By Will Strohl on 9/6/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/31/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/27/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/26/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/22/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/14/2010
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 8/11/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/10/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/6/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/5/2010 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,...
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By Will Strohl on 8/4/2010
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 8/3/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/3/2010DotNetNuke, 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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/27/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/18/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/17/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/17/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/16/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/13/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/11/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/11/2010
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. ...
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By Will Strohl on 7/7/2010
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">...
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By Will Strohl on 7/6/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/24/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/24/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 6/22/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/22/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 6/21/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/19/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/15/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/13/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 6/9/2010 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,...
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By Will Strohl on 6/7/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/4/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/4/2010
(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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/3/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/28/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/17/2010 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!  ...
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By Will Strohl on 5/10/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/6/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 5/2/2010 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,...
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By Will Strohl on 4/29/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/28/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/27/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/26/2010 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!  ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/24/2010
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/10/2010
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] ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/7/2010
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,...
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By Will Strohl on 3/5/2010 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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By Will Strohl on 3/4/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 3/4/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 3/1/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 2/28/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 2/24/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 2/24/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 2/22/2010
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. ...
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By Will Strohl on 2/22/2010 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. ...
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By Will Strohl on 2/21/2010
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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By Will Strohl on 2/18/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 2/5/2010 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...
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By Will Strohl on 2/1/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 1/27/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 1/14/2010 |
By Will Strohl on 1/8/2010
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...
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By Will Strohl on 1/7/2010 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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By Will Strohl on 11/16/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 11/13/2009
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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By Will Strohl on 11/12/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 11/6/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 11/5/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 11/4/2009
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)  ...
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By Will Strohl on 10/20/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 10/20/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 10/19/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 10/8/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/29/2009
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:  ...
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By Will Strohl on 9/28/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/25/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/22/2009
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" ...
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By Will Strohl on 9/21/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/21/2009
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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By Will Strohl on 9/17/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/15/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 9/10/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/9/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/9/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/8/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 9/3/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 9/2/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 8/30/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/26/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/25/2009
(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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/21/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 8/21/2009
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,...
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By Will Strohl on 8/19/2009
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]...
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By Will Strohl on 8/18/2009
(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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/18/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 8/18/2009
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 |
By Will Strohl on 8/16/2009
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],...
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By Will Strohl on 8/15/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/11/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/10/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 8/10/2009 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®...
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By Will Strohl on 7/4/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/4/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/28/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/27/2009 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,...
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By Will Strohl on 6/27/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/26/2009
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  ...
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By Will Strohl on 6/25/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/23/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/22/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/22/2009
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,...
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By Will Strohl on 6/22/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/20/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/18/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 6/17/2009 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®...
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By Will Strohl on 6/15/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/9/2009 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: ...
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By Will Strohl on 6/7/2009
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,...
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By Will Strohl on 6/2/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 6/2/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/26/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/23/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 5/23/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/21/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/21/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/21/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 5/21/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 5/16/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/12/2009Scott 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.comDownload DotNetNuke version 5.01 Beta...
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By Will Strohl on 5/12/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/10/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 5/10/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/6/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/6/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/3/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/2/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 5/1/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/30/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/28/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/25/2009
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 ModuleAdd 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>...
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By Will Strohl on 4/24/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 4/24/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/23/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/22/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 4/21/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/21/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 4/21/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/13/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/13/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/11/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/9/2009DotNetNuke 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,...
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By Will Strohl on 4/8/2009
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:...
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By Will Strohl on 4/8/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 4/8/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/31/2009Right 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. Technorati Tags: Dnn Blog |
By Will Strohl on 3/30/2009
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. ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/30/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 3/30/2009
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 |
By Will Strohl on 3/25/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 3/25/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 3/24/2009
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,...
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By Will Strohl on 3/20/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 3/20/2009 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...
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By Will Strohl on 3/18/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 3/18/2009 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,...
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By Will Strohl on 3/17/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 3/16/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/13/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 3/13/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/12/2009
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.  ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/12/2009
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...
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By Will Strohl on 3/9/2009
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 ...
