DotNetNuke Blogs On DNN, For DNN

OpenForce 09 Day 1 Update

Engage Software — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:11:00 GMT

So things are running smoothly so far at OpenForce here in Las Vegas. The Engage guys are all enjoying their time. Ian and Dang had one of the first sessions of the event this morning, and finished that up like champs. We handed out T-Shirts after the session, though people are requesting our hunter orange shirts from last year. We’ve got some red/maroon shirts this year, sorry to disappoint.

I’ve been live blogging from some of the sessions this morning over on DotNetNuke.com, you can find them with Shaun’s Keynote at OpenForce 09, and Snowcovered session from Brice Snow.

A quick overview of each. Shaun talked about some project stats, what’s happened in the past year, and what’s coming in the next year or two with DNN. Things are looking good!

Brice talked about the history of Snowcovered, and then had some basic stats about that website as well. I think he got attacked afterwards from a few people with questions, being the first time he’s been out in public speaking about SC I think people had a lot pent up! He held up well and presented very well. I look forward to seeing more of him in the future.

We had some lunch after the morning sessions and sat around talking to Brice and Bruce Chapman from Ifinity it was nice to finally meet Bruce after being a big fan of his modules/extensions for a number of years.

The rest of the afternoon is just getting started. I may not live blog from each session, but I’ll try to post an overview later today. At 4:30pm the expo hall opens up for the vendors to show off all their wares.

To follow us and our tweets check out this URL which will show the tweets from Engage guys.

Welcome Aboard!

Joe Brinkman — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:38:21 GMT

Last year at OpenForce, DotNetNuke Corporation was on the verge of closing our first round of funding. 2006, 07 and 08 were challenging years as we struggled to find a business model that would support our company of 6 and allow us to grow. Shaun, Scott, Nik and I formed DotNetNuke Corp. with the goal of building a company that would allow us to better manage the project and improve DotNetNuke with access to increased resources. With the investment we received in 2008 we have been able to grow the company to nearly 30 employees and contractors. As we have brought in additional employees, it has allowed us to further focus our efforts rather than running around trying to do everything ourselves.

One of our first people we hired after OpenForce last year was Cathal Connolly from the core team. Cathal joined Charles Nurse who already worked for DotNetNuke Corp and brought his deep understanding of DotNetNuke security to the company. At the same time we began to build out our engineering office in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada – not far from Vancouver. We quickly hired Sarah Darkis and John Lucarino who both had prior experience working with Shaun and who also had extensive experience working with DotNetNuke and ASP.Net. This was our engineering team for the better part of the first 9 months in 2009.

As sales of DotNetNuke Professional continued to grow, we were able to start a second round of hiring. We brought in Ken Grierson this past summer. Ken is a senior test engineer, with many years of experience working as a tester at Microsoft. He has worked hard to help us add more rigor to our testing and QA processes which is starting to pay off as we near our 5.2.0 release. Ken has also started working with our community QA team to ensure that we are fully aligned with our QA efforts on the community side.

Around this same time we were able to hire a network engineer. What many people did not know is that this is a role that sort of fell in Scott Willhite’s lap several years ago. Scott is not a network engineer, but has been able to keep the DotNetNuke infrastructure for both the project and the corporation running quite well over the past 7 years. I am often amazed at how well he did, but know that it involved quite a few late nights and long weekends. When we hired Konstantine Tcherenkov for the network engineering position in September, Scott was able to finally able to begin focusing on his primary responsibilities as Director of Community Relations. Konstantine quickly came up to speed on our infrastructure and has already begun work on a restructuring of our servers and infrastructure to provide greater stability, redundancy and scalability for many of our critical systems.

Another recent addition to the engineering team is Chris Kendall who was hired to head up our support team. If you are a Professional Edition customer, you have probably already had a chance to talk with Chris as he is managing our customer support for Professional and Elite customers. This has been one part of my job over the last year, but a part I was quite happy to turn over to Chris. Chris brings a passion for the job that is unbelievable and even without a lot of DotNetNuke experience was able to jump in and begin making a huge difference from his very first week onboard the team.

