40Fingers Blog Feed

Style Helper Skin object and DotNetNuke 6.1

Timo Breumelhof — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:27:00 GMT

As some of you might have noticed, removing style sheets with the StyleHelper Skin Object does not work anymore since DotNetNuke 6.1. (al other functionality still works just fine) This blog post is about my considerations on this issue.

Adding a Print stylesheet to your Dotnetnuke Skin

Timo Breumelhof — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:41:00 GMT

As you can read in my previous blog, there's an issue with the DotNetNuke core print skin object in DotNetNuke 6.1. I'm sure this will be solved in a future version, but there is a workaround for it as you can read in the blog post. Another solution is something that's part of the HTML recommendation. Include a print.css file, which allows you to style the printed page. The HTML for this would be: <link rel="stylesheet" href="print.css" type="text/css" media="print" /> Because the Media attribute is set to "print" this stylesheet will only be loaded when printing the page. Using this print.css stylesheet you can hide certain parts of the page you don't want to print, or change font-szie, content width etc. Example CSS: #HorMenuDropDown{display:none;} #Skin{width:99%;} .Normal{font-size:12pt;} Including a Print.css is not difficult but some people are asking for a solution in the DotNetNuke Forums, which is why I decided to write this blog. How to include Print.css on you page for printing The easiest way to include this is to use our DotNetNuke Stylehelper Skin Object. You can download it here. Then add this to your skins ascx file: <%@ Register TagPrefix="fortyfingers" TagName="STYLEHELPER" Src="~/DesktopModules/40Fingers/SkinObjects/StyleHelper/StyleHelper.ascx" %> <fortyfingers:STYLEHELPER ID="STYLEHELPER1" AddCssFile='Print.css' CssMedia="print" runat="server" /> And add a Print.css file to the root of your skin package and your done. Now you only have to create print styles and test. BTW, you can test the result by using the print preview option of your browser. On this page there are some good tips on how to create a good print.css file: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/01/10-tips-for-better-print-style-sheets/

Print and RSS action icons in DNN 6, a solution

Timo Breumelhof — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:33:00 GMT

Because of changes to the action menu in DNN 6, the Print and RSS feed icons don't work anymore. At first I didn't notice this as they do work if the user is logged in, but for an anonymous user they don't. I'm sure this will be solved in a future update of DNN, but there are people who upgraded to DNN 6 and only discovered this issue when it was to late to "downgrade". Here's one of the Forum threads: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Forums/forumid/109/threadid/428780/scope/posts.aspx I found a (temporary) solution to for the issue. The following code blocks should be injected in place of the original Print or RSS action button in the Container's ascx file: For Print: <% 'Print action alternative for DNN 6 Timo Breumelhof - 40Fingers Dim sPrint As String = "<a href='http://{0}/tabid/{1}/mid/{2}/dnnprintmode/true/Default.aspx?SkinSrc=[G]Skins%2f_default%2fNo+Skin&ContainerSrc=[G]Containers%2f_default%2fNo+Container' target='_blank'><img src='/images/action_print.gif' alt ='Print' /></a>" If Me.ModuleControl.ModuleContext.Configuration.DisplayPrint = True Then Response.Write(String.Format(sPrint, PortalSettings.PortalAlias.HTTPAlias, PortalSettings.ActiveTab.TabID, Me.ModuleControl.ModuleContext.ModuleId)) Else Response.Write(String.Empty) End If %> For RSS: <% 'RSS action alternative for DNN 6 Timo Breumelhof - 40Fingers Dim sRSS As String = "<a href='http://{0}/tabid/{1}/moduleid/{2}/RSS.aspx' target='_blank'><img src='/images/action_rss.gif' alt ='RSS' /></a>" If Me.ModuleControl.ModuleContext.Configuration.DisplaySyndicate = True Then Response.Write(String.Format(sRSS, PortalSettings.PortalAlias.HTTPAlias, PortalSettings.ActiveTab.TabID, Me.ModuleControl.ModuleContext.ModuleId)) Else Response.Write(String.Empty) End If %> BTW, this has one advantage, as it does not use any Javascript, the new window is opened without a warning. I did not test this in a multi-language environment, I think it should work with the core localization, but I guess not with the other solutions. (although it should not be difficult to add the language parameter) Hope this helps, BTW, I might create a skin object from this if there's a demand for it. If you want to add a Print.css stylesheet for printing to your skin, read this blog post. Timo

40FINGERS Style Helper Skin Object 02.02.01 for DotNetNuke 5

Timo Breumelhof — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 17:43:00 GMT

