never posted them anywhere for some reason.  For this reason, and the fact that I was building a new one for a proof-of-concept for someone, I thought it would be perfect to have in another open source project.  Enter, the Widget Suite...

I haven’t seen or heard anyone mentioning it yet, so I guess no one noticed…  DotNetNuke Corporation is hiring!  That’s right folks…  Do you love DNN?  Would you like to work with DNN on a daily basis?  Do you fantasize on being paid to help build the CMS platform that you love and use on a daily basis?  Do you dream about having a direct impact on the future of DNN and its features?  Now is your chance to step up to the plate to get paid to play with DotNetNuke every day!

Right now, there are at least two open positions on the engineering team.  While engineering is located in Vancouver, Canada, you don’t necessarily need to live in the area.  The right candidate will have the option to telecommute.  Are YOU the right candidate? ...

There have been several blogs about the Movember effort, in order to raise awareness and funds to support the effort to reduce prostate cancer in Men.  You can think of this as the male version of breast cancer month.  This is very relevant since 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their life.  We as a company jumped on the chance to participate, as did several DNN community members.

All in all, the DotNetNuke Movember team had 37 members from around the world, and although there are still about 8 hours left in the event, we were able to get to #122 in the United States for the most money raised by a team.  At the time of this writing, that’s $6,264 raised, with Chris Hammond taking the lead a couple of hours ago, thanks to his dare. 

Chris pledged to shave his head if he reached $1,000 in donations, and he did.  Though the donation didn’t come...

There have been significant updates to the User Group Wizard module on the DotNetNuke site this year.  Many of the updates that are there are nothing short of monumental in terms of helping to better support DNN user groups world wide.  However, one of those features has flown under the radar… until now!

There are literally DNN user groups all over the world.  Some of the most active ones happen to be outside of the United States even.  There is a little known feature in the module that allows you to set the language for your user group.  As an added benefit, it also displays the appropriate flag on your user group listing as well.

Editing this feature is quite easy, but is only available to the leaders of the user group. First, login to the site and go to the user group wizard...

Orlando was home to me for most of my life – from grade school to high school, and the my adult life after the military.  Then, DotNetNuke Corporation snagged me up earlier this year, causing me to move to San Francisco in June.  Oh, darn! :D  December will officially be the 6th month that I have been away from the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG),...

Next week, I will be holding a public webinar covering the topic of “content staging” in DotNetNuke.  Content Staging is the concept of having a “staging” environment that your normal website visitors cannot access.  Within this method of content editing, all of the content updates would take place on that internal or “staging” server.  Then, when you decide, you publish those content updates to your production site, without your content editors ever having to login to your production web server.

If you would like to learn more about this feature in DotNetNuke, feel free to attend the webinar on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 10:00 AM PST.  The webinar is scheduled for an hour, but could last past that for questions and answers.  The official info is below…

Content Staging in DotNetNuke Webinar Registration DotNetNuke is the leading open source Web Content Management Platform for...

When you think about presenting any topic to an audience, there are quite a few things that are common to presenters, no matter what the topic or type of presentation it is.  You want to be well-prepared.  This sounds super simple, and even trivial enough to not have to mention, but it’s not.  Not even for the most seasoned presenters out there.

Preparation requires that you know a few things that are sometimes outside of your control:

What kind of audience will I be presenting to? What kind of equipment will I be using? What is the layout of the room? How long do I have for my presentation? Is there an expected “dress code” that I need to worry about? Those...

My Movember Picture on November 1st

With everything going on leading up to DotNetNuke Connections, something that didn’t receive its due attention was Movember.  If you’re not aware of what Movember is, Chris Hammond did a great job of explaining Movember to those of us who are less informed.  Basically, for the entire month of November, men are encouraged to grow a mustache and get donations to help support men’s...

Some of you will already know, and some will be surprised to find out that this was my first time attending DotNetNuke Connections.  I have been to all but one of the Day of DotNetNuke events, and other events all over the United States, but never to DotNetNuke Connections.  I could tell early-on that...

Hopefully you have all already heard that the long overdue DotNetNuke facelift was rolled out today.  Go ahead and check it out if you need to, but clear your schedule when you do, because it’s simply too fun to play with now!  This is the update that I have been hinting around in some of my recent blog posts, especially those that centered around adding your user group events to the DNN site.

User Group Events Rotator A quick glance at the DNN homepage should make it very clear why you should add your user group events to the site.  You get featured on the homepage!

 

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I have many passions, as I would imagine you probably do too.  They are, in no particular order: positivity, the San Diego Chargers (not doing too well this year), customer service, beer, photography, tea, being eco-friendly (green), social media, and of course – DotNetNuke. 

It seems that since I’ve been at the DotNetNuke Corporation, most of my passions can be found in one place, and in one job.  I get to keep my ties with my social...

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...

One of the most common questions I seem to get from those who are new to DotNetNuke relate to how and if you can conditionally hide modules and pages in DNN.  For some reason this question comes up again, and again.  So, I figured that I would make it easy for everyone.  Here are a series of 3 videos that help you to learn how to hide a page or a module in DNN.

Overview of Security Roles How to Hide a Page How to Hide a Module As you can see from the videos above, hiding and a module or a page is quite easy. 

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,Security,Adminstration,Video

...

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed my very first experience at the Silicon Valley Code Camp.  I have to admit, with all of the stigma and mystique surrounding Silicon Valley, I was quite intimidated walking into this event.  With this being the 5th time actually holding a code camp here in Silicon Valley, I knew that they were going to know what they were doing, and they didn’t disappoint.

Let’s talk some quick stats first:

Number of Days:  2 Number of Sessions:  194 Number of Speakers:  149 Number of Registered Attendees:  3,065 Number of Actual Attendees:  1,900 Drop-Off Rate:  61% Number of Pizzas:  350 Number of Deli Sandwiches:  920 Number of Gallons of Coffee:  29 On a related note, Arun Gupta does a much better job of laying out the numbers for you.

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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.

Try the Lightbox Gallery module today!

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.

Issue 5251:  Add Module to Page error Issue 5293:  Upgrade Fancybox jQuery Plugin...

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.

You can also view these...

Hopefully, by now you know that there’s a new and improved area on the DotNetNuke website for you to find and maintain your user group information.  People that are new to DNN can find your group, and you can also maintain a useful presence there.  This is an officially supported and active project that is managed by DNN Corp. 



What is available to you on this...

You heard of that little event that has been traveling around and sprouting in various places around the world, called the Day of DotNetNuke, right?  Maybe you haven’t.  The most recent one just concluded in Chicago yesterday.  I won’t give you a run-down here though, because I already did that on the actual Day of DotNetNuke blog. 

Day of DotNetNUke Chicago 2010 Recap

As a selected speaker at the event, I was responsible for bringing in content for two of my accepted sessions.  My first session was Installing, Upgrading DotNetNuke and DNN Modules, and the second was Programming Your Way into Designers Hearts. 

While most presenters in DNN understandably tend to stray away from beginner content, there’s still an inherent need...

 

I have been blogging about and involved in user groups for a long time.  During this time, I have had the pleasure of seeing all kinds of things happen – some bad, but about 99% of the things were overwhelmingly good.  Great, in fact.  I want to talk about why and how the good comes about now.

Use groups can be traced back to the 1950’s, when mainframe computers were being used to do some pretty amazing things.  Unlike today, information about information systems was difficult to come...

Please take 10 minutes today to read a blog post by Cathal Connolly, the DotNetNuke Security Team lead.  He gives DotNetNuke specific advice and the exact steps you need to take to protect your DNN websites (and any other public ASP.Net site), while we wait for Microsoft to release an official update for you to apply to your servers. 

ASP.NET Security Vulnerability workaround for DotNetNuke sites

Please note in Cathal’s blog...

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.

Menu and Pages If you’re just adding a new page to a site, no problem.  But what if you’re moving your pages around?  For example, what if you begin with a simple top-level menu like in the image below?

 

At some point, you will likely need to add more pages as your site grows.  Perhaps you need to add more pages like Support, Social Media, and News. ...

I feel a bit overwhelmed right now.  I haven’t presented at any community events in at least a couple of months, and I have somehow found myself committed to 7 different public presentations at 4 different events in 4 different cities over the next 2 months – and that’s not including 2 huge presentations that are not public.

I am not complaining though.  I wouldn’t agree to any of them if I didn’t enjoy it.  I just didn’t realize...

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 what I mean by instance in this post.  Even though this definition doesn’t really change for me, and instance of DNN can be defined as a single file system and IIS reference to an installation of DotNetNuke.  You can and probably do have a varied definition, but this will serve our needs for this post.

Comparing Multi-Portal vs. Single Portal Instances Need a new site?  Just add it to the DNN site you already have.  You don’t have to waste...

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 see user groups of all kinds and types, all over the place.  They all serve a purpose.  Typically, that purpose is to gather like-minded individuals together in one place, to network and learn about whatever it is that brought them together.  For pretty much anyone that reads my blog, this common thread is probably DotNetNuke.  However, I could just as easily be talking about SQL Server, .Net, PHP, Java, etc.  Name the technology or cause, and that’s the only thing that changes.  The principles remain the same.

These same user groups usually get created...

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...

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,...

There are all kinds of polls, surveys, and awards that all of us try to get at some point in time.  Since DotNetNuke® first got popular, it was no different.  DNN has been honored by a wide variety of sources, including aspnetPRO Magazine (now called DevProConnections), and Visual Studio Magazine. 

These awards have been getting more and more prestigious in nature.  For example, Shaun Walker blogged not long ago about DotNetNuke being named a 2010 Cool Vendor by Gartner.  That is easily one of the greatest honors to-date.

 

...

As part of one of my overall themes in my blog, I want to once again speak about user groups.  User Groups are excellent resources.  If you’re interested in any technology, like DotNetNuke as an example, then user groups can be an invaluable resource if you let them.  However, user groups wouldn’t exist without, among many other thins, meetings.

(in the front, you can barely make out Nik Kalyani...

DotNetNuke, since its very beginning has always relied on the community for all levels of involvement.  The core code base has never been, and still isn’t any different.  It is, after all, still an open source project, albeit a very large one now. 

There are numerous bugs that are in the code base right now.  Thankfully, most of them are small ones.  The larger bugs require a significant amount of time and resources, and more importantly, extensive testing.  Those bugs are the ones where the DNN Corp engineers really shine now, as they tend take the lead on those bugs.  However, that amount of time and resources does leave many of the smaller bugs leftover, waiting for someone like you to help with.

As a result, I often see statements in forums and twitter resembling something like, “This is such a simple and easy thing to fix. I cannot believe that DNN Corp hasn’t fixed it yet.”

I have heard many different reasons why various...

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 the DotNetNuke 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...

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 and responsibilities differently.  You should only do what you feel comfortable with, and maintain a level of involvement that keeps you and your family happy, and that won’t lead to you being burnt out.

That really sets the stage for what to expect the first few months of managing a user group.  What do you expect during this time?  That very question is what keeps the majority of people from even starting a user group.  However, I will tell...

In what used to be a utility to exclusively generate an XML SiteMap for the DotNetNuke core Blog Module, is now called an XML Utility for the DNN Blog Module.  This change was made to more accurately reflect what this utility does.

There have been two versions released over the past week, with the latest being this evening, for version 01.02.00.  Version 01.02.00 is basically a stabilization release for the previous release.  There wasn’t anything show-stopping, unless you use Feedburner.  But more on that later…

What’s New? In version 01.01.00, I added RSS feeds as a feature, along side the existing SiteMap feature.  There were two main motivations behind adding this feature to this...

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.

While I am going to talk about this in the context of DotNetNuke, be aware that most of this information can be applied to nearly any user group in the world.

Drafting Event Information The first thing you need...

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 learning resources (even if you are the resource).

On the DNN Website There are several areas on the DNN website itself that offer you various ways to learn about DNN.  Some you probably already use, but they are viable resources just the same.

