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

First, I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and support since the original release of this module.  It’s been quite interesting.  This module has many things planned for it, but I did want to make sure it lived in the wild for a bit to fix any issues that have been found before I begin adding more features.  As it turns out, there were two significant fixes that were required.

Many of you are not even aware that the Open Graph Protocol even exists.  However, it has been the backbone of inter-connected websites ever since social sharing of content and web pages has existed.  This is the standard that Facebook, Google+, and others have adopted to properly connect, share, and display content from site to site when a visitor decides to share it.  Of course, like any other standard, every site varies on how well they adopt this particular standard. 

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

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

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

I am by no means an expert on open source licenses.  I am not a lawyer.  I have, however, been part of the overall open source software community since roughly around 1999 or 2000.  During this time, I’ve dealt with open source software almost exclusively.  It’s a blur at this point.  I began at a time where PHP was king, and Microsoft’s (now Classic) ASP was trying to get in on the party.  Long story short, I found out immediately that I loved open source software and I never looked back. 

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

I look forward to many things at DotNetNuke World – the networking, the events, the people, and more.  But one of the things I enjoy immensely is preparing a presentation for people.  This year, my presentation for DNN World was DotNetNuke Widgets, from A to Z.  Widgets (a.k.a., skin widgets) in DNN are largely misunderstood and seldom used. 

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