New release of the 40Fingers DotNetNuke Stylehelper skin object. Version 02.02.00 Highlights: Improved Redirect Handling Get Backlink to the PAge that casued the redirect Add anything to the Head of the DotNetNuke page Remove Existing DotNetNuke MetaTags Links to Style sheets and Javascript files are now templatable You can download the new version here: http://dnnskinextensions.codeplex.com/releases/view/73344 Full documentation here: http://www.40fingers.net/WeblogsNews/Weblogs/tabid/58/ID/23/language/en-US/Style-Helper-Skin-Object-Documentation.aspx

40Fingers Style Helper Skin Object bug fix release: 02.00.01

Timo Breumelhof — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:09:00 GMT

Today I discoverd a bug in the DotNetNuke Style Helper Skin Object 02.00.00. The "IfMobil" attribute, used to detect if a bowser is a mobile browser or not, did not always detect the browser correctly. This issue has been fixed in this new release: 02.00.01 If you use the mobile detection capabilities, please update your installation with this new release. You can download the new version of this DotNetNuke skin object here: http://dnnskinextensions.codeplex.com/releases/view/66281 Full documentation here: http://www.40fingers.net/WeblogsNews/Weblogs/tabid/58/ID/23/language/en-US/Style-Helper-Skin-Object-Documentation.aspx

DotNetNuke Style Helper skin object 02.00.00 released

Timo Breumelhof — Thu, 19 May 2011 22:08:00 GMT

Today I released a new version of the 40Fingers DotNetNuke style helper skin object. The main enhancements are for mobile DotNetNuke skins / websites. I made detection of mobile browser much easier and you can now redirect the user to another DotNetNuke page or even website. Also added: - Set the doctype of the DNN skin. - Support to add custom attributes to the DNN HTML element as needed for Open Graph protocol.

Wat is Visual Studio LightSwitch

Stefan Kamphuis — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:16:00 GMT

Begin 2011 heeft Microsoft de eerste beta van VS LightSwitch met Go-Live licentie gelanceerd, een nieuw product in de Visual Studio familie, waarmee razendsnel zowel web- als desktop SilverLight "Line of Business" applicaties kunnen worden gemaakt. Hoewel de doelgroep van VS LightSwitch niet primair bestaat uit hard-core .net developers, zal het ook voor deze groep zeker waardevol kunnen zijn om de mogelijkheden en beperkingen van LightSwitch te leren kennen.

Stefan Kamphuis On DevDays

Stefan Kamphuis — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:44:00 GMT

Only a few days left before DevDays11 will start in The Netherlands, and while a large part of my schedule is fixed already I decided to run through the agenda and pick a few sessions anyway. My main interest during DevDays will be Visual Studio LightSwitch, as you will be able to find me most of the time - at least in between sessions - in the Ask The Experts area at the VS LightSwitch boot. So naturally I highly recommend the sessions Beth Massi will be giving on the topic. She's doing 4 of them, one of which during geeknight, so I'm sure you'll be able to catch one. On april 28th DevDays my highlight will probably be: 9:15 The KeyNote. Keynotes are always a blast. 11:05 Not sure yet, but I might just try and catch the Windows Phone 7 Mango session by Ben Riga. 13:30 Going for the session on REST with WCF by Glenn Block, since I already know a bit about LightSwitch.This timeslot also features Beth's first session on LightSwitch. If you're new to LightSwitch, check it out. 15:05 That'll probably be Mark Miller on UI. It's been a while since I've seen him speak. 16:30 I'll probably try and learn something about Azure this timeslot. But then again I might also pick up on Beth's second appearance on LightSwitch, since we might get questions about that on the boot. Geek Night night is not something you should plan for, so we'll just see what happens. 9:15 No possible way of predicting how things will look during the first session after Geek Night. So I decided not to plan anything here. 10:50 Only one possible option: Beth Massi on Advanced LightSwitch Techniques. That'll be awesome! 13:15 This will be a hard one. Of course there's Mathijs on WP7 Push Notifications, but there's also Ingo Rammer on Advanced Debuggin in VS2010 which will probably be very useful too. For the remainder on the conference I actually expect to be busy on the ATE stand for LightSwitch. And I'm looking forward to it too! Hope to meet you there

Bug fix release Style Helper SKO v01.08.04 for DotNetNuke

Timo Breumelhof — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:18:00 GMT

We found a bug in the stylehelper skin object for DotNetNuke. In certain conditions you could get an "Object reference not set to an instance of an object error" error, if you use the BodyClass attribute...