Online Help  this is a non-downloadable...

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.

Will Strohl being a Dork at an Orlando DNN User Group After Party 

I was pretty active in a handful...

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 the database itself as an API, which was never intended.  This basically means that if you make changes or reference the DNN database directly, your extension can possibly break on every single DNN release.  The best practices in terms of an API perspective is to use the controller classes to access DNN data – not the database itself.

That’s not to say that you should never reference the database directly, it’s just not a best practice.  There are numerous reasons that you might...

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 about that is that the thumbnails are generated for you.  All you have to do is tell the module where to find each album (folder).

Lightbox Gallery Module Version 01.03.00

This is an open source (and FREE) module released under the New BSD license through the DNN Forge and CodePlex.

...

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.

FYI – If you have such an article, feel free to let us know in the comments below, but also know that the site where your article is needs better SEO.  ;)

What is a Skin Object? First of all, a skin object is an ASP.Net user control that is used in DNN skins to provide a limited feature.  For example, the search box, menu, login link, copyright statement, and more, are all skin objects.  They allow a skin designer to include dynamic content without having to know how to build the content itself, or knowing any programming.

Other than the previous description, this post will assume that you know how to create and package your own skin.

Text Skin Object The Text skin object itself is a very useful feature in skinning, as it allows you to include localized text, while not having to create a copy of the skin for each language, or using any other number of workarounds.

For example, if you have static text next to your login skin object that says, “Welcome, “ then you might want to have alternatives for another language, if you plan to support it.

I am going to use that example for the rest of this post.

The Code There is minimal code needed to implement the Text skin object.  If you’re using an HTML skin, then you would simply need to do the following:

object id="dnnTEXT-Welcome" codetype="dotnetnuke/server" codebase="TEXT">...

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...

As many of you know, last week was the second Hackathon event, held in Washington D.C.  The focus of this particular hackathon was to help DotNetNuke® developers build more robust user interfaces in their modules and other extensions, using tools like jQuery, Silverlight, and telerik.  Being called “Visual DotNetNuke,” I think it was pretty clear that this is the direction that the speakers, Nik Kalyani and Joe Brinkman, had in mind. 

Using open source, free, and even commercial tools like those I mentioned earlier can bring with them many significant...

In what might be my last blog entry for about 3 weeks, I just released the details of the planned roadmap for the Media Module for DotNetNuke®.  This list will certainly change over time, as more of you contribute your ideas and suggestions.  Hopefully, you have plenty of both!  :) 

Here is a link to the blog post:  Roadmap for the DotNetNuke Media Module

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,DNN Blogs,Media Module

...

This blog post is cross-posted from the DotNetNuke® website.

I am very happy to announce that the Media Module v03.03.03 was released today.  This release of the module marks the beginning of an...

The good people over at Packt Publishing were very generous recently in forwarding a copy of their newest DotNetNuke® book to me and a few to the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group...

I once gave a session about module development, and one slide in particular was a hit.  It was a last minute addition too.  We spent at least 15 minutes on a slide that was expected to take just 1 minute.  Basically, it outlined some of the considerations that a DotNetNuke® ecosystem customer must be aware of when looking for and buying extensions...

In a private e-mail, a friend and I were conversing about their modules that they sell, and how their sales have been going.  Despite our greatest dreams, this topic is not always a happy one, and while I think this person is somewhat content with their current sales, an important question always rises…  “How can I generate more sales?”  If you’re trying to build up your company through extension sales on the DotNetNuke® platform, this is a very important thing to be concerned about.

Many of the things I plan to talk about in this blog post can be universal across...

I just completed my first blog post on the DotNetNuke® website.  I cannot express to you how excited that made me!  :)  This first post focused on the alpha release of the Media Module.  I haven’t committed fully yet on how I am going to handle the multiple blog sites yet.  Most people seem to cross-post on their personal blog, and on the DNN site.  This seems to work pretty well.  I think I might do the same thing moving forward, but I am not yet sure.  What do you think?

If I don’t cross post, the marketing side of my brain would feel compelled to write another separate post to notify the readers on the opposite site of the blog post.  This thought seems chaotic at best.  :)  Must keep my OCD tendencies in check…

That being...

The other night, I had the distinct pleasure of being able to watch Mitch Labrador present a session to the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG), showing off his newly released BigfootMVC framework for DotNetNuke®.  Charles Nurse spent a lot of...

You spoke, and the folks at the DotNetNuke® Corporation have listened.  The user group module that’s on the DNN site hasn’t been updated in quite a long time.  There are many things that we probably would like to see that module do.  This is one of the primary topics that the DNN User Group Advisor Committee has been talking about for a little while now.  As a group, we have all been talking about several things that both important to the user groups in the world,...

Tomorrow is the June Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) meeting.  I am very excited about this meeting, because it features one of our own members as the headline speaker.  We will also be having a segment of our meeting called “DNN Appetizers” where a 5-10 minute presentation...

At this point, I don’t even remember how I came upon this video.  However, I am very glad that I did.  This video does an impeccable job of telling and showing us what motivates people.  This is not an easy subject to tackle on any level, despite it being easy to be “dumbed down” for convenience in non-motivated circles.

Among the things I am passionate about is motivation.  The ability to motivate yourself first, and the ability to motivate others second.  At this point in my life though, I have found that the two have a very symbiotic relationship.  I am always looking for new ways to motivate myself and others.  This video sheds insight into what works, and what doesn’t – BUT it goes on to tell you a little bit about why.

That being said, this video is just to fun to watch!  The white board animation stuff it does is addicting to see.  Check it out!

Beyond the motivation aspect, I especially love how this video parallels open source developers and development.  Even though it doesn’t mention...

(Please excuse my ramblings below…  This is a two-day personal brainstorm.)

Imagine a small village, in a remote area.  It doesn’t need much.  The people there need huts for shelter, clothing, food, and water.  This was true of every human being on the planet at one point.  Things were simple.  Everyone had their expertise.  The hunters hunted, and had nearly all of the same tools.  The gatherers gathered, and had pretty much the same tools as well.  Each society functioned pretty much the same way.  However, thanks to procreation, these villages began to grow.  Needs began to change.



The next thing you knew, the...

Several months ago, I was very honored to participate in a preview of a new product that I was being told to not say anything about.  They wanted it to be a big surprise.  I could tell through the IM that we were communicating on that excitement doesn’t begin to describe how happy and proud they were of it.  How could I resist?  I agreed to take this new “top secret” product for a test drive, and see what it did. 

DISCLAIMER:  This is not a sponsored...

Among the DNN sites that I actively manage is the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) website.  There are other user groups using our DotNetNuke® instance too though.  We have been having issues with the size of our database for nearly a year now.  Since this site is on a shared instance of SQL Server, we are limited in how large our database can get.  In order to stay below that limit, I have on many occasions cleared out the tables commonly know to cause this problem, such as the EventLog and SiteLog.  However, we were still living life on the edge of going over our limit.  Since this site doesn’t pay very much, I hadn’t looked much further into it until today.  :)

First of all, I needed to find out what objects are taking up the most space on our database.  Luckily, there is a nice little T-SQL script that...

As more than one person has pointed out over the last couple of months (I am looking at you Chris, and Joe), I have had something of a “love affair” with the DotNetNuke® platform for quite some time.  In short, I do indeed love using it and showing others how they can use it to leverage their talents and resources.  In the technical industry, some might call me an amateur “evangelist” for DNN.  I would agree.  Heck, I have been speaking about it for several years now – sometimes even getting paid for it! 

...

First of all, if you’re asking, “What is that,” let me elaborate.  A WSP module is also known as a “Web Site Project” module.  Basically, what this means is that the module does not need to be precompiled into an assembly (DLL) to run.  It pre-compiles as your web site responds to its first web request.  Alternatively, you can also build your DotNetNuke® modules using the WAP, or “Web Application Project” method.  This method will compile your code behind into one or more neat little assemblies, effectively hiding your source code from anyone that has direct access to the file system of your module and/or website.

I am not going to going any great detail of why you’d want to prefer one method over the other – especially since in some cases, these points may not apply.  In short, myself and many others prefer the WAP method of building a module for one or more of the following reasons:

Hide source code Protect the module from direct...

When I first decided to start a DotNetNuke® user group, I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do.  However, Brian Scarbeau beat me to starting the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group...

I am in the middle of finalizing the details and preparations for the largest and most exciting Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) meeting to date.  Part of the reason for the excitement is because it features Nik Kalyani.  That’s only the beginning though.  There is so much more to look forward to.  For instance, we have joined forces with the local .Net user group, ONETUG.  Both groups have a great chemistry,...

You might be reading this thinking, “What do you mean?”  That’s typical.  The real question though is, “What can importing jQuery UI CSS do for me?”  jQuery UI  on it’s own is already a great thing to use.  It gives you all kinds of intuitive, interactive, and usable UI elements with very little work on your part.  Think of things like calendars, tabs, sliders, and more.  jQuery UI on it’s own only adds the behavior.  You have to import the CSS to make it look good, and luckily, there’s a few themes out there pre-made with jQuery UI  in mind.

While...

In previous years, one thing or another has consistently prevented me from attending the popular DotNetNuke OpenForce events.  Last year, my only chance was to go as a speaker.  That didn’t work out for me.  This year is different though.  I will be seeing you there!  Why?  Easy…  I am very honored to be able to announce that I have been selected to be a speaker at this years event!

I submitted around 8 sessions for consideration to DotNetNuke Connections this year.  Luckily, one really fit in with what they were looking for this year, but it wasn’t the session that I would’ve thought it to be.  I had a few cutting-edge sessions there, and a couple in-depth sessions as well.  However, the one that caught the eyes of the selection committee was, “DotNetNuke 5 Administration: Tips and Tricks.”

I have done this session and sessions like it uncountable times.  However, this...

The core DotNetNuke® Media Module has been idle for quite some time.  Like many open source projects, peoples lives have gotten in the way of keeping this module updated.  About 2 years ago, several members of the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) had gotten together to begin managing the Media Module.  Some work was done with it, but nothing was checked in.  After a while, the module was no longer being worked on.  I am very excited to let you know that this has changed!

I had been working on the next release of the DNN Media Module for about a month.  It was ready to go, but I had to prepare the module to go through the DNN release tracker.  This was a foreign concept to...

There are many reasons to build a DotNetNuke® module.  You might need to satisfy a business need.  Perhaps you need to rewrite an existing or open source module.  There could be an application that you’re porting over to DNN from your own custom solution.  Maybe even, it’s just a project at work…  That’s all well and good, but have you ever built a DNN module to win prizes???  You will have your chance next week!

...

The great thing about an open source project that becomes popular is that many people use it, and if you’re lucky, they let you know about it.  The bad thing about an open source project becoming popular is that people use it, and as a result, you need to fix it when things go wrong.  With the default model of open source being that the product and support are typically both free, this can sometimes be troublesome.  Luckily, this is not the case for this release!

For those of you that haven’t heard of this module, the Ligthbox Gallery module is an open source (free) module for DotNetNuke® that allows you to quickly and easily provide that popular lightbox effect for images on your website.

...

I ran into an interesting situation last night.  I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this in the past.  My blog site was originally one of many in a single DotNetNuke® installation or instance.  Since it has grown in popularity and traffic, I had to move it to it’s own standalone DNN instance.  The quickest way to make that happen was to move a copy of the original instance, and delete all of the other portals that came with it.  In doing so, this left all of the users from the other portals still in the Users table in the database.

WARNING!!! Don’t just run the queries here. Read the post in detail first. Also, BACKUP your database before manually changing any data.  You may severely mess up your site. You’ve been warned!

At first, I kind of panicked, because I was looking at the users in my Superusers Account module.  It was 100+ pages of users!  We all know that there is probably not a single site out there that has 10 super users, much less 100+ pages worth of super users.  In the first page, there were several test accounts, so my first thought was that I had been hacked at some point.  However, I didn’t take the history of the portal into account. 