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By Will Strohl on 3/7/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 2/23/2009There 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. |
By Will Strohl on 2/19/2009I was invited to speak at the next Space Coast SQL User Group meeting. Of course you know I will make it all about DotNetNuke... |
By Will Strohl on 2/18/2009Yesterday, I kinda vented about a press release that the DotNetNuke Corporation sent out. Today, we have a happy end to that... |
By Will Strohl on 2/17/2009Today started out innocently enough. But it was clearly a day for me to remember, as far as my DotNetNuke involvement goes... |
By Will Strohl on 2/17/2009Just moments ago, Joe Brinkman posted the newest version of DotNetNuke for the community to download. |
By Will Strohl on 2/17/2009This year has become an all-star year in terms of speakers for the ODUG. Our next meeting features DotNetNuke Core Team Member, Chris Hammond. |
By Will Strohl on 2/13/2009I 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. |
By Will Strohl on 2/10/2009Do you live in Florida? Do you use DotNetNuke? Please read on... |
By Will Strohl on 2/10/2009If 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. |
By Will Strohl on 2/9/2009I was looking through some of the Client API and Widget code tonight, and ended up finding a setting that you might find interesting. |
By Will Strohl on 2/8/2009There was something I missed in my last blog entry about jQuery. |
By Will Strohl on 2/8/2009I was an attendee and speaker at yesterdays South Florida Code Camp. It was awesome! |
By Will Strohl on 2/3/2009If a typical user group meeting is a sky diving event, tonight there were no chutes... |
By Will Strohl on 2/3/2009There is only 10 hours left until the next ODUG meeting. Are you coming? |
By Will Strohl on 2/1/2009jQuery has had a pretty significant release since DotNetNuke 5 was released. If you want to upgrade jQuery now, here's how... |
By Will Strohl on 2/1/2009There are only 2 days until our next ODUG meeting. It will be a great one! each ODUG meeting only gets better, and better... |
By Will Strohl on 2/1/2009The next South Florida Code Camp is only a few short days away, near Miami, Florida. |
By Will Strohl on 1/28/2009Something that is important to most websites and companies, is branding. Unfortunately, the DotNetNuke error page has their branding. Here is how to change that. |
By Will Strohl on 1/25/2009This 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. |
By Will Strohl on 1/23/2009Here is a solution to a problem we were having with accepting the short form of our domain. |
By Will Strohl on 1/21/2009Joe Brinkman presented jQuery at the January Capital DotNetNuke User Group meeting tonight. I was a remote attendee. |
By Will Strohl on 1/21/2009When 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. |
By Will Strohl on 1/20/2009In my next post about widgets, I want to talk about the Style Scrubber Widget... |
By Will Strohl on 1/18/2009 |
By Will Strohl on 1/14/2009Code Camps happen all over Florida, and we have two coming within a 2 month span. |
By Will Strohl on 1/14/2009The 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. |
By Will Strohl on 1/13/2009Code Camps happen all over Florida, and we have two coming within a 2 month span. |
By Will Strohl on 1/7/2009I 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! |
By Will Strohl on 1/3/2009We are only two days away from the next ODUG meeting. This one will be a biggie! |
By Will Strohl on 12/30/2008 |
By Will Strohl on 12/30/2008For 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/29/2008One 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/28/2008The Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group (ODUG) newsletter was just out to all members. |
By Will Strohl on 12/28/2008The 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/28/2008A 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/26/2008A 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/26/2008Every 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/25/2008A long while ago, I created a suggested upgrade path listing to assist folks with upgrading older versions of DNN. |
By Will Strohl on 12/24/2008I saw Joe Brinkman mention this earlier, but I honestly thought it was a joke! |
By Will Strohl on 12/23/2008The User Group Kit from CodeZone arrived today... |
By Will Strohl on 12/23/2008Here 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/22/2008I have been doing videos of our DotNetNuke® meetings and sessions for some time now, I only plan on getting better at it. |
By Will Strohl on 12/21/2008I am laying down the plans for the upcoming code camps here in Florida. I am looking for your feedback. |
By Will Strohl on 12/20/2008 |
By Will Strohl on 12/18/2008While 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... |
By Will Strohl on 12/14/2008I 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/12/2008Pinging 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. |
By Will Strohl on 12/12/2008Here is a simple walk-through of how you can organize your blog entries in the DotNetNuke® blog module. |
By Will Strohl on 12/12/2008Some of you may have noticed a couple of things changing here at WillStrohl.com... |
By Will Strohl on 12/10/2008I just added the ability to "ping" the blog module to various sources... |
By Will Strohl on 12/10/2008Last night was the December ODUG meeting. Wanna know how it went? |
By Will Strohl on 12/9/2008DotNetNuke announced yesterday that there is a new appointment to their Board of Directors. |
By Will Strohl on 12/7/2008If you go to my website today, you will notice a few things to be different... |
By Will Strohl on 12/7/2008
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.