Style Helper version 01.08.03 released

Timo Breumelhof — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:31:00 GMT

After a few minor internally used and tested versions, I released a new version of our DotNetNuke Stylehelper Skin Object on codeplex. The new version is 01.08.03 It contains A bug fix A correction to the AddMetas attribute A New template option for the AddBodyClass attribute. (you can add a class for the role a user is a member of)

DotNetNuke Upgrade Issue with 5.4.0 script

Timo Breumelhof — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 23:10:00 GMT

Today I tried to upgrade my DNN Skin Development installation from 5.3.1 to 5.6.0 I got a SQL provider error on the 5.4.0 script I did not understand at first. I got this error System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PK_TabModuleSettings'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.TabModuleSettings'. Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PK_TabModuleSettings'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.TabModuleSettings'. I took me a while but I found the reson for the failure and the solution.

Overview of DotNetNuke Stylesheets

Timo Breumelhof — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:01:00 GMT

There are several blog posts about Stylesheets in DotNetNuke, but they mostly cover only a part of the subject. I tried to wrap up all the information on what stylesheets DNN loads and how to manage them in one blog post. - What stylesheets are loaded and why - In what order they are loaded - Use of Ids / Classes for containers - How to limit the number of stylesheets DNN loads - Why you should not delete or edit Default.css

Presenting a list of events with the DotNetNuke reports module

Peter Schotman — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:44:00 GMT

The reports module is an excellent way to present data from your DNN installation in an ad hoc fashion. One can use it for any table in and outside the DNN installation. In this example we will present a list of events from the events module.

DotNetNuke background issues in FCK & Rad Editor

Timo Breumelhof — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 15:31:00 GMT

If your skin has a dark color or an image as the background, there are situations were this background is visible in the editor too. This can make it very difficult if not impossible to edit the content of your site. As this question keeps comming up in the DNN Forums and is an issue in the new RAD Editor too, here's how to solve these issues for your skin.

DotNetNuke very slow page loading issues with AVG 9

Timo Breumelhof — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:33:00 GMT

Since about a month I'm having issues on my development machine with my local DotNetNuke installations. Sometimes pages load so slow in the browser, I get a timeout or the page only loads only half. After checking all kinds of possible causes I finally found the solution...

Style helper 01.05.01 released

Timo Breumelhof — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:52:00 GMT

New release of the 40 Fingers Style Helper skin object (V01.05.00) The Style Helper skin object allows you to load css and javascript files in the head of the page from you DotNetNuke skin, directly or conditional, based on all kind of properties. New Feature: You can now inject a CSS class to the page Body tag. This allows styling of specific page in the same skin. Bug Fixes: - Javascript files are is now Injected after jQuery (the was not the case before) - You can now use spaces after the comma in you RemoveCssFile attribute.

YouTube Movies In Normal Content

Stefan Kamphuis — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 21:30:00 GMT

Quite often, DotNetNuke website administrators turn to specialized YouTube modules to include a YouTube movie on their website. The good news is, however, that YouTube movies can be embedded easy enough in pretty much every module that uses the rich text editor in DotNetNuke. Let’s just take it in a few steps. In this example I’ll just use a Text/HTML module, but it’ll work in any other place too where the rich text editor is used. First, log into your website, navigate to a page with a Text/HTML module on it and choose “Edit Text” on the module’s menu. Chances are, you are now looking at the Rich Text Editor in WYSIWYG view. You will need to switch it to Raw or HTML view. How this can be done, depends on the type of Editor Provider that your site is configured to use. When using the FCK Editor (default before DotNetNuke 5.4) you can click the “Source” button on the top right of the editor. With Telerik’s RADEditor (default from DotNetNuke 5.4 upwards) you can click the HTML tab in the lower left of the editor. Alternatively, you can switch the entire editor to “Basic Text Box” mode by using the radiobuttons right above the editor. You should now see something like this: For now, leave this page the way it is now, open up a new browser window or tab and find the YouTube Movie you want to include in the module. Notice the “Embed” button on the right, below the movie: Click it, and see what appears in the area below the button: You can use the options in this area to tweak the look of the movie a bit and when you’re done, click in the “html” area (blue text) to select the so-called embed code and copy the code to the clipboard. Now, switch back to the window where we just left your site open and paste the code into the HTML Area: Switching the editor back to Design view will prably look a bit odd: Never mind that though, and just click “Save” and watch the movie play in your site:

Cross Browser DotNetNuke Skins

Timo Breumelhof — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:01:00 GMT

There are a lot of posts in the DotNetNuke forums about cross-browser issues in a DotNetNuke skin. The problem is mostly that the skin does not render the same in Internet Explorer and Firefox. As most of these issues are quite easy to prevent / solve, here's how to prevent most of them.