As it turns out, I had learned in a very scary way how DNN handles user accounts when portals are deleted.  I am not sure of the thought process behind it, but the users are soft deleted from the portals that get deleted.  In this situation, this has a couple of distinctive attributes to take note of.

The IsDeleted column in the Users table is 1 The PortalId column in the UserPortals table is NULL You can see these attributes by running the following query:

1: SELECT up.[PortalId], u.[UserID], u.[Username], u.[FirstName], u.[LastName], u.[IsSuperUser], u.[Email], u.[DisplayName], u.[IsDeleted] ...

It was less than a year ago that I created the Lightbox Gallery Module, as a proof of concept for using jQuery in a DotNetNuke® module.  It has been quite popular considering I only ever expected those who attended my code camp sessions to enjoy it.  Since its first release, it has had over 1600 downloads!  I am sure that less than 50 people have physically attended those sessions, so that number is staggering for me.  That being said, I am pleased to announce that I have another release ready for you to use and abuse.

If you don’t already know, Lightbox is the highly interactive method of displaying pictures on a website.  The thing that separates Lightbox out from the uncountable others is that its fast, user-friendly, interactive,...

I have blogged about some community things here and there, and I will begin blogging about them more starting right now.  My first meaningful post in this area talked about how to run a user group, and it was more generic in its discussion.  It could apply to any user group.  This time, I am talking about how to start a user group, and I am focusing this discussion on DotNetNuke® user groups specifically.

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I will be presenting a webinar later this month titled, “DotNetNuke® Essentials: Simple Solutions for Building Your Website.”  I have been very excited for quite some time to be able to announce this.  The webinar will focus on DotNetNuke®...

I didn’t notice it when it happened, but jQuery has had a couple of stabilization releases since the popular 1.4 release.  The updates are pretty significant and I have seen performance increases that were noticeable to the eye with several implementations after upgrading.  I would highly recommend upgrading your current jQuery core scripts if you’re not running version 1.4.2.  Here are some tips for those of you running jQuery...

One of the new features in the updates in my website is the “Most Popular Entries” area at the bottom of each page on my site.  It gets attention for a few different reasons.  First, everyone wants to know how I did it.  Next, people want to know what determines the most popular blog entries.  Finally, people want to know if I would blog about it.  I had always planned to, but since you asked…

First of all, I need to give a quick disclaimer.  I...

I just got home from the 2010 South Florida Code Camp, where I presented a session titled “How to AJAX-ify Your DotNetNuke Modules.”  Here are the presentation files for that session.

Slide Deck – This can be downloaded from my Sessions page.

Code Files – The code files has been released as an open source module on CodePlex.  This module is called the QueryToGrid module.

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,Modules,Session,Presentation

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I just finished reading the interview with Shaun Walker by the folks at HowSoftwareIsBuilt.com.  This is a website sponsored by Microsoft, whose purpose is to open a dialogue for proprietary...

As you likely know, I am a user of twitter.  You’ll find me at:  http://twitter.com/WillStrohl.  Lately, I don’t contribute as much as I used to, but I still try and pay attention to what’s going on.  For example, I have an ongoing search that filters all tweets based on some DotNetNuke® keywords.  Today, this search came across a blog post titled, Does DNN Allow Me To Do SEO Stuff.  I liked this post, despite it being on a non-DNN blog platform.  It only scrapes the surface though.

Basically, it mentions that DNN makes it easy to manage the Page Title, Keywords, and Description.  Unfortunately, the only thing here that is very important these days with SEO is the Page Title.  The Kewords and Description can help, but by all accounts, little to no...

If you’re using the URL Master module from IFinity, chances are that you are also using the extension-less URL pattern like you see on my site.  This is a great way to shorten your URLs for a more SEO-friendly impact when search engine spiders crawl your site.  It also removes the TabID from the URL, which also has a meaningful impact on SEO – not to mention making the URLs more human-friendly.  This is sometimes more important than the SEO benefits.

By default, the DotNetNuke® Blog Module generates a URL that looks like the following URL:

http://www.domain.com/PageName/tabid/123/EntryID/123/Blog-Title.aspx

This isn’t a horrible URL structure, but it leaves plenty of room for improvement.  That pesky TabID needs to go.  This is done automatically by URL Master. ...

I had been planning for a long, long time to update the design of my blog site.  Even though I consider myself a proficient skinner, I simply haven’t been able to find the time to return to it for my own projects.  Nearly all of my professional and personal time has been taken up recently with module development.  Through this, I have found that not only did I not have the time to build myself a new skin, I also have been getting a bit rusty at it. ...

There can be many times when you might want to clear out the skin and/or container value assignments for your DotNetNuke® website.  The most common example would be when you’re switching skins.  By clearing out the skin and containers, it can make it easier to re-assign the new skins and containers across your site.  (This of course depends on your specific site.)  This is quite easy to accomplish.

Default Skins and Containers First, let’s review where the container and skin assignments are made.  This begins at the portal level.  For your portal, you can set the default skin and container to be used for all pages and containers in the Site Settings.

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I thought I’d share a little gem that I had drummed up some time back to help you with a little bit of built in audit information from your DotNetNuke® website.  Many sites that want to present their visitors with a notification of when and where they last logged into the web application.  This can be useful, even if I believe few to no people actually pay attention to it past the first couple of times they logged in.  That being said, it’s very easy to implement in DotNetNuke®, and you don’t even need to build a module to take advantage of it!

First, you’d want to add a stored procedure to your DNN site that queries the database for the user login information that’s currently logged in.  Here is an example snippet:

1: CREATE PROCEDURE {databaseOwner}[{objectQualifier}GetLastIpNumberForUser] 2: @UserId INT, 3: @PortalId INT 4: AS...

If you follow anything that I do, then you might have picked up on the fact that I am a big fan of Active Social.  Active Social is a complete social networking solution for DotNetNuke®.  Out all of the available solutions for DNN that I could demo, this was the only one that just worked, with minimal set-up and had the best usability.  Needless to say, I am using this solution on a handful...

Do you live in the Toronto Area and need your DotNetNuke® fix?  Well, Paul Scarlett has that fix ready for you!  He has just founded the Toronto Area DotNetNuke User Group.  Paul recently announced this on the DotNetNuke® Forums, and is currently looking for your input.  So, if you’re passionate about...

I was helping someone out on twitter today.  They were very upset about DotNetNuke®, claiming that it sucked.  That’s fine.  Everyone thinks that something sucks.  But usually that statement arises as an emotional response to being frustrated by something that should be “simple.”  I agree. All applications should be simple.  However, not everyone gets it right the first time.  Luckily for us, the DotNetNuke® Corporation is fully aware of the usability shortcomings of DNN, and are actively fixing them in each release.  You can easily see evidence of this when comparing version 3.x to version 5.x.

Today’s frustrated DNN user was very upset.  He uploaded an image using the File Manager module, and then couldn’t find the image.  I would suspect that this happens a lot more than we realize.  He assumed that since he uploaded the image to the file manager’s “root” folder, the image would be...

With the help of INETA, the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) and the Tampa DotNetNuke® User Group were able to bring in Joe Brinkman to speak to us about DotNetNuke®. ...

Early in the year of 2009, the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group was very fortunate to host the well-known DotNetNuke® SEO Expert, Tom Kraak.  He spoke to use about how we could make our DNN sites more SEO-friendly.  Among many other things, Tom is also a DNN user group leader, in charge of the Connecticut DotNetNuke® User Group.  It’s only fair that if he could fly down to us, that I could make a trip up there to visit them.  That’s just what I did on November 17, 2009.  (A couple of months ago.)

The flight up there was fantastic.  I simply love flying on Southwest.  They are by far my favorite airline.  On our descent, I began to immediately take notice of the differences between Connecticut and Florida.  When you are flying over Florida, it seems that everyone...

Joe Brinkman first came to Orlando on DotNetNuke® business a few years ago.  We had a local DNN vendor who sponsored bringing him down to be a speaker at the annual Orlando Code Camp.  Then, he came along with the other DNN Corporation founders to host the OpenForce Connect: Orlando event in 2008.  The last time that we’ve seen Joe visit Florida on DNN business was in June of 2009 for the first annual Day of DotNetNuke® in Tampa.  Well, he’s back!

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Tomorrow night I will be in chilly Connecticut to speak to the Connecticut DotNetNuke® User Group (DNNCT) about jQuery.  This is still kind of a new group, in that it’s still finishing its first year of service.  The group is headed up by a well-known DotNetNuke® guru, Tom Kraak.  Tom was invited to the ODUG earlier...

With Antonio Chagoury visiting recently, and the last code camp in Florida wrapping up for the year, I’ve been talking to many Microsoft MVP’s.  As a result of these recent conversations I’ve been having, I was curious…  How many Microsoft MVP’s are there in the DotNetNuke® community?  As it turns out, the answer might surprise  you.  I know it did me!

There are a couple of obvious people in the community that immediately pop into my head when I thought about this, and that’s Shaun Walker and Nik Kalyani.  But can you believe that there’s actually 18 MVP’s active in the DNN community?!  That should allow you to rest easy, knowing that when you have a problem, there’s several MVP’s out there helping to create and contribute to DNN.

At least that’s my count. The number might be higher, as I might have forgotten some names.

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This past Tuesday was a number of things… The Marine Corps birthday, the release of Modern Warfare 2, and it was of course the day of our November meeting for the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG).  There were many challenges coming into this meeting, which each could possibly ruin the entire meeting.  However, all of those challenges were successfully met and overcome.



So… What Challenges? This meeting had a lot going...

I have already told you about the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) meeting details, on November 10th (this Tuesday).  We will be having an exclusive interview with the members of the DotNetNuke Corporation, and our speaker will be Antonio Chagoury. ...

Not everyone can go to OpenForce this year.  Many things might be a factor in that decision.  But if you’re in Central Florida, and not going to OpenForce, you should be coming to the next Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG)...

November is proving to be a busy month for me in all areas of my life.  November 10th is the Marine Corps birthday, but it’s also the day that we have our monthly Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) meeting.  Not to mention, this is also the date that my favorite XBox 360 game comes out, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  On 11/19, our ONETUG President will be out of town, so I will be organizing the monthly Orlando .Net User Group meeting on my own for the first time.  If those events were not enough, I also am speaking at 3 other events this month!

November 7th – Tampa Code Camp (DNN Administration) ...

I know a few of you have become fans of the Lightbox Gallery Module that I released a couple of months ago.  I think that is really cool – especially since it was just created as a proof of concept for a DotNetNuke® presentation I gave at Jacksonville Code Camp this year.  I never intended for it to be a production...

Like every other month, we had our monthly Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) meeting last week.  This was an important meeting too.  Since recently being appointed as the Vice President of the Orlando .Net User Group (ONETUG), my time is going to be more valuable...

In the world of DotNetNuke®, we have enjoyed the fact that we can easily include our own Terms of Use page, as well as a Privacy Statement page on our websites.  The simplicity of adding these two pages is almost too good to pass up.  In fact, I see very few DNN websites that don’t include it.  It’s simply there as a rule of thumb.  However, have you ever actually read either page thoroughly?  There might be things that you should be concerned about.  Both pages have items that may have an impact on the visitors to your website, or even have legal ramifications to you and your site.

Typically, the two links I am talking about are located on the bottom of your page, like shown in the screen shot below.

...

Tampa Code Camp is right around the corner, on November 7th, at the KForce offices.  I only submitted my session(s) today, because I had to work out a scheduling conflict.  That day, there is a very important birthday that I need to celebrate.  Luckily, there were still a couple of open speaking slots left.

I contacted Keith Kabza this morning, and he hooked me up.  I am very grateful to him for working me in.  I know how hard that can be – especially...