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By Will Strohl on 12/6/2008
I went to Tampa Code Camp today. It certainly was not lacking excitement!
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By Will Strohl on 12/5/2008I 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! |
By Will Strohl on 12/5/2008
Did you forget about the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group meeting on Tuesday?
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By Will Strohl on 12/5/2008
Tampa Code Camp is tomorrow, here is what to expect if you're interested in DotNetNuke®.
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By Will Strohl on 12/4/2008
I ran into something of a usability issue when installing a fresh copy of DNN 4.09.00...
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By Will Strohl on 12/3/2008
It is no secret that DNN have a file manager, but what is not clear is what the single-letter file attributes mean...
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By Will Strohl on 12/3/2008
It looks like we might be getting pretty close to the book being complete.
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By Will Strohl on 12/2/2008
Tampa Code Camp has certainly snuck up on us!
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By Will Strohl on 12/2/2008
The next Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group meeting is only a week away...
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By Will Strohl on 12/2/2008
At this point in the day, if you don't already know, you should...
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By Will Strohl on 11/25/2008
There is exciting news for the DotNetNuke community. This will affect us all!
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By Will Strohl on 11/23/2008
I got us a quick turnaround this time on getting the videos posted online.
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By Will Strohl on 11/21/2008
Here are a few news tid-bits about the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group.
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By Will Strohl on 11/21/2008
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...
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By Will Strohl on 11/20/2008
We are broadcasting the ODUG meeting right now.
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By Will Strohl on 11/18/2008
Here is something interesting that occurred when I found a weakness in the ODUG SERP.
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By Will Strohl on 11/18/2008
Here are few DNN-related things I ran across today...
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By Will Strohl on 11/17/2008
I just made the final preparations and the final test run...
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By Will Strohl on 11/15/2008
We have only a couple of days left before the next ODUG meeting.
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By Will Strohl on 11/14/2008
This is what happens when you're notified a week before a user group meeting that a sponsor has bowed out...
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By Will Strohl on 11/13/2008I thought it was a mistake, but two confirmation e-mails later, it looks like I won the INETA Community Champion award this quarter. |
By Will Strohl on 11/12/2008
Here is a snippet about our next ODUG meeting...
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By Will Strohl on 11/11/2008
Guess who's coming home to dinner tonight?
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By Will Strohl on 11/11/2008
Even though I am not there, I did stumble upon some news, and a live video feed of Shaun Walker's keynote.
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By Will Strohl on 11/5/2008
Only moments ago, I sent off the edited copy of an upcoming technical book.
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By Will Strohl on 10/31/2008
I have seen some chatter that you might want to pay attention to...
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By Will Strohl on 10/30/2008
I am really excited about our next ODUG meeting!
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By Will Strohl on 10/30/2008
I just ran across a blog entry from someone that described how to do this.
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By Will Strohl on 10/29/2008
I have converted blog.strohlsitedesign.com to willstrohl.com...
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By Will Strohl on 10/29/2008
Here is a really cool module that was just released...
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By Will Strohl on 10/28/2008
You can skip this blog entry if you want...
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By Will Strohl on 10/27/2008
I just submitted a few sessions to present at the upcoming Tampa Code Camp.
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By Will Strohl on 10/27/2008
I attempt to answer a question I saw in the DotNetNuke® Forums.
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By Will Strohl on 10/27/2008
Wrox has tapped me to do some editing for them...
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By Will Strohl on 10/21/2008
Here is an update about one of the next DotNetNuke® books from Wrox.
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By Will Strohl on 10/21/2008
I recently partnered up with JumpStartTV to publish some tutorial videos on DotNetNuke®.
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By Will Strohl on 10/20/2008
I have long searched and played around with ways to hide the entire module. I have at last found it!