Installing DotNetNuke on Windows 2008R2

erik van ballegoij — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 14:51:00 GMT

Windows 2008r2 is good in so many ways, I can never list them all. Of course, being the server variant of Windows 7, it means you can use all the nice interface enhancements that are also available in Windows 7. Both Windows 7 and Windows 2008r2 have IIS 7.5 on board. One of the most interesting enhancements in IIS 7.5 is something called the Application Pool Identity (AppPoolIdentity). In Windows 2008r2 this is the default setting for new application pools. With this setting, IIS can create a unique virtual windows account, using the name of the application pool. Accounts created like this have the same networking capabilities as the well known NETWORKSERVICE account, however, because they are unique, they can also be used to secure physical files in your system. So, lets see how we can use this to quickly install DotNetNuke in a secure manner.

Style Helper Skin Object Documentation

Timo Breumelhof — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:55:00 GMT

This is the documentation for the of the new Style Helper skin object on Codeplex. This is a skin object I started in 2007, but never got to making it releasable. And now i decided I should finally finish it.. (I will add a some extra functionality later this year) I would appreciate it if you would test the skin object and give feedback / report issues (on Codeplex). Download: dnnskinextensions.codeplex.com

Getting a list of all sites served by IIS

erik van ballegoij — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:55:00 GMT

In order to prepare for an upcoming move of all sites hosted on our webservers to a new location, one of the tasks was to list which sites are served by IIS, including all hostheaders defined for those sites. The purpose of this list is to identify all domains we are handling.

2 tips for better use of the FCK editor

Timo Breumelhof — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:37:00 GMT

Changing text styles During text editing a lot of people are confused as to what the editor does if you set a certain style to a selection of text. Sometimes the editor assignes a style to more then the selected text. Here's an example: You make a selection and select a style, the result is this: Which was not your intention. The reason for this is that the editor adds some styles to a block of text. The selection was a part of the text inside a block of text, and the editor automatically expands the selection to the whole block. The solution for this is to make the selected text into a "block of text" (read paragraph) first. You do this by pressing enter while the cursor is placed at the end of the text (in the case behind "lectus"). Then select the text and change the style. Another related issue is that it is sometimes difficult to see what's a paragraph and what's not, but the editor now has a trick to solve that. There is a "Show Blocks" Icon in the toolbar: If you click it the editor will show you the paragraphs in the text, which it very handy at times. Full screen mode Another "annoyance" can be that the text editor window is too small. On the left of the "Show Blocks" button there is a ful screen Icon, which will show you the editor in full screen mode, giving you all the editing space you need. Please note that have to restore the normal size before you can save (click the icon again).

Data conversion with Expresso and regular expressions

Timo Breumelhof — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 10:18:00 GMT

I often get data from clients in Excel or XML format, which I have to convert to some kind of XML like format. Mostly this is a one time conversion for which a custom solution is not viable. The target data is the XML to import into a module or a template with a specific structure. You can use database tools to do this kind of conversions import to a database use SQL etc. or XSLT, but I tend to use Expresso more and more in this scenario. Expresso is a free tool to generate regular expressions. Regular expressions are used for advanced text search and replacements. It took me a while to understand regular expressions (and I'm still no expert) but if you get to know them they are very powerful. More information on regular expressions: http://www.regular-expressions.info/ While Expresso is normally used to develop and test regular expressions, I'm using it a lot as an advanced text replacement tool. (My other favorite text tool (Notepad++) has some regex support too, but not like Expresso) An example I worked on today. The data (in Excel) I got was this: FirstName, MiddleName, LastName (250 records) I had to convert this to a format like this (simplified): <content id="#" ...................................> ............<FN>Firstname</FN><MN>Middlename</MN><LN>Lastname</LN>.................. </content> This is what I did: 1. Add an id column to the Excel sheet 2. Export the Excel sheet to CVS 3. Copy the Exported text to the "Sample text" field in Expresso 4. I used this regular expression: (.*?),(.*?),(.*?),(.*?)\n 5. My replacement String was: <content id="$1" ...................................> ............<FN>$2</FN><MN>$3</MN><LN>$4</LN>.................. </content> This regular expression searches for the text between the commas and found text between () can be referenced in the replacement string using $n. n being the order in which the text was detected. This all took me about 2 minutes, which is much faster then any other tool I can think of..

Build behaviour, not appearance

Stefan Kamphuis — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:21:00 GMT

By seperating appearance from behaviour, you will decrease ther depency between developers and designers in your project. Both use there specialized set of skills, leading to good clean design and code.

SEO is an integral part of content management

Peter Schotman — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:33:00 GMT

By following the official Google Webmasters blog and related online presentations, you can learn a great deal about the SEO in a short amount of time. The video below is about 'snippets', that is, the presentation of your website in the search results after someone has entered a search query. Usually, the 'snippet' is the combination of the page title, description and page URL. In DotNetNuke, you can set the page title and page description in the 'page settings'. Bottom line: make sure you enter an appropriate page title on every page, otherwise google will do it for you (and that is probably not the best one). always look at a specific page in its entirety, only then you are able to come up with a good description and title.