Earlier this year, Tom Kraak took a long trip down to Orlando, Florida to speak at the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG).  He gave a fantastic session on SEO practices in DotNetNuke®.  I am all set to return the favor on November 17th, 2009 at the Connecticut DotNetNuke® User Group. 

I will be speaking to the members of the user group about jQuery, and how it is used in DNN module and skin development.  Here is the abstract for the session:

...

I had built a module a while ago called the WillStrohl.FeedHandler.  It was specifically built for what I am about to talk about, but it can be used to make adjustments to nearly any XML or RSS feed.  Basically, it consumes an existing XML feed, and allows you to change whatever you want in the feed, while supplying you with a new XML feed URL to pass on to your website visitors and other XML feed consumers.  I mainly only use this module with the XML feed from DotNetNuke® sites, and most often with the Blog Module.

The XML output in the RSS engine in DNN has some known issues.  I won’t go into them all, as they are obvious when you try to consume the feed.  Here are a few things that I fix in my blog’s XML before allowing you to consume it to your RSS readers.

Standalone Ampersands First, I have found that the XML that is rendered will occasionally be littered with standalone...

A while back, I built a module for the Day of DotNetNuke® that was specifically meant for me to collect contacts for people that were interested in being volunteers at the event.  I called it that Contact Collector Module, because that’s all I wanted to do.  I wanted to collect contacts.  The module worked great, but it also highlighted some needed features.  I am happy to say that as of about 1:00 AM EST this morning, those features are now in the module.

One of the most visible weaknesses was in the expectation from the person filling in the contact form.  They expected more feedback to let them know what happened.  The initial release only told them that the information was saved.  In version 1.01.00 of this module, you can now optionally have an e-mail sent to the contact and even an administrator when a new contact is added.  The e-mails are even using a template to allow you...

One cool thing about the recent releases of DotNetNuke® is that they include the intellisense file for jQuery in the installation and source.  What is that file for?  Well, that’s quite simple.  It allows you to have intellisense for jQuery the same way that you have it for VB and C#.  Here’s how you can take advantage of that when developing modules in DotNetNuke®.

First of all, Scott Guthrie already does a great job of explaining how to get jQuery intellisense enabled in Visual Studio, so I will not rehash that information.  Just read his blog post about it and come back here.  Don’t take too long though, because I have a short attention span…



Okay, you should have follow Scott’s steps in the above paragraph. Now let’s get back to DNN.



First of all, there is a difference in how you handle jQuery from version 5.01.00 and those that came before it.  For those versions that are lower, you will need to add the intellisense file to the website project.  If you need to do that, put it in the following directory with the following name:

~/Resources/Shared/scripts/jquery/jquery.intellisense.js

Doing this will ensure that you follow the same directory and file naming convention, and further ensures that subsequent upgrades of DNN does not break your module.  Of course, commercial modules may have to come up with a different solution to support a wider variety of DNN installations.  (Also, you may have to give further consideration to jQuery versions.)

Now that the file is in place, open the mark-up for any user control in your module source.  Add the following line of HTML code:

script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" ...

I have given a tiny preview about the Southwest Florida Code Camp 2009 in an earlier blog entry.  But I now have all of the information you’ll need if you want to attend this years code camp in Naples, Florida.  Unfortunately, this is not going to be presenting DotNetNuke® content by the usual suspects.  I will be the only person presenting on DNN.  That’s better than nothing though!  Here’s what you can expect.

I have 3 back-to-back sessions in the latter half of the day on Saturday, October 3rd (8:00 AM), at the Embarq Auditorium which is part of the Florida Gulf Coast University.  My first session begins just after the lunch break, at 1:45 PM.  This is the dreaded hour for any instructor, presenter, or teacher.  This is when the audience...

One of the great things about the DotNetNuke® 5 series is that it automatically includes jQuery.  I have noticed that when I use a clean install of DNN 5+, I can immediately use jQuery to my hearts content.  However, I was shortly stumped on another DNN website, when I tried to drop some jQuery code onto the page, and I just received script errors.

Since I was using the latest and greatest version of DNN (v5.01.02 at the time), I chalked it up to having a missing reference to jQuery.noConflict().  So, I looked in the rendered HTML to see if it was there.  I was surprised to not see jQuery in the HTML source at all.  I was highly confused.

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There is a new version of the WillStrohl.Injection Module available for download.  If you are unfamiliar with this module, once you drop it onto a page in DotNetNuke®, it allows you to inject HTML-based content into the mark-up on your DNN website.  I have written, licensed, and made this module available as a free and open source project so that everyone can benefit from it.  This module could be useful for any number of use-cases.  Some of the more popular use cases have turned out to be for jQuery, Google Analytics, Google Adsense, and more.

One of the chief complaints in the previous versions was a limitation on the number of characters that was allowed for the content to be injected.  This originally shown its ugly head when I included this field in the indexing on SQL Server.  This problem has been solved.  You no longer...

If you are not familiar with the name “Brandon Haynes” then you should check this guy out (keep within context, jokers).  I had the pleasure of meeting Brandon at the first annual Day of DotNetNuke®, where he presented a topic titled, “Advanced Authorization in DotNetNuke 5.1.” ...

I have just posted the installation and source packages of the WillStrohl.LightboxGallery Module for DotNetNuke®.  If you are not familiar with this module, I blogged about it recently.  There are no new features in this release, just some stabilization.  Here are the release notes:

Fixed a bug the prevents the album from rendering – I was referencing the incorrect class to grab the path for the selected gallery folder on the server. Ensured that slashes are interpreted no matter which are used – This was already done for the slashes throughout the folder name, but I was not checking for the preceding slash. Changed the folder not found error to tell us the folder we tried to access, if authorized – If you are logged in with Edit permissions to the module, the error that tells you when a folder path is not found tells you...

I have been putting off upgrading WillStrohl.com to the most recent version of DotNetNuke® for quite a while now.  I have been keeping it in the 4.09.x series, mostly due to laziness.  However, as of a few moments ago, I have completed an upgrade and clean-up of this site. 

What did that consist of? I upgraded WillStrohl.com to version 4.09.05 earlier today for security reasons.  But I knew that upgrading to the Cambrian series of DNN would be much more involved and require more time, so I waited until this evening to begin.  The upgrade process was mostly uneventful.

I of course backed up my site files and database first.  DO NOT forget to do that!

Earlier, I upgraded from version 4.09.04 to 4.09.05.  Tonight, I upgraded from 4.09.05 to version 5.00.01, and then to version 5.01.02.

The main...

Last night was our September Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) meeting.  I was the presenter, and the topic was the “DotNetNuke® Core Blog Module.”  Overall, this was yet another great event, despite a scary start.

This topic was originally scheduled for July, but I had to cancel the meeting due to me being out of town unexpectedly.  I was extra heart-broken about cancelling...

When I am developing any product, I try to do my best to limit the amount of time that my customer or staff will have to manage that product.  This can be looked at from one perspective in terms of usability.  I like to think that I keep usability as my #1 priority.  However, another way this comes in to play is with administration under the covers.  There are literally too many ways that you can do that, thus limiting how many I can mention.  So I will just mention the one I intend to talk about, Foreign Keys. 

Foreign Keys are very often a foreign topic to developers.  Most developers know enough about a database to get connected and manage the data that their code affects, but many do not know enough about the ins and outs of things like Foreign Keys and Indexes.  There is a marketplace of consultants that look specifically at things like this.

...

Next Tuesday, I will be presenting a session about the DotNetNuke® Core Blog Module for our September Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) meeting.  You may think you know about the blog module, but I am going to walk you through the entire thing, from beginning to end.  I will begin with an overview of blogging, and then move into...

I was asked not long ago to write a blog for Applied Innovations.  If you don’t know who they are, Appliedi is a very well-known web host in the State of Florida.  They do a ton to sponsor and help the community around here.  I have already begun switching my websites over to their hosting plans, since using them for the Day of DotNetNuke® and Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group...

In nearly all of my modules, I include the compatibleversions node in the manifest file for my modules.  The reason I do this is simple.  I want to prevent my module from being installed on DotNetNuke® sites that I do not want to support, or cannot support.  Think about that for a moment…

One example for this might be that I am using a feature that is only supported in certain versions of DNN.  A module that required SSL would be a great example of this.  SSL has been native to DNN since version 4.05.04, but most people don’t know that.  Heck, I would bet many module developers don’t know that.  It’s for that reason that someone might want to include the compatibleversions in their DNN manifest.  If the person installing their module on an earlier version of DNN, then the installer will tell them that they can’t.

Another reason that a module developer might want to use this feature is in the instance that they do not want the person installing...

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I am speaking at the Jacksonville Code Camp this weekend.  My topic is “Using jQuery in DotNetNuke Development”.  In outlining and planning my presentation, I quickly realized that a real-world example will be necessary in order to effectively express my points to attendees.  So, I began to think… What kind of module could I write that would allow me to demonstrate integrating jQuery in several ways?

I immediately determined that I wanted to use a jQuery plugin of some kind.  I began browsing through the most popular jQuery plugins for ideas.  Eventually, a light bulb went off in my head while browsing.  I might have been...

(FYI... I had problems with Windows Live Writer tonight, so I am posting this usnig ScribeFire.)

I have a full plate right now in terms of upcoming speaking engagements the next few months.  I love spreading the word about DotNetNuke®.  The best part about it is, that I know I am helping someone learn something that they might have otherwise not known.  This hobby is continuing.  You should try to make it out to one of these events.

Jacksonville Code CampDate/Time:  Saturday, August 29, 2009 at 8:00 AM EST

I submitted 3 sessions to the popular Jacksonville Code Camp (a.k.a., Jax Code Camp), and at first, I was not selected to speak.  I was not heart-broken, as I was going through a lot at the time, and it was something...

Every year, the DotNetNuke Corporation does a great job of bringing something new to the table for the annual OpenForce events.  This year, they are holding the first annual OpenForce Community Choice Awards.  This is exciting!

Finally, the...

As is usual for me, I will be working on one thing, and concentrating on another thing, and then – BOOM!  An idea or thought pops in my head that is usually completely unrelated to the tasks at-hand, but are really good ideas.  This time, it’s more of a philosophy though.  I think those of you that have private modules that you only make available to certain customers should consider selling those “private” modules.  Here’s why…

I am not going to mention any names, but during my evaluation period where I was trying our different Social Networking solutions for DotNetNuke®, one of my options was from a major DNN vendor.  From one stand point, I really favored that option from the outset, because I trusted this vendor completely to very quickly, efficiently, and consistently fix or add any features that I needed.  Good right?  Maybe…

Then there were other public options out there, such as: Active Social,...

Here is another tip, that grew out of an implementation using the Active Social module suite.  Once I was ready to roll the module out on an existing site, I needed to add all of the existing users to the security role that Active Social uses to give certain permissions to end-users.  I know I could have created a new role and added all users to it, but I wanted to use the new role that Active Social created for me.  As far as I know, DotNetNuke® does not provide a way to do this through the existing admin modules.

Since all of the users and roles are kept in the database, I naturally decided to generate a T-SQL script to accomplish this task for me.  At first, I thought it was going to be a complicated query, but I soon found myself to be wrong.  Here is how I investigated this task to find it’s solution.

First, I began looking through the source code of DNN library project.  Normally, when you want to perform a utility function like this task, there’s a method in the appropriate controller to accomplish it.  From there, a console app might be able to quickly written to perform your task.  In my case, I was not able to find an appropriate method in the UserController, RoleController, or any of the other classes where I thought this might be.  However, I did find one that might be useful.  In the RoleController class, there’s a method called AddUserRole().

The AddUserRole() method accepts the PortalId, UserId, RoleId, and optionally the effective and expiration dates.  In turn, this method calls the underlying AddUserRole stored procedure in the database.  The purpose of this method and data call is to add a single user account to a security role.  That is nearly what I was looking for, but it was all I could find – and it would do just fine.  This method pointed me to something I could work with.