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By Will Strohl on 10/20/2008
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).
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By Will Strohl on 10/11/2008
I am sitting in the presenters room, finishing up my preparing presentations right now.
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By Will Strohl on 10/6/2008
The next ODUG meeting is tomorrow...
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By Will Strohl on 8/30/2008
I just checked my downloads again and noticed something that you will all be pleased about...
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By Will Strohl on 8/27/2008
I know it has been a long time since I blogged... But here is an update - mostly about the recent Jacksonville Code Camp.
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By Will Strohl on 7/16/2008
Not much to report here in terms of DNN help info, but here are somethings that are going on right now...
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By Will Strohl on 7/8/2008
I just came across a "gig" on CraigsList that you might be interested in...
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By Will Strohl on 7/8/2008
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/7/2008
The next edition of the DotNetNuke® Newsletter was just released this past week. Here are some of my thoughts...
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By Will Strohl on 7/6/2008
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.
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By Will Strohl on 7/6/2008
Creating a skin object for DotNetNuke® is actually not all that difficult. Here is what you have to do...
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By Will Strohl on 7/5/2008
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...
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By Will Strohl on 7/3/2008
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.
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By Will Strohl on 6/26/2008
Have you ever wanted to send a link to someone to a specific section in the DotNetNuke® online help? Here is how you can...
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By Will Strohl on 6/10/2008
Here is a day's worth of adventures troubleshooting one of my DotNetNuke® sites that went down one day.
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By Will Strohl on 6/10/2008
I have finally put my presentations on my site for you to download and reference.
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By Will Strohl on 6/9/2008
OpenForce Connect just wrapped up yesterday, and it was a blast!
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By Will Strohl on 6/4/2008
SourceForge is having their annual community choice awards. You can vote for your favorite projects.
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By Will Strohl on 6/3/2008
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.
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By Will Strohl on 5/1/2008
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.
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By Will Strohl on 4/11/2008
There are many details yet to be worked out, but it looks like there will be another DotNetNuke® event in Orlando, Florida.
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By Will Strohl on 4/5/2008
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.
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By Will Strohl on 4/5/2008
Today I presented a session to the Orlando DotNetNuke® Users Group. Here is how I feel it went... I hope I see you at the next session.
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By Will Strohl on 2/28/2008
If you're interested, I have a few speaking engagements coming up. All of them center around DotNetNuke®.
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By Will Strohl on 2/8/2008
Not that anyone but me cares, I just reached 1000 posts on the DNN forums today!
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By Will Strohl on 2/5/2008
Sorry to get political (kind of), but this funny little tid-bit just popped into my head.
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By Will Strohl on 2/3/2008
Some DotNetNuke administrators give out RSVP Codes to people to allow them to voluntarily gain access to features or sections on their web site that is normally hidden. Here is what you do with it...
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By Will Strohl on 2/3/2008
Yesterday marked the first meeting of DNN'ers in the Orlando area. It was a lot of fun meeting and discussing DotNetNuke® (DNN) with other people.
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By Will Strohl on 1/24/2008
I received this error while installing a customized version of the DNN install package. Here is what happened...
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By Will Strohl on 1/24/2008
Sometimes, you are experiencing an error on your DotNetNuke web site, but the error will not even let the page load, or the error load. Well, here is a way to find the offending error.
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By Will Strohl on 1/23/2008
I see a question in the DotNetNuke® (DNN) forums a lot. It is often phrased something like "I deleted my login page. How can I login now?" Here is how you can get to your login page even when the Account Login module is not on the page, or the login page you specified in Site Settings is not accessible.
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By Will Strohl on 1/11/2008
As of version 4.06.02, DotNetNuke (DNN) has the built-in capability of providing a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection for any page on the web site. Some of you may notice such a page when the little lock appears on your web browser, and the prefix for the URL is "HTTPS" instead of "HTTP". Doing this for your DNN web site is pretty simple.
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By Will Strohl on 1/2/2008
I have been using the minimum DotNetNuke® version feature in my modules for some time now. It is a great feature in your DNN manifest file that prevents your modules from being installed on unsupported versions. However, when I upgraded from v4.05.03, it didn't work anymore.
