I am not sure where I have been, or whether or not I have not been paying attention, but I have missed something.

I just got done updating my DotNetNuke website to 5.04, from 5.02, and I was having a bear of a time.  I was using the same old update steps I used for version 4.

Most of the update directions are just fine for version 4, except for one.

The Web.Config file!

In any version above 4.6.2 (that is what I have been told) does not require you to update the web.config file.  Yuppers, you heard me right.  DNN now updates the web.config file for you.

You don’t even have to redo the connection strings.  How do you like that?

This isn’t a long post, but I thought I would pass on the information.  I know many of you are already wondering why I hadn’t figured this out before, and I am not sure either.  Oh well, at least I have the information now.

Happy DNN updating!

Today I got an email from Google because I use their Google Apps, and I was surprised, but kind of happy to read the email they sent.  Below is it's contents in entirety. 

NOTE: I have highlighted the interesting parts, or at least some.

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

I hope someone else finds this interesting.  If not, no worries, but if you did and have comments, please feel free to post.

Okay I have a customer who has a .deb file that he wants to link to in his blog, which I have created for him in DotNetNuke.  DotNetNuke is an ASP.NET CMS. (content management system)

When he links to it, the user gets a 404 error, which is not what was wanted, so I needed to figure this out.

My assumption is that I need to add a MIME Type to IIS.  I found the following MIME Type, and it worked.

application/x-deb  

I first looked through several “Common MIME Type” web pages and couldn’t find the .deb extension.  Then I went to Wikipedia just because I wanted to find out more about the debian extension.  Once there I was happy to notice that it gave the “internet Media Type” (MIME Type) on the right hand side of the web page.

So make a note.  If you want to find an uncommon MIME Type, look for the extension on Wikipedia.

I have been designing a site for a customer that is going to rely on having a good looking and functional DNN Core Repository.

I found that creating a template for the repository was pretty simple after I found some online documentation on the DNN Repository.

I found that in the /wwwroot/DesktopModules/Repository/Templates/ directory I could add my own template which will show up under the Repository Skin drop down box.  As shown below.

As you notice the bottom one is the one I added.

Now the Issue

I was very excited to make my own repository template, but soon found I was getting pesky borders around the tables of the repository in the Safari and Opera browser. 

I tried editing the repository.aspx file, but was uncomfortable doing that because that is going beyond a simple template.

So then I did some experiments with the two browsers having the issues.  (Safari and Opera)  You can see my demo page and how I ended up fixing the issue.  (NOTE: for the demo page to make sense you need to view it in either Safari or Opera)

Basically to fix the issue I ended up using CSS to tell the tables inside the div I use for Content to have no borders.  Below is the CSS. (in the example below the DIV that the tables are in has the class bordernone)

.bordernone table,
.bordernone td,
.bordernone tr,
.bordernone tbody
{
    border: none !important
}

I hope that all makes sense.  Please feel free to email me if you have questions.  You can also make a comment here with a question, or heck, a better way to fix this issue.

Today I tried to install the Repository Module on a DotNetNuke website and was very frustrated to find I kept getting runtime ASP errors.

I was trying to install the Repository Module by going to Host > Module Definition and clicking on the “Install Module” link at the bottom of the page.  Then I was browsing to the zip file I had on my PC.

This was not working and I was beginning to think I was going to have to give up.

I started to look around my folder structure, thinking there might already be repository files somewhere that might be causing the error.  I came upon the install/module directory and inside there was a resource file for the Repository.

I was confused at first but then I found the page Host > Extensions and noticed at the bottom of the page there was an “Install Available Extensions” link and it went to a page that had all sorts of modules to install, to include the Repository.  YAY!

As you can see above there are a bunch of modules.  You won’t see Repository because I installed it already.

This is a very nice feature, but it is tucked away and not the easiest to find unless you already know about it.  So for those interested in installing any of the following modules, please go to the Host > Extensions page and make sure you are on or in Edit mode.

• Adsense
• Documents
• Feedback
• Help
• Map
• NewsFeeds
• Survey
• XML
• Announcements
• Events
• FormAndList
• IFrame
• MarketShare
• Reports
• UsersOnline
• Blog
• FAQs
• Forum
• Links
• Media
• Store
• Wiki

I hope this helps all you DNN people out there.  My only other question and I will have to repost on this as part two, or comment below.  Is this the only way to add Core modules for the first time? 

I am also hoping that when I go to update this module, or any Core modules, I won’t have any issues.  I don’t think I will, but I still can’t help but worry.

Today I was doing a database backup for a DotNetNuke website.  When I did the backup, I was amazed at how big the database was.

I tried to shrink it, and it didn’t work.

The next thing I did was Googled it, and found a little help in pointing me to what the issue was.  A couple posts in the DotNetNuke forums had commented on big events logs, so I checked mine out.

581MB!!!

Okay now how to clear this?  I couldn’t even view them via the website when logged in as “host”.

I cleared them by doing the following steps.