Since I only needed to do this one time, I decided to write a T-SQL script to take advantage of the existing DNN stored procedures.  Here is what I came up with.

1: USE [DNN_DATABASE_NAME]...

(In the spirit of The Onion…  Don’t take anything seriously, and make sure you follow the links.)

NORTH AMERICA – As is with the recent trend, some DotNetNuke® news was just broken on the popular mini-messaging site, twitter.  Users of twitter were surprised to find out that the famed originator of the fastest growing online content management system (CMS), Shaun Walker, was let go for unknown reasons.  The still young DotNetNuke® Corporation was not able to be reached for a comment.  Using Bing Maps, we were able to determine that they are having a pool party in their home base in San Francisco, California in celebration of the new DNN Corp Team Members being announced.  (None of the team members were invited.)

Sources close to the Walker family say that Shaun...

As I mentioned before, I am going to begin featuring some of the blogs that I read, and tell you why.  The first installment to this ongoing series is Nik Kalyani.  First of all, who is Nik Kalyani?  If you’re familiar with DotNetNuke®, then you should already know that Nik is one of the co-founders of the DotNetNuke® Corporation.  Beyond that, he is a very innovative technologist, who brings many ideas together to approach tasks and projects.  I have only met Nik in person once (at Open Force Connect – Orlando 2008), and spoken to him on a couple of conference calls, as well as watched his web casts.  Above all though, I read Nik’s blog.

...

Looking through the myriads of questions and answers out there, and the quality of blogger content out there that focuses on DotNetNuke®, it is quickly apparent that many people out there are not familiar with all of the better DNN blogs out there.  So, to help solve that for the folks that might be readers of my blog, I have decided to occasionally feature a DNN blog that I read, and tell you why I read that particular blog.  Hopefully, I introduce you to a new blog that you cannot live without!

If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment to let me know.  Expect the first installment of this blog series later today.  Can you guess who I will feature first?

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,DNN Blogs,Bloggers,Feature

There may be a time where you’ll have to find display names that are not unique.  I recently had to do this for an Active Social implementation.  (I have done a few of those now.)  There could be any number of reasons for you to do this.  You might need to for the same reason as me, to accomplish a business objective, or you may simply be curious. 

Regardless to why you feel you need to find the user accounts with matching display names, doing so is pretty simple.  There is a simple query that you can run to get the results you are looking for.  The good news is, that with a few simple changes, you can use this same query to do similar checks in other data tables.

Here is the query I used to find the non-unique display names in my DotNetNuke® site:

SELECT u.* FROM [dbo].[Users] u LEFT JOIN ( SELECT [DisplayName],...

Some time ago, I won a free VPS hosting account from Applied Innovations at Open Force Connect – Orlando (now known as Day of DotNetNuke®).  Well, like a dummy, I didn’t make time to use it and my entire free year went by without me so much as logging in to my account.  However, this led to something much better!

This free account led to me getting to know the CEO of Applied Innovations, Jess Coburn, a little better.  (By the way, I didn’t know that Jess has a blog, until I wrote this post!)  When I contacted them upon getting my expiration notice, Jess offered up extension of the free hosting.  I certainly wanted to take him up on it, but time continued to be an issue, since this would involve moving...

It’s that time of year again.  Packt Publishing is once again holding it’s annual award process where everyone votes for the best open source content management system (CMS).  While it’s an honor for any CMS to make it into the final voting, as DotNetNuke® always does, DNN usually gets snubbed pretty good in this contest.  Traditionally, DNN has not been considered a true open source product since it requires to be installed on a Windows operating system, which...

I recently came across what I thought was a bug in the way that certain pages were added to the site map in DotNetNuke®.  You see, if you’re not already familiar with the DNN site map feature, you can go to the SiteMap.aspx page on any DNN installation to see it.  For example, mine is here:

http://www.willstrohl.com/SiteMap.aspx

This is a very useful feature, especially for larger sites, or for those who are not very familiar with generating their own site map XML file.  That’s right!  The site map we’re talking about is the same kind that gets submitted to search engines, to show them where all of your web pages are.  It is written in XML, which is not the optimal language that some folks might want to work with.

Anyhow, we were talking about what looked at first to be a bug in the site map feature.  Basically, in reviewing my site map output, I noticed that all of the pages found in...

I recently had the both the pleasure, and honor of being the Technical Editor for the recently released DotNetNuke User’s Guide, published by Wrox.  The book is written by two very experienced and influential folks in the DotNetNuke®...

There are two well-known module suites for the DotNetNuke® web application framework.  First, there is the SmartSocial offering by Smart-Thinker, and then there’s the Active Social offering by Active Modules.  We are going to briefly compare the two right now.

Before I begin, please know that I have not been compensated in any way, and do not have any affiliation with either module suite, or their respective owner(s).

Smart-Thinker: SmartSocial Smart-Thinker is a company and website run solely by Rodney Joyce, who is also known for PokerDIY.com.  In fact, his modules...

A great feature of DotNetNuke® is that each version comes with project templates for both the website, skins, and modules.  What is a project template?  Well, if you want to build your first module, then executing the project template inside of Visual Studio will give you a really great starting point, instead of having to figure out the files and file structure all on your own.  The project template puts all of that together for you.  All you have to do is give it a name, and then rename/change the code and files as you see fit.  (And then build your module of course.)

Any developer though has their own style of both creating the files and code within their user controls, and other related code files.  For example, you might have a specific namespace that you always like to work in, or you might always have specific properties that you create each time you build a user control.  Luckily, the project templates can be easily easily altered to remember...

I was recently asked how someone could manually delete a module once it is installed. The number of use cases where this would be useful is limited, but it is still a valid scenario that needs to be considered – especially during development.  Here is a walk through of the general steps required to delete a module manually.

Run the Uninstall script (if necessary) Delete the module files from the DesktopModules and App_Code folder Grab the DesktopModuleId Delete the permissions associated with the module Delete the module from the database Refresh the site cache to update the UI with your changes While I have not fully verified these steps to be the same in DNN version 5.x, they should generally be the same.  Here is some guidance to follow each of the defined steps above…

WARNING!  Performing these steps incorrectly could result in your DNN site being broken and/or no longer accessible.  In some cases, this might be permanent.  It is HIGHLY recommended that you perform a...

In DotNetNuke®, a favicon of the DNN gear logo is placed as the default favicon.  For some websites, this is no big deal.  However, for any site that requires its own branding, changing the favicon is a really big requirement.  Luckily, DNN makes changing this easy, and flexible.

First of all, in the root of your DNN site, there are two favicons:

favicon.ico DotNetNuke.ico Both files contain the same image, the DNN gear.

You could just overwrite the favicon file with your own.  However, that is technically making a core code change,...

The Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) is not very old.  We are still working toward finishing our second year as a user group.  Our first meeting was February of 2008.  However, it was several months later before we actually were able to claim our status as member of INETA.  Well, a few days ago I was reminded of this, as there was a package that showed up for me at work.

Looking at the package, I was confused since it was from INETA.  I wasn’t expecting any packages, much less one from INETA.  When I opened it, I was greeted with a pleasant surprise.  It was a mounted certificate, celebrating our one year anniversary with the INETA user group...

I wasn’t really listening to podcasts until a few months ago.  I just really didn’t find anything that truly interested me to the point of putting down my personal 60+ GB of music and streaming my favorite radio stations.  Not to mention, I am a fan of the popular streaming service known as Pandora.  Anyway, I found the DotNetNuke Podcast about that time, and shortly after, DNN Voice was born.  Since I am so passionate about DotNetNuke®, I began listening.  Right now, I only know of those two DNN podcasts.

I have been listening to both podcasts for a while now.  Honestly, I like them both.  They have a different focus, and because of that focus, both are going to have a different fan base. 

DotNetNuke Podcast ...

There may come a time when you will want to programmatically add a user to an existing role in DotNetNuke®.  It’s actually quite easy.  If you take a look at how the core code in DNN does it, just emulate that.  This method of using and reusing the existing DNN core code is what DNN development is supposed to be about, so make sure you don’t reinvent the wheel.

In the source code for DotNetNuke®, there is a controller class for nearly everything that you want to do with the various objects that you work with in DNN every day.  Since I am familiar with the DNN source, I knew where to go.  But many people are not familiar with the source code.  In those cases, you need to either do some searches in the Object Browser, or browse around until you find the code you’re looking for.  Thinking it through logically, you can usually browse right to the code you’re looking for since the core team...

I was one of the many people who watched Nik Kalyani’s first webinar, showcasing the anticipated Professional Edition version of DotNetNuke® version 5.01.00.  As always, he did a fantastic job of presenting his topic to us.  I really enjoy his talks.  This blog is coming a bit late, as the webcast was last Wednesday.

I do want to calm any conspiracy theorists first though.  The only affiliation I have with the DotNetNuke Corporation is that I am on the Media Module project team.  They are in no way asking me to review DNN PE (which I do not have a copy of), and they might even be unhappy about it since they have a Marketing team who is dedicated to speak about such things.  I am just like most of you.  I am on...

If you attended the Day of DotNetNuke® this year, you probably already know.  If you don’t know, those who attended the event are getting a software bundle from SmarterTools, Inc.  They were incredibly generous to us.  They gave each attendee a license for each of their product offerings, which is a whopping $750 USD value for each attendee. The e-mails with all of the license information just went out.

Here are the software packages that each...

The DotNetNuke Corporation is on the verge of releasing version 5.01.00 of the popular DotNetNuke® web application framework.  I am so excited, because this is going to be the reason to finally jump aboard the version 5+ band wagon.  Especially, when you include the fix they found for the high load performance issues from last week, this version of DotNetNuke® is going to be the best yet. 

DotNetNuke® version 5.01.00 has all of the great things I love about version 5.00.00 and 5.00.01, but it is stable!  Numerous bugs, performance updates, and workflow issues have been resolved.  Among the new features to look forward to in version 5.01.00 are: Site Map Priorities, Human Friendly URL’s are turned on by default, a few SEO updates,...

On many DotNetNuke® (DNN) websites you will find an unacceptable number of the following exception:

System.Exception: Error Creating BusinessControllerClass ‘YourModule.Modules.ModuleName.ControllerName’ of module(ModuleName) id=(ModuleID) in tab(TabID) and portal(PortalID)  ---> System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I have put the changing words in bold.  Those words will be different for you.

This is almost always the result of the wrong business controller class being specified in the DNN manifest file.  In the manifest file, the module developer will specify the business controller class so that DNN knows what Interfaces the module implements (such as: IPortable, and ISearchable).  This is very important, because DNN will treat those module a little differently.  For...

One of the more misunderstood, and underestimated modules in the Core offering of DotNetNuke® Modules is by far the Blog Module.  Everyone has an opinion on it, and most of us are wrong.  Blogs are one of those adaptive concepts – it is what it is.  A blog is one of those many, many things that simply give you back value based on what you put into it.  Luckily, the latest release of the Blog Module makes that easier than ever before in DotNetNuke® (that is, without paying for it).

On July 9th, I will be presenting the DNN Core Blog Module for our next session at the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group, or ODUG.  In this session, I hope to make the Blog Module understood by anyone that might be thinking about using it, or may have been confused about it...

I was recently given the honor of reviewing the Universal Tag Cloud Module.  This module is released by InspectorIT, a Washington D.C. based company, whose many talents happen to include DotNetNuke®.  The company has deep roots in the DNN project.  They have a hand in developing the Core Blog Module, Links Module, and the Installer Utility.  You may recognize the name of their CEO, Antonio Chagoury, who is very helpful in the community, not to mention very talented.  He also founded the Capital DotNetNuke User Group.

Universal Tag Cloud Module The Universal Tag Cloud Module...

The first annual Day of DotNetNuke® was less than a week ago.  We had been thinking about this event for over a year, but only planning it for about 2-3 months.  I have been blogging about it for most of the 2-3 months as well, so you can look forward to me returning to my usual DotNetNuke® blog content following this post.  Before we can get there, I need to let you know my perspective of how the Day of DotNetNuke®...