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By Will Strohl on 12/31/2007Believe it or not, there are quite a few people out there running on versions of DotNetNuke, and haven't upgraded in quite a long time. This could happen for any number of reasons. But it's important to know that upgrading is not always as easy as just dowloading and upgrading to the most recent version. Due to feature inclusion/exclusion, database schema changes, and more, there may be stops you have to make in the upgrade process. |
By Will Strohl on 12/30/2007
The DotNetNuke (DNN) CMS has a great Blog Module that allows you to have your very own blog on your web site. That's no secret. However, some people do not blog chronologically and/or update their blogs - in turn changing the publish date. Well, the current version doesn't allow you to change that date manually. Here is how you can....
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By Will Strohl on 12/29/2007
I haven't tried it yet, but I found a tool that is supposed to make the module creation process easier. This is thanks to a Blog by Jon Henning.
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By Will Strohl on 12/29/2007
I recently had to update one of my DotNetNuke (DNN) sites from version 4.05.03 to 4.06.02. I chose to do this to take advantage of the new SSL support. However, upgrading for me was not as straight forward as it normally is.
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By Will Strohl on 12/28/2007
For those of you that are familiar with DotNetNuke (DNN), you know that although it is not a "slow" application, it has its moments. Also, ANY application can benefit from performance enhancements. I just sent a few to the DotNetNuke team.
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By Will Strohl on 12/11/2007
I blogged earlier today on a new piece of software that I ran across on the DotNetNuke® DNN web site. It is called the "Basic Skin Creator", and its intent is to make the job of creating skins easier.
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By Will Strohl on 12/11/2007
If you're even a fraction as much of a fan of DotNetNuke (DNN) as I am, this news will certainly excite you... Michael Washington just blogged about software that he found that is tailored to aid folks in creating DotNetNuke skins!
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By Will Strohl on 12/4/2007
Not that is matters at all, or even that anyone out there cares a whole lot, but I wanted to pat myself on the back for reaching 500 posts on the DNN Forums today at 10:22 AM (EST).
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By Will Strohl on 11/30/2007
A recent blog post on the DotNetNuke web site prompted me to investigate in a bit more detail...
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By Will Strohl on 11/27/2007
Although for many of you, it may be very elementary as to how you would clear the cache in DotNetNuke (DNN), this is simply not the case for everyone out there. It is for this reason that I thought it would be a good idea to blog about it.
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By Will Strohl on 11/27/2007
Although we would never want it to happen, we occasionally need to update the Module Settings for all instances of a specific module throughout a DotNetNuke (DNN) portal. There are times when a DNN web site grows to be so large that there are modules and pages all over the place, and the prospect of updating every single instance of a module is just not realistic. That all changes with a simple SQL Query!
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By Will Strohl on 11/7/2007
User Groups often have a bad stigma of not being productive and just being a "geek" meeting. Well, this doesn't have to be true. Such organizations can often be very productive and conducive to an entire industry, and your career.
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By Will Strohl on 11/4/2007
I don't know about you, but I am an avid user of the Google Toolbar buttons, as well as the DotNetNuke web site. Well, if you use the DNN web site as much as I do, you either have the addresses in memory on your address bar, quick link or short cut buttons, bookmark links, etc. Well, I came up with another way...
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By Will Strohl on 10/26/2007
A while ago, I tested the popularity and name recognition of DotNetNuke against some of the other CMS products out there. Being a fan and loyal user/developer of DotNetNuke projects (not the Core projects), I was quite disappointed.
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By Will Strohl on 10/10/2007
I had an instance recently where the FCKeditor would not display in any browser. Instead, I was greeted with nothing in non-IE browsers, and in IE I was greeted with the unwanted "Internet Explorer cannot display this webpage" page.
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By Will Strohl on 8/21/2007
There is an obscure and seemingly untraceable error that may occur with the DotNetNuke (DNN) Core Forums Module. This error states, "User Settings is currently unavailable." I believe that I have nailed down how this happens and how to fix it!
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By Will Strohl on 8/9/2007
The Display Name field is often misunderstood, and in my opinion... Not very well thought out. It has great potential for many different things, but overall I find that I answer more questions about it then I actually use it. The most common question about it is, "How can I remove it?" I will address it here.