As everyone already knows, Shaun has also worn many hats during the first 7 years of DotNetNuke’s growth. Like all of the founders, Shaun has been pulled in many different directions and desperately needed some additional help in engineering to manage our growing team. We were very fortunate to be able to entice Rob Chartier to join DotNetNuke Corp as the Director of Engineering. As an ASP.Net Insider, Microsoft MVP and longtime DotNetNuke user and evangelist, Rob was a natural fit for the position. Rob’s brings his background in agile development practices to the engineering team and is using those skills as he heads up feature development for the community and commercial DotNetNuke editions.

With Rob onboard, I have formally taken on responsibility for the Quality, Support and Maintenance side of the engineering department. I have the privilege of working with Ken, Chris, and Cathal to ensure we are putting out the best possible product. We are focused on ensuring that we have a good grasp on all of the items that exist in Gemini for the DotNetNuke Core as well as Professional and Elite editions and will be working hard over the coming weeks to close them as quickly as possible, and putting the appropriate tests in place that they do not re-appear in future releases.

With the exception of Cathal, all of our engineering hires work from our Abbotsford office. This is great for building team cohesion and simplifying communications. Unfortunately, many of the great developers in the DotNetNuke community don’t live near Abbotsford. With a solid core engineering team in place, I was happy to hear that were approved to make a few hires from outside the Abbotsford area. Over the past couple of years Shaun and I had the opportunity to hear from a number of people in the community that they were interested in joining DotNetNuke Corp. whenever we had an opening.

Well, the day has finally come, where I am happy to say that we have hired two more members of the DotNetNuke Core team. Both of the individuals have been working with DotNetNuke for many years and have a passion for the project that matches that of almost anybody in the community. Shaun and I recognized that as capable as Ken, Chris, Cathal and I are, it is probably not enough to meet the goals we have for the quality and maintenance team. We needed some additional people with a deep understanding of DotNetNuke who could immediately jump in and begin helping our support, quality and maintenance efforts on their first day.

I am happy to welcome aboard Phil Beadle to the DotNetNuke Corp. team. As many of you already know, Phil was a founding member of the Core Team and was recently named a Trustee in our latest team re-organization. Phil has worked for the past four years at Readify where he built up an impressive resume working on some very cutting edge DotNetNuke projects. Phil was the lead architect of the Readify team working on the Afl.com.au and Nrl.com.au sites, some of the largest public DotNetNuke sites anywhere in the world. Like Rob, Phil also comes from an agile development background. I am looking forward to working with Phil to use his knowledge to implement automated unit testing and improved continuous integration practices. Phil is a great addition to our engineering team and I am looking forward to December 7th when he will officially begin work as a new member of the DotNetNuke Corp. engineering team.

The second core team member who has accepted a position with the engineering team is someone who may come as a surprise to many people. I am happy to welcome Alex Shirley as our newest member of the support and quality team. Anyone who frequents the forums or pays attention to our bug tracking system, knows that Alex has been a very dedicated member of the DotNetNuke QA team for the past several years. As a core team member Alex has been a passionate advocate for improving the quality of our releases. As the release manager for the past couple of years for the project, I often have the task of making sure we get releases out the door. Even when Alex and I have disagreed on issues regarding the project releases, we both wanted what was best for the DotNetNuke project. I love Alex’s passion and willingness to be a strong advocate for his position. During his tenure on the core team he has kept the team focused on making sure that each release was the best possible version of DotNetNuke given the constraints that we often are forced to live with. I look forward to working with Alex to help put in place additional processes to ensure that we are living up to his high quality standards. Alex will also have the opportunity to work with Chris Kendall on the support team and to ensure that issues found by our customers are getting the appropriate attention from our maintenance team.

Our final hire is someone that Rob Chartier has worked with in the past, Keivan Beigi. Keivan joins the Abbotsford/Vancouver team and helps round out the DotNetNuke development team with his real-world enterprise experience. Recently, he has worked with many of the large US Telco providers, not to mention many of the Fortune 500 with the design, implementation, deployment and support of various projects focused around transaction processing. It is in his enterprise experience we will gain the most value.

I am really excited at all the growth that has occurred on engineering team this year. I look forward to continuing this trend in 2010 and further improving DotNetNuke. This is an exciting time to be a member of the DotNetNuke Corporation engineering team and the DotNetNuke Community. I can’t wait to sit at OpenForce 2010 and talk about all the great things we accomplished in 2010.