I would hope that all of the 3 readers of my blog know that there was an event being planned called the Day of DotNetNuke® by now.  If you don’t know, we had a full day code camp type event this past weekend which focused 100% on DotNetNuke®.  Now, I am going to tell you how it went.

The Beginning Last year, we were lucky enough to have the OpenForce Connect – Orlando event in June.  Since then, we have been eager to repeat the event.  Unfortunately, we were not able...

We are a few short days away from the first annual Day of DotNetNuke® 2009.  For the most party, we are ready.  Sure there are some final details to work out – but we cannot wait to kick this event off.  I have blogged about the various reasons you should be attending the Day of DotNetNuke®, so I will skip that this time.  What we DO need are a few non-monetary donations and volunteers to make our vision a reality.  Here is what we need:

...

The June 2009 Orlando DotNetNuke®Users Group meeting was last night.  Our first meetings began with us getting together to just ask each other questions, and others would answer them.  This was a great format.  Beginners especially loved this format.  Remember what this is?  It’s what we used to do before there was such a thing as a bulletin board system, or community forums.  It is very retro, much like the newest graphic design product, Crane. (funny)

The meeting began as it always does… Bob Santuci (ODUG Secretary) and I set up the room, and then wait for the members to show up.  This month though, we went back to our roots.  We all came in with no game plan.  We just knew that whatever happened,...

I have finally gotten to the point of having a good idea of what we have in store for the Day of DotNetNuke® attendees.  We have lots of cool stuff to give away and raffle.  First of all, attendees will all get the follow standard things:

Cool T-Shirt Breakfast, Lunch, and drinks DNN After Dark (after party social event) Networking with your fellow DNN peers & experts 5 great tracks 21 incredible...

We have been trying to work this out for a long time now, but I kept dropping the ball on it.  We now have a block of rooms reserved at the Embassy Suites, only a few blocks away from where the Day of DotNetNuke® is being held.  That is really cool, because it puts all of us in the same area with each other at...

This weekend was a great time to go shopping on behalf of a non-profit organization, as there were great bargains everywhere!  I had been eye-balling some sales going on at our local CompUSA for several weeks now.  This weekend, it got even better.  I was able to procure an HDTV and an HP Laptop to be given away as grand prizes at the Day of DotNetNuke® this year!  I would post pictures, but they are still in their respective boxes.  Those pictures...

In terms of SEO (search engine optimization), one of the biggest issues with DotNetNuke® has been that the site map it generates assigns the same priority to every single page in the portal.  The priority should be a value between 0.0 and 1.0, but historically DNN has assigned every page the priority of 0.5.  If you submit your site map to Google, and then check the parsed results later, you will see an error like shown below.

 

...

I finally have found some time to look at the newest version of DotNetNuke®, or in this case, the most recent Beta.  The beta can be publically downloaded and participated in.  One of the first things I have stumbled upon during my run through tonight was the new Google Analytics...

I was recently asked to show someone how to use the DotNetNuke® Wiki Module.  While I can usually whip up a demo in seconds and wing it, I was not able to this time.  It had been too long since I had last used it, and was having a brain lapse.  So, I decided to put that demo here, so to speak.  Before I get into it though, I do want to mention that there are some features that are missing and planned to be in future releases.  Chris Hammond is the project lead, and he admittedly is looking for time and contributors to help in continuing the development effort.  Use the Wiki project forum if you’re interested in helping (or need support).

First of all, you need to install the module, as it is not installed...

The Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group, or the ODUG, is not as old as some might think.  Our first meeting was February 2, 2008.  So, we are working on completing our second year as a user group.  It began simply enough… Brian Scarbeau signed up to reserve the user group on the DotNetNuke® website, and then began to...

The DotNetNuke Corporation has begun broadcasting webinars for anyone to register and watch.  They are mostly hosted by Nik Kalyani, a Co-Founder of the corporation, Former CEO, and the current Director of Products and Strategy.  His first webinar was today, and it was basically an introduction to DotNetNuke®.  While his demo today was run on the new Professional Edition, the webinar strictly focused on introducing some of the most common and powerful features that would be of interest to anyone evaluating our favorite web application framework.

...

The Day of DotNetNuke® is very fortunate to have the support of the DotNetNuke Corporation for the event.  Part of that support is a bit of advertising on the official DotNetNuke® website.  We have a skyscraper...

A lot of things have been happening in preparing for the first annual Day of DotNetNuke®.  We have been speaking with sponsors, potential partners, service providers, hotels, speakers, and more – making sure that everyone that attends will have the best possible time that they can.  Our goal is to provide the best DNN content anywhere, and provide the best social, learning, and networking environment possible.  All of this, and it is absolutely FREE to attend!  Can you believe it?  Here is what has been going on in terms...

Scott Willhite just announced via twitter that the Beta version for DotNetNuke® version 5.01.00 is available for download.  Basically, the DNN team is making the betas available publically, as the number of possible use cases has exceeded those that they are able to test right now.  As a result, more than the acceptable number of bugs have been coming along with recent DNN releases. 

Before I tell you the download link, know this:  PLEASE report any and all bugs you find.  It is up to people like you and I to help make DNN better.  And what easier and cheaper way to help support the project?  Report bugs to:  http://support.dotnetnuke.com

Download DotNetNuke version 5.01 Beta

...

We have had many great submissions to the Day of DotNetNuke® speaker pool.  Many of those submissions are from some fantastic speakers!  However, we are also looking for the lesser known and local speakers.  Many of the topics submitted so far are very great, but we are also looking for some more general topics, such as using the DNN Core Modules. 

We would love to see new faces and community members taking the plunge and speaking for the first time.  Believe me, no one will make fun of you.  Community events are perfect for first...

This news was already announced at the May Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group meeting, and subsequently announced on Twitter as well.  We are very lucky to be able to announce that Joe Brinkman is the Keynote Speaker for the Day of DotNetNuke® this year.  Here is an excerpt from the Day of DotNetNuke® website:

...

I blogged before about my new hosting account with Applied Innovations. Here is an update on how that new adventure is going. 

Tonight I began making some of my preliminary adjustments and staging of files.  I began with getting familiar with the control panel used by Applied Innovations, Helm.  Despite the popularity and widespread adoption of Helm, this is my first time ever using it.  I had many problems finding settings and getting started with the control panel, but that is very little fault of the host.  Even though they manage the control panel, all of the short comings and difficulties I experienced had to do with Helm itself.

One of my first steps was to use one of their temporary URLs to install and stage my new DNN installation.  Through my investigation of my options in their control panel, I noticed two things to note...

Last night was the May meeting for the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG).  We were lucky enough to be able to host Mitchel Sellers to our meeting, to present “Advanced DotNetNuke® Module Development” to the attendees.  Though, Mitch being our speaker wasn’t the only thing special about this particular meeting.

Only moments before arriving at our meeting venue, I received a phone call from the DotNetNuke® Corporation, officially confirming their...

I was recently offered sponsored hosting from Applied Innovations.  As much as we all pay for hosting solutions, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity.  As the word “sponsored” implies, while I may not be paying for this account monetarily, I will be in other ways.  During my transition to move to this host, and during my time using this host and their features, I will be blogging, tweeting, and otherwise voicing my experiences.  It goes without saying that Applied Innovations is...

There have been plenty of reviews already on this book, by Mitchel Sellers, which I made sure to not read.  I have not been able to find as much time to finish this book, even though it is quite short.  Also, unlike the previous Wrox book that I reviewed, I did not help to do any technical editing for this book.  So, you can rest easy knowing that even...

I am so excited to write this blog entry.  Especially since I have been fielding requests almost daily from potential DotNetNuke speakers from all over.  We having finally opened the call for speakers for the Day of DotNetNuke!  Unfortunately, we need to get things done very quickly, so we need speakers to submit their session abstracts fast – and we will in turn need to make our selections and draft the agenda even faster.

The rules for being chosen...

That’s right!  The attendee registration for the Day of DotNetNuke has opened!  I know it’s a bit backwards, but due to our tight timeline, availability of certain options and features, we have had to open the attendee registration before the open call for speakers.  Typically, the registration would happen after or near the end of choosing all of the speakers and sessions.  We will do that right next year.

Since we opted to use the Microsoft Events registration process, and we needed additional...

I really haven’t stayed up with promoting this meeting as much as I normally would.  I must apologize for that.  But this is indeed an important meeting to attend if you ever have or plan on developing modules or providers in DotNetNuke.  We are very lucky to be able to welcome Mitchel Sellers to Orlando for our next ODUG meeting.  Why are we so lucky?…

You might recognize...

Some twitter conversations today led me to see the need for a jQuery tips blog entry to help DotNetNuke developers integrate jQuery into their modules easier.  There are a handful of things that can easily stumble someone new to the jQuery scene.

Make sure you call jQuery.noConflict();.  This is necessary to not cause other client scripts and libraries to run errors.  This is due to the fact that other client scripts might be using the $ designator for a JavaScript class. [jQuery.noConflict(); documentation] If manually adding jQuery, try to load the jQuery library in the header before all others.  Not doing this can lead to the jQuery...

Even though there is a Map Module available to DotNetNuke, I had a need to use the Live Maps, instead of the default Google Maps.  I found a couple of modules that looked to provide the Live Maps, but the project I was working on didn’t have a budget to purchase any of the modules.  A friend sent me a snippet of code to get me started with the map, and everything sky-rocketed from there!

First of all, the easiest and most reliable way to get the map properly initiated on page load requires a bit of jQuery.  I have posts that can help you include jQuery in your DNN site, if you are not yet upgraded to version 5.  DNN Version 5.00.00 and higher have jQuery support out of the box.  No modifications are necessary.

Adding jQuery to DotNetNuke 4.09.02+ Using the Injector Module Add jQuery Support to Pre-DNN 5 Sites Using PageBlaster Once you have jQuery added to your site, we can move on.  Add a Text/HTML Module to your page.  Go to edit the text of the Text/HTML Module.  Make sure that you switch to the Basic Text Box view, and then to HTML mode.



Now comes the fun part.  Add some HTML to the textbox to load the map into.  Also, be sure to include the script for the Live Maps client-side API.  Here is a snippet:

div id="mapDiv" style="position:relative;display: block; width:550px; height:600px;">div>...

The last Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG) meeting featured Tom Kraak, from Seablick Consulting.  During his visit, we had a great time.  We talked about a great many things.  One of the things that happened though, is that he gave me a few interview questions.  I am honored that he feels that I am interview-worthy.  If you haven’t already heard about it or read it, visit Tom’s blog at Seablick.

Tom’s Blog: 7 Questions for “His Mightiness” Will Strohl

I...

Pretty much every community event these days has an after party of some kind.  I wouldn’t dream of disappointing you, and having the Day of DotNetNuke be different.  After consulting with someone local to the area, our Microsoft Developer Evangelist, Joe Healy, the choice of an after party has come down to one of two choices.  Unfortunately, I have not been to either place.  So, I will not be able to give you any constructive clues to help you vote.  And that is just...

I recently read from someone that they suggest to always perform a Server.HtmlEncode on user-entered text.   While this is good advice, it reminded me that the DotNetNuke core gives us some additional security options in the DotNetNuke.Security.PortalSecurity class.  I figured that I would blog about this, as the DNN core gives us a great deal of pre-written methods to help make development easier and faster.  Even though a ton of functionality is written and provided to us, most people don’t know that much of this functionality exists.

The DotNetNuke.Security.PortalSecurity Class The PortalSecurity class contains several methods to help you provide encryption, decryption, portal permissions, and user entry security to your modules and providers.  Here is a listing the publically available methods in DNN version 5.00.01:

ClearRoles() – This method deletes the “portalroles” cookie.  As a result, the current user will not match any roles...