1. Log into your website as a "host user"
2. Go to Host > SQL
3. Run the script below
   
   Truncate table eventlog
   
4. Logged into my SQL server and Shrunk the database
5. All my issues were solved!!

This seems like an easy no brainer, but I hope it helps people out there with there DNN databases.

Oh and one other helpful hint:  Set your db’s “Recovery Model” to be simple in the options, if you backup your database on a regular basis.  This will keep your db from getting too big also.

I ran into this while working on a customer’s new DNN site.  The install went well and I thought all was good.

Usually my first thing I do is delete the DotNetNuke stuff off the home page and then I go to the admin site settings and disable the inline editing.

When I chose to update settings on the admin settings page I got the following error.

DNN Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'DefaultLanguage'

The first thing I did was to check the admin settings page for a Language setting and sure enough under “Advanced Settings” and “Other Settings” there is a default language pull down menu.  I noticed that I couldn’t fill it in, because the pull down menu was blank.

So my next step was Google.  (Yah, I know I need to use Bing more often now)  I quickly found what I needed and this is what it boiled down to.

Within DNN

1. Go to the Admin/Languages page
2. Click on the Edit Languages link in the upper left corner of the module
3. Select a language from the Dropdown list.
4. Check the enabled checkbox
5. Click the update button.

I got this information from the bottom of a bug fix page. And I got the bug fix page from my trusted DNNCreative websites forums.

I always like it when it is a quick and easy fix.  Go DotNetNuke!

Today I was trying to change how the Table of Contents drop down menu worked in MindTouch Core.

The drop down menu is dynamically created as a list of headers on the page.  For example if your page has an h1 header of Hello and an h2 header of You, the drop down menu would be.
1. Hello
    1.1 You

As you see above, “Hello” and “You” are both links to their respective header on the page.

This is great for wiki's, but for the intranet site I am working on, we are using the headers manly for design this could be a problem.  For example, it is not uncommon to have an h2 of “Hello” and an h5 of “You” because the odd numbered headers I have styled with a yellow background, but I still want it to appear under the h2 in the Table of Contents. 

So in the above example the TOC will display like this.
1. Hello               <--h2
    1.1.1 You        <--h5

This is confusing for my users so I wanted this.
Hello
    You

Notice that it is still a list, but there is no number structure.

I looked at the markup via Firebug (in Firefox) and found that this should be easy.  The numbers I wanted to remove where in a span.  (i.e. <span>1.1</span> and the span was in a <li> inside of div with a class of pageToc.

Figuring this would be easy, I just added this to CSS.

.pageToc li {
    display: none;
    }

After adding this to the CSS it worked GREAT in Firefox, but not so well in IE 7/8.  The numbers were gone, but there was still a big space where the span used to be.  At first I thought that the span just some how wasn't going away, so I tried all sorts of CSS with NO luck.

Above is the TOC without the numbers viewed in Firefox

Above is the TOC without the numbers viewed in IE7/8

After a lot of frustration I actually looked at the source and noticed that the markup had a space before the anchor links (i.e. Hello and You) I am not sure why MindTouch did this and it might just be a bug or something they overlooked.

I had to look at the source because I could not tell viewing the markup via Firebug (in Firefox) that the spaces were there.

However when I viewed the webpage with Internet Explorer’s Developer Toolbar and I could see them a little better.  As you can see below you can see the Text – Empty Text Node.  The problem with Developer Toolbar is that it doesn’t display closing tags, so I didn’t catch this right away.

After all that troubleshooting I was happy to know at least what the issue was.  Now I just need to add some jQuery to remove those blank spaces.  Below is the jQuery I have come up on page load.

$(document).ready(function(){
            // Used to replace the spaces in the TOC menu before the anchor links
            $(".pageToc li").each (  function ( i , val  )
            {
                $(val).html($(val).html().replace(/\s<a/ig, "<a"));
            });
        });

I had to use Regular Expression to replace only in front of the anchor.  I created another post to go a little further into JavaScript's Regex Syntax.

After I added this jQuerry script all was good and now I had the following TOC display. 

I know this isn’t a common thing to do, but it works well for my customer’s intranet site, and the way they use the headers in content more as display elements than hierarchy elements.

I hope this helps anyone in the same boat.

In JavaScript, a regular expression is written in the form of /pattern/modifiers where "pattern" is the regular expression itself, and "modifiers" are a series of characters indicating various options. The "modifiers" part is optional.

    * /g enables "global" matching. When using the replace() method, specify this modifier to replace all matches, rather than only the first one.
    * /i makes the regex match case insensitive.
    * /m enables "multi-line mode". In this mode, the caret and dollar match before and after newlines in the subject string.

You can combine multiple modifiers by stringing them together as in /regex/gim.

Since forward slashes delimit the regular expression, any forward slashes that appear in the regex need to be escaped. For example, the regex 1/2 is written as /1\/2/ in JavaScript.

As with anything, you can find much more information about JavaScript on the web if you Google or Bing it.