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By Will Strohl on 8/9/2007
There are many of us out there who could be considered DotNetNuke (DNN) enthusiasts. We are constantly looking through the forums and blogs for new information about various components and modules, and we may even lose a lot of sleep doing it....
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By Will Strohl on 6/25/2007
In DotNetNuke, you generally are always working with the tab (page) that you are currently on whether it be at the module level or not. However, on occassion, you might need to access the properties of another tab (page) that you are not currently on.
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By Will Strohl on 6/24/2007
I have a great need for a current project to optimize whereever I can. The DotNetNuke SqlDataProvider is one of those areas where optimizations are NEEDED.
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By Will Strohl on 6/10/2007
I have come to realize that many people have the need in their DotNetNuke (DNN) applications to create a new user "on-the-fly". Here is how to do it...
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By Will Strohl on 4/21/2007
Many of you often look for a free DotNetNuke skin to download and use for a specific purpose. It may be an uninportant site, a test site, etc.
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By Will Strohl on 4/15/2007
In helping a colleague learn how to create and upload DotNetNuke skins, I ran into an error that I was not used to. It was at first a bit frustrating until I stepped back and looked at it without rushing.
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By Will Strohl on 4/15/2007
I must say that I am thoroughly excited about the recent upgrades to DotNetNuke to bring us to version 4.05.00. There are a great many updates that address functionality and usability. Great job, Core Team!
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By Will Strohl on 4/12/2007
I have been using DotNetNuke since I first built my own portal just prior to the release of DNN 1.0. Although I didn't really jump on board until v3.x. Since then, we have all had ideas about how to make DotNetNuke better, but this time the Core Team has struck GOLD!
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By Will Strohl on 4/11/2007
Well, as you can see, the new blog is alive and well. I have just a few comments to make about it...
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By Will Strohl on 3/18/2007
There is a handy-dandy little calendar control that DotNetNuke (DNN) uses to insert a date value into a textbox control. However, it is not obvious in its usage. If you look at the source of any of the core modules or admin modules that use the control, you will see the following code in the HTML.
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By Will Strohl on 12/11/2006
I recently needed to retrieve Tab information from a URL for the Google Search Provider I am writing for DotNetNuke. (You can translate "tab" information into "page" information if you are not familiar with the term.)
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By Will Strohl on 12/10/2006I cannot seem to get the class I wrote for the Google Search Provider for DotNetNuke to get created in the reflection process. Argh!!! It keeps telling me that there is a missing method, but I have created all of the methods that the inherited SearchDataStoreProvider class required me to. I also bounced what I did against the core search provider and everything seems to be in order, but I cannot get past the *censored for your benefit* error that you will see on the linked post. :( Okay... I vented and now I feel better! :) |
By Will Strohl on 11/12/2006
I have begun writing what I hope is to become a Google Appliance Search Provider for DotNetNuke. I have looked (Googled) for such a provider for several weeks now so that I might save some development time, but no such luck yet. The good thing is that I will be able to make this provider do what I want it to from the beginning. :)
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By Will Strohl on 7/21/2006
In case you do not get the meaning of this blog title, DotNetNuke is greater than EntitySpaces. :)
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By Will Strohl on 7/13/2006
While performing some upgrades after finding out that the FCKeditor integration for DotNetNuke has been released, I realized that I forgot something in my original blog on this topic.
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By Will Strohl on 6/12/2006
I have learned an extraodinary amount of information during the last few months in rolling out DotNetNuke to an entire school district. While the rollout is only in its initial phase, there have been some interesting developments.
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By Will Strohl on 9/24/2005
Right now, I am building a new web site for my girlfriend. Those of us who are in the business of building web sites are constantly looking at security. One of those security areas are login pages. This is one of the more popular avenues of attack by many hackers. And why not? If the hacker and/or his software can just guess a username and password combo and get in to mess things up, then why bother with trying to get access to the database directly? Unless there are deeper motivations... However, I am not too concerned with those motivations on my girlfriend's family site. There shouldn't be any credit card or ssn numbers in her database. Hehehe...
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By Will Strohl on 9/2/2005
Woo hoo! After a horrible battle with my current web host, previous web host, and the online registrar of my domain, I finally have everything up and running! It only took a month.
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