You may or may not know this, but jQuery has been available to you since DotNetNuke version 4.09.01.  It was not publicized at all, as it is not officially supported until version 5.00.00.  In this blog entry, I will show you how add jQuery to your DNN site using the WillStrohl.Injection module.  This is a free and open source module I have on CodePlex.  I posted a variation of this blog entry in the past, using the PageBlaster Module.  While I love the PageBlaster Module,...

If you don’t already know, there will be a free one-day event that focuses only on DotNetNuke in Tampa, Florida on June 13.  This is just around the corner, and information will begin to flow very fast.  This event is being called the Day of DotNetNuke!  If you are on twitter, you can follow the event and event news by following @DayOfDNN.  And we are using the #dodnn...

Last Thursday seems like a week or more ago now, and it’s only the Monday after.  But last Thursday is indeed the day that I presented an Introduction to DotNetNuke Module Development session to the Orlando .Net User Group, or ONETUG.  I go to their meetings every month, but this is the first time I presented while there.

I wasn’t sure what to expect walking into this meeting.  There was a major 5k race in the Downtown Orlando area at the same time, so it threw some of the traffic and attendees schedule off.  Luckily, I knew of a really good detour.  Also, I don’t know when the last time this user group had heard anything about DotNetNuke.

...

Last night, the call for speakers for the annual DotNetNuke OpenForce conference begun.  Right now, the DotNetNuke Corporation is focusing on OpenForce North America, to be held in conjunction with DevConnections in Las Vegas.  Joe Brinkman announced the call for speakers via twitter.  Having gotten to know many of the more visible and prominent members of the DNN community over the last year, including Core Team members, I really wish I had submitted a session last year.  I think I will make a few submissions this year.  Why might one want to do that?…

Submitting a session that gets chosen has its perks.  You get...

Hopefully you all already know that Gemini exists.  If not, I will quickly tell you about it.  The actual word “Gemini” refers to the software by CounterSoft that DotNetNuke uses to accept, track, and manage bugs and feature development for the DotNetNuke project.  DotNetNuke exposes this to the community at http://support.dotnetnuke.com.  This is not a tutorial of how to use it.  Hopefully, it is intuitive enough to figure out.  Rather, I am going to focus on a single feature.

Most feature or bug trackers these days allow visitors to vote for an issue.  The idea behind this is to allow a community to help drive development efforts by letting project owners know what the...

I am still reading Mitchel Seller’s book, Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming.  It’s a great book so far, and I have already been using it as a quick desktop reference for my DNN development needs.  However, I came across a page last night that confused me.  I have been speaking at code camps recently about the new Skin Widgets available to DotNetNuke version 5.  One of the things I show during the session is how to package a widget to be installed on another DNN website. 

In the book, Mitchel describes the available manifest types being: Module, Provider, Skin, SkinObject, and Container.  However, another type is Widget.  That’s what we are going to talk about here.  First of all, since Charles Nurse has done...

On Thursday, April 16th, I will be presenting a session to the Orlando .Net User Group (ONETUG).  If you have never before built a module in DotNetNuke, need a refresher, or just want to learn a few quick tips, make sure you stop by. 

The ONETUG folks do a great job at their events, including their monthly meetings.  You can be sure to have plenty of food and drinks, as...

DotNetNuke does a pretty good job of providing an XML Site Map for your to submit to the major search engines.  However, it does not contain any dynamic URLs.  A good example of what I am talking about is the DNN core Blog module.  This module dynamically generates a new URL that will not show up in the Site Map that is generated by DNN.

You can find what is in your site map by navigating to the SiteMap.aspx page on the root of your DNN website.  For example, mine would be:

http://www.willstrohl.com/SiteMap.aspx

If you look through the included pages, bugs aside, you will notice that it only contains actual “pages” or “tabs.”  If will not include any Forum or Blog URLs.  The result is that while your blog URLs might eventually end up in the search engine results pages (SERP), it will take a long time, and in some cases might not happen at all.

When Tom Kraak,...

If you missed the previous blog post about the technical difficulties, it’s not a big deal.  Due to a weird replacement that was taking place in the XML for my blogs RSS feed through Feedburner, my blog was not able to be parsed by DNNBlogs.com.  However, thanks to Chris Hammond, this problem has been fixed.  However, along with this fix, my images are now being rendered in the feed correctly as well.  This was due to the WillStrohl.FeedHandler module that I recently released.

I apologize for anyone that was really missing my blog entries. ;)  Also, a HUGE thanks goes to Chris for taking the time to help me with this problem.  He’s the man!

Technorati Tags:...

Last year, we had a DotNetNuke event in Orlando called OpenForce Connect – Orlando.  It was an excellent event.  This year, we are holding the first of many annual events called the Day of DotNetNuke.  Planning just began last week.  The Day of DotNetNuke will be held in Tampa, Florida on June 13th.  Last time, we had the luxury of the DNN Corp behind us.  This year, the event is being put together by the...

Last night we have the April ODUG meeting.  We were very lucky to have Tom Kraak come visit us to speak about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  This is Tom’s specialty, being the co-founder of Seablick Consulting.  As it turns out, despite a few hiccups, the meeting was great.

Tom flew in just for the meeting.  So, I picked him up from the Orlando International Airport in the afternoon.  We spent some time after that getting him some food.  He wasn’t able to eat lunch.  We have a good time catching up and talking about things like our businesses, and DNN of course.  Some time later, we left my office to set-up the ODUG meeting room.

...

Right now, my blog’s RSS feed is having problems getting consumed at DotNetNukeBlogs.com.  I have contacted the website administrator, and we are working on getting this issue resolved.  Until then, my blogs on DNN will not show up on the DNNBlogs feed.  I apologize for the inconvenience, and I will post again when it is fixed.

I attended the Orlando Code Camp for the 4th time this past weekend, and it was the 2nd time that I attended as a speaker.  The past 3 years have given us nothing to expect but an outstanding event.  This was the first year that Shawn Weisfeld wasn’t the primary person running the event, but Jessica Sterner and Fabio Honigmann did an exceptional job of following up the great head start that Shawn had given us the past 3 years.  They had nearly 600 people register to attend, and over 400 people showed up.  That is outstanding!  We can most certainly expect a larger event next year.  I would expect that Orlando might be able to compete with South Florida for the largest code camp next year.

The Venue The event was once again held at the Sanford campus of the Seminole Community College. ...

I just uploaded a lot of pictures to my Facebook profile, and also attached the photos to the ODUG group.  Below is a summary of the photographed events.

We recently had a DevConnections tweetup, partially sponsored by the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group. ...

The Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG) website finally has the speaker files from the sessions that were presented at the South Florida Code Camp last month.  Among the files are the power point slides, skin files, widgets, and more.  Make sure that you read the included “read me” file, as it will point you to other download locations for some of the speaker files.

2009 South Florida Code Camp DotNetNuke Track Speaker Materials

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,DNN Blog,Sessions,Code Camp,Widgets,Skinning,SKins

The WillStrohl.FeedHandler module for DotNetNuke has just had another release.  Version 1.01.00 is now available for download at CodePlex.  In this release, I added some missing validation in the edit views.  I also added a feature that should have been part of the initial release.  You can now import feeds using a URL, and not just using the dropdownlist.

Download it now, and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,DNN Blog,Module,Open Source

It's no secret that I was the contributing technical editor (TE) for Professional DotNetNuke 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET, by Wrox. Being a TE has some great perks, not the least of which being one of the first people to see the content of an upcoming book.  I had the responsibility of looking over the 4 module...

I just released the WillStrohl.FeedHandler module for DotNetNuke websites.  This module is meant to be used to manage the RSS feeds for a DotNetNuke website.  Why?  There are many times when an RSS feed might render output that you are not happy with. 

For example, the image paths might be virtual, and not full paths.  If someone consumes and renders the feed, they would see broken images.  Another example would be with the core Announcements Module.  It’s output puts the module title before the announcement titles for each feed item.  In either case, you probably are not happy with the results.  This module aims to address that issue.

Here are the minimum system requirements for the module:

DotNetNuke:  4.06.02 + .Net FrameWork:  2.0 + SQL Server:  2000 + Check out the module for yourself on DotNetNuke Forge,...

The 4th Annual Orlando Code Camp is literally days away.  There is plenty of exciting content, and great speakers.  As usual, we are expecting people to fly in from various place to attend and speak.  Orlando Code Camp is primarily put on by the talented folks from the Orlando .Net User Group (ONETUG).  They are well-known for doing a fantastic job...

On Tuesday, April 7, 2009, the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG) is welcoming Tom Kraak.  Tom is a very well-known consultant in the DotNetNuke eco-system for his work as an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert.  His specialty these days appears to be in DNN implementations.  While he also provides other services and support in his...

We all pretty much know that DotNetNuke has officially adopted jQuery, beginning with version 5.00.00.  Although version 4.09.02 has the scripts in the installation, jQuery still does not have “official” support until version 5.  I have built a module that facilitates this need, and blogged about how to do so, but if you already have PageBlaster installed, why install another module to use a feature you already have in your possession?

PageBlaster (PB) does many great things, among them is the...

Scott Willhite just blogged, announcing that the DotNetNuke project, and many of its affiliates and ecosystem vendors are nominated for a possible Readers Choice Award for 2009.  Scott does a great job of summarizing the award and the vendors/affiliates,...

I am not sure that the entire DotNetNuke community knows about the Ignite IT Awards, put on by Microsoft Canada, despite Shaun Walker blogging about it.  As of this morning, DotNetNuke is only in 3rd place, and I would certainly have expected for the project to be number one.   In the past, DNN have been in 1st and 2nd place, so we appear to be dropping in the rankings.

Did you know…

That you can vote every day? That anyone in the world can vote? Voting...

During my day today, I stumbled across something with the help of my followers and followees on twitter.  In all actuality, I should already know this little trick, but when I fire up Visual Studio, the last thing I want to do is fish through the settings.  I am simply interested in coding, and if you’re reading this, you probably feel the same way.  Anyhow, let’s get to why you are reading this blog entry.

When you start Visual Studio, you’re certainly used to seeing the start up page.  This page has all of the latest Microsoft marketing and development blogs.  However, after a quick poll, I found out that most folks feel the same way that I do.  First, it usually takes too long for the RSS feed to load up, and second, we usually don’t look at it anyway.  So what can we do about this?  We can do a few things.

In order to change the way that Visual Studio starts up, we need to turn to the Options dialog in the Tools menu.

...

On Thursday, March 12, 2009, I presented a session to the Space Coast SQL User Group in Melbourne, Florida.  The topic was Managing DotNetNuke Using SQL Server.  This was my first time presenting to a user group other than the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group, but I hope to do this some more in the future.  I have presented at several code camps, and the OpenForce Connect event in Orlando last year, but I really enjoyed the coziness there is to be had in presenting to a user group.

I left from my Clermont home just after 3 PM, expecting to hit a lot of traffic, and arrive around 5:00 – 5:30 PM.  According to Google Maps, this trip is supposed to take about 1.5 hours.  However, I have known from my past trips to this area, to expect a 2-hour drive (or more).  Amazingly, we arrived in an hour!  I was floored.

I brought the family with me, as my lady was having...

For the longest time, DotNetNuke has assumed in many areas that administrators and hosts know what they're doing.  Why shouldn't we assume that?  I will not advocate that we should rethink that philosophy, because I don't believe that should.  But the DNN team has done just that with a usability "feature" that was introduced in DotNetNuke version 5.00.00. 

A well-known feature of DNN, is allowing administrators to change the "page" that is used when a visitor clicks the Login link on a DNN site.  This is very useful if you want to decorate the login form with advertising, instructions, or if you want to enable SSL on the login page.  It's easy enough to do as well.  Just login using an account with administrator permissions.  Then change the setting, like shown in the screen shot below.

...

Following the creation of the WillStrohl.Injection module, I was on a roll.  So I quickly readapted a private module I had to be another public module.  This happened to become the WillStrohl.CookieCheck module, also available on DotNetNuke Forge and CodePlex.

Unlike many modules out there, this module is very simple to manage, and even more simple to use.  In short, it just works.  First of all, it has been tested to work with DotNetNuke version 4.06.02 and up.  When you install it, and drop it on one of your DNN pages, it will inherit the container setting just like any other module.  It will look similar to the following screen shot.

...

Recently, I created my first Forge and CodePlex project.  This one was called WillStrohl.Injection.  The purpose of this project was two-fold.  First, I wanted to build a useful module to give to the community for free, in an attempt to give back.  Second, all of my module development up to this point has been private modules, unavailable to the public in most capacities.  I wanted to have something publicly available.  :)

This first venture was to be in the form of an injection module.  The basic idea was to allow DotNetNuke site administrators to easily inject HTML content into a DNN page.  This, in hopes of preventing the site administrators from modifying the DNN page source code.  I hopefully have achieved that for those that use the module.

This module can...

If you haven't been keeping up, I will be presenting a session at the newly formed Space Coast SQL Server User Group in Melbourne, Florida this Thursday.  That's on March 12, 2009.  Well, to be fair, I have been so busy, that I have not been plugging it as much as I normally would have as well.  Sorry guys!

Basically, I will be going over the relationship that DotNetNuke has with SQL Server, and some of the ways that I use SQL Server to manage my DNN sites.  Hopefully, everyone will find value in it.

I always try to stream my presentations, but I am not 100% sure that I will be able to this time.  I will definitely record it, but I am not sure how fast I can post it, as I am back logged in video rendering right now.

Here is the user group information.  Please try and make it.  I am going to be giving away at least one Wrox DNN book.

Start Time: 6:30 PM

...

The Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG) was very fortunate this month to have an INETA sponsored meeting.  It was INETA who paid the bill to fly and accommodate Chris Hammond.  If you don't already know, Chris Hammond is a pretty well known name in the DotNetNuke community. ...

There have been some "interesting" discussions happening on the DotNetNuke Forums recently, so I thought I'd touch on a couple of points that were being missed throughout all of the chatter.

I was invited to speak at the next Space Coast SQL User Group meeting. Of course you know I will make it all about DotNetNuke...

Yesterday, I kinda vented about a press release that the DotNetNuke Corporation sent out.  Today, we have a happy end to that...

Today started out innocently enough.  But it was clearly a day for me to remember, as far as my DotNetNuke involvement goes...

Just moments ago, Joe Brinkman posted the newest version of DotNetNuke for the community to download.

This year has become an all-star year in terms of speakers for the ODUG.  Our next meeting features DotNetNuke Core Team Member, Chris Hammond.

I am answering a common question on the DotNetNuke forums. There is a bit more to think about when uploading a restricted file type, other than just enabling it.

Do you live in Florida?  Do you use DotNetNuke?  Please read on...

If your DotNetNuke website interacts with your visitors in any way at all, chance are you have some JavaScript written your skins or modules.  Here is a new way to debug those scripts.

I was looking through some of the Client API and Widget code tonight, and ended up finding a setting that you might find interesting.

There was something I missed in my last blog entry about jQuery.

I was an attendee and speaker at yesterdays South Florida Code Camp.  It was awesome!

If a typical user group meeting is a sky diving event, tonight there were no chutes...

There is only 10 hours left until the next ODUG meeting.  Are you coming?

jQuery has had a pretty significant release since DotNetNuke 5 was released.  If you want to upgrade jQuery now, here's how...

There are only 2 days until our next ODUG meeting.  It will be a great one!  each ODUG meeting only gets better, and better...

The next South Florida Code Camp is only a few short days away, near Miami, Florida.

Something that is important to most websites and companies, is branding.  Unfortunately, the DotNetNuke error page has their branding.  Here is how to change that.

This is actually a topic that has been spoken about before. I am blogging about it now because it has not been spoken about in a while.

Here is a solution to a problem we were having with accepting the short form of our domain.

Joe Brinkman presented jQuery at the January Capital DotNetNuke User Group meeting tonight.  I was a remote attendee.

When we talk about widgets, it is easy to forget about widgets we use everyday. Once of those is the YouTube widget, but now DNN makes it easier than ever to embed a YouTube video into your website.

In my next post about widgets, I want to talk about the Style Scrubber Widget...

Since I am preparing to present a DNN 5 Widgets session at the South Florida Code Camp and Orlando Code Camp, I figured I would write about the widgets a bit here and there too.

Code Camps happen all over Florida, and we have two coming within a 2 month span.

The ODUG is going to have an all-star year in terms of speakers!  Here is our speaker and topic lineup for the next couple of months.

Code Camps happen all over Florida, and we have two coming within a 2 month span.

I know I say something like this after every meeting, but they keep getting better and better.  The January ODUG meeting was last night and it was a FANTASTIC success!

We are only two days away from the next ODUG meeting. This one will be a biggie!

The Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG) is meeting again next Tuesday.  Here are the details.

For many, this is a long time coming.  Realistically, it has only been a couple of weeks.  Anyhow, there are 3 sets of video ready to be viewed on the ODUG website.

One necessary evil with some websites is to put preventative measures in place to prevent web "bots" from attempting to log in to your website.  CAPTCHA attempts to provide a solution to this problem.

The Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) newsletter was just out to all members.

The core DotNetNuke Blog Module has obviously grown by leaps and bounds. However, there are a few things that I have wanted to change about it.  One thing is the social bookmarking badges.

A really great trend that is moving through many modules out there is the use of templates. One of these modules is the DNN core Survey module.

A shiny new toy appears in DotNetNuke version 4.09.01.  It is called the "Dashboard", and it is back-ported from version 5.00.00.

Every once in a while, I face an error installing DotNetNuke that completely frustrates me.  It is only because it forces me to start over with the installation process.

A long while ago, I created a suggested upgrade path listing to assist folks with upgrading older versions of DNN.

I saw Joe Brinkman mention this earlier, but I honestly thought it was a joke!

The User Group Kit from CodeZone arrived today...

Here is a useful tip to make skin development go faster, or make minor changes to a HTML skin file without having to recreate and install the skin package.

I have been doing videos of our DotNetNuke® meetings and sessions for some time now, I only plan on getting better at it.

I am laying down the plans for the upcoming code camps here in Florida. I am looking for your feedback.

Here are some tips that may make it easier for you to stay current with the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group.

While I was at work, I received a phone call from home telling me that I received a package in the mail.  I wasn't expecting a package...

I have a habit video-taping all of the sessions I do, and the ODUG meetings.  Here is the status on the current batch of videos.

Pinging your blog to various services uing XML RPC is one of the features on the road map for the DNN Blog Module, but in the meantime I have modified it for those of us who do not want to wait.

Here is a simple walk-through of how you can organize your blog entries in the DotNetNuke® blog module.

Some of you may have noticed a couple of things changing here at WillStrohl.com...

I just added the ability to "ping" the blog module to various sources...

Last night was the December ODUG meeting. Wanna know how it went?

DotNetNuke announced yesterday that there is a new appointment to their Board of Directors.

If you go to my website today, you will notice a few things to be different...

I have on my own site a great listing to show the proper upgrade path. But I just found another valuable post in this regard.

I went to Tampa Code Camp today. It certainly was not lacking excitement!

I have been only mentioning a single book recently, which was only because I had personal involvement with it. However, I have updates on some others coming down the pipe!

Did you forget about the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group meeting on Tuesday?

Tampa Code Camp is tomorrow, here is what to expect if you're interested in DotNetNuke®.

I ran into something of a usability issue when installing a fresh copy of DNN 4.09.00...

It is no secret that DNN have a file manager, but what is not clear is what the single-letter file attributes mean...

It looks like we might be getting pretty close to the book being complete.

Tampa Code Camp has certainly snuck up on us!

The next Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group meeting is only a week away...

At this point in the day, if you don't already know, you should...

There is exciting news for the DotNetNuke community. This will affect us all!

I got us a quick turnaround this time on getting the videos posted online.

Here are a few news tid-bits about the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group.

Last night was the November ODUG meeting. It got pushed to the end of the month because of OpenForce 2008. Here is how it went...

We are broadcasting the ODUG meeting right now.

Here is something interesting that occurred when I found a weakness in the ODUG SERP.

Here are few DNN-related things I ran across today...

I just made the final preparations and the final test run...

We have only a couple of days left before the next ODUG meeting.

This is what happens when you're notified a week before a user group meeting that a sponsor has bowed out...

I thought it was a mistake, but two confirmation e-mails later, it looks like I won the INETA Community Champion award this quarter.

Here is a snippet about our next ODUG meeting...

Guess who's coming home to dinner tonight?

Even though I am not there, I did stumble upon some news, and a live video feed of Shaun Walker's keynote.

Only moments ago, I sent off the edited copy of an upcoming technical book.

I have seen some chatter that you might want to pay attention to...

I am really excited about our next ODUG meeting!

I just ran across a blog entry from someone that described how to do this.

I have converted blog.strohlsitedesign.com to willstrohl.com...

Here is a really cool module that was just released...

You can skip this blog entry if you want...

I just submitted a few sessions to present at the upcoming Tampa Code Camp.

I attempt to answer a question I saw in the DotNetNuke® Forums.

Wrox has tapped me to do some editing for them...

Here is an update about one of the next DotNetNuke® books from Wrox.

I recently partnered up with JumpStartTV to publish some tutorial videos on DotNetNuke®.

I have long searched and played around with ways to hide the entire module. I have at last found it!

There was a little-known feature that DotNetNuke® has had since it began telling us about upgrade versions. Here is something related that's new in version 5.0 (Cambrian).

I am sitting in the presenters room, finishing up my preparing presentations right now.

The next ODUG meeting is tomorrow...

I just checked my downloads again and noticed something that you will all be pleased about...

I know it has been a long time since I blogged... But here is an update - mostly about the recent Jacksonville Code Camp.

Not much to report here in terms of DNN help info, but here are somethings that are going on right now...

I just came across a "gig" on CraigsList that you might be interested in...

Ideally, we never want our web sites to be "down". However, there are the inevitable times when we need to manage something on the site, and we just can have anyone getting in the way. Here is a way that DotNetNuke® makes this easy...

The next edition of the DotNetNuke® Newsletter was just released this past week. Here are some of my thoughts...

Many people want to have custom profile features for their visitors to fill in. However, it does little good if no one knows that it is there. Here is how to create a custom profile property, and how to require it during registration.

Creating a skin object for DotNetNuke® is actually not all that difficult. Here is what you have to do...

It is a pretty common question. In fact, the answer has been there for a long time, but I do not think the majority of DotNetNuke® admins are aware of it. The RSVP Code feature allows you to add someone to a role using a link. Here's how...

Getting faster performance out of DotNetNuke® is always a topic that is at the forefront of most DotNetNuke® conversations. Here is something I learned about getting better performance out of DNN.

Have you ever wanted to send a link to someone to a specific section in the DotNetNuke® online help? Here is how you can...

Here is a day's worth of adventures troubleshooting one of my DotNetNuke® sites that went down one day.

I have finally put my presentations on my site for you to download and reference.

OpenForce Connect just wrapped up yesterday, and it was a blast!

SourceForge is having their annual community choice awards. You can vote for your favorite projects.

DotNetNuke® OpenForce Connect - Orlando is just around the corner. In fact, it is this weekend. I am eager to get to my session and meet everyone.

TechEd is in Orlando in June, and between the two-week event is a weekend where a bunch of free developer events are going to be held. I will be speaking at one of them.

There are many details yet to be worked out, but it looks like there will be another DotNetNuke® event in Orlando, Florida.

For quite a long time now, I wasn't receiving the DotNetNuke® newsletter. I also was not able to find a way to sign up for it on the DotNetNuke® web site. Here is how to get yourself back on the DotNetNuke® mailing list.