OpenForce is Coming! OpenForce is Coming! (v2009)

DotNetNuke Developer — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:51:31 GMT

So really, it is just about here! I leave in just over 48 hours to head to Las Vegas for the third annual US OpenForce (DotNetNuke conference), once again being held at Mandalay Bay along with DevConnections. If the previous two years were any sort of...(read more)

How to fix the Culture issue for DNN and SunBlogNuke

SunBlogNuke — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:42:00 GMT

Here I would like to share how to fix the culture issue for DNN and our blog module [SunBlogNuke]. Hope it can helps someone who has the same issue. What is the Culture issue? When there is only one language in your DNN website, like the initial installation, the culture and language dropdown list may be blank. Okey, let’s go ahead the topic.

User Experience in DotNetNuke Presentation: What to Expect

dnnGallery — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:35:00 GMT

Dang and I are doing a presentation next week at Open Force entitled “UX in DotNetNuke: Designing Your Applications the Right Way.” One of the challenges we face as presenters is making sure we attract the right people and set their expectations appropriately as to what the actual content of the presentation will be. While our title and description are accurate, it may be helpful to go into more detail.

Just won an Zune HD from PowerDNN

Hilbert Solutions, LLC — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:51:39 GMT

PowerDNN the Premium Dotnetnuke Web Hosting Company is currently running a giveaway via Twitter where if you retweet a message then you are entered into win a number of prizes. Well I did just that and today I got a call from a nice lady who said I had a choice between $100 of Omaha Steaks or an Zune HD. I picked the Zune HD of course. You can follow PowerDNN on Twitter at @PowerDNN.

Active Social 1.02.07 and Active Forums 4.01.18

Active Modules, Inc. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:17:16 GMT

We are happy to report that new versions of both Active Social and Active Forums have been released this week.

Active Social 1.02.07 was released today, November 5th. This is the latest of several updates to the module since Active Social 1.02’s release over a month ago. These releases have included fixes to issues that have emerged as well as several enhancements. Some notable updates include:

•    Fixes to notifications for journal comments and journal updates (1.02.04)
•    Fixes to gallery paging and gallery comments (1.02.05)
•    Group creation and management from the control panel (1.02.05)
•    Resolution of all javascript errors in the control panel (1.02.06)
•    Localization support for the alpha bar in the member list (1.02.07)
•    Fix to prevent profile pictures from caching after update (1.02.07)
•    Fix to address journal rendering when a group or display name contains special characters (1.02.07)

Active Forums 4.01.17 was released on Monday, November 2nd. This release includes improvements to search capabilities, an improved date picker for announcements, delete permission for regular users, and more. Active Forums 4.01.18 followed on Tuesday and addressed a packaging issue with the What’s New Module.

Please follow these links for complete release notes for Active Forums and Active Social. We are excited to have released these versions and look forward to hearing your feedback. More updates are already in the works!

Customers who no longer have access to support and updates for Active Social or Active Forums, please feel free to contact us for a renewal quote. In addition, current Active Forums customers that are interested in upgrading to Active Social are eligible for a discounted upgrade price; please let us know if you would like additional details.

New Telerik Release

AppTheory DotNetNuke Blog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:01:04 GMT

Telerik released their updated set of components for Q3 2009 the today. One of the things I find great about this release is their Visual Style Builder is now capable of producing detailed skins for all of their controls now. If you haven’t heard about the Style Builder, it basically allows you to redesign the user interface of the Telerik controls without having to write a single line of code or HTML code. To checkout the Visual Style Builder, follow this link to create your own set of custom Telerik control skins: http://stylebuilder.telerik.com/. New controls which are included in the release that may appeal to DotNetNuke developers is their new SiteMap control (which allows you to render from the google xml sitemap created by DNN, if you so desire), RadRating control, RadListView (basically a data list replacement), A new skin for all controls, Suite control installer now permits upgrading (instead of a completely re-install) and some performance enhancements. Also worth mentioning is it looks like they are getting about a 30% performance gain by removing some generic reflection use that was done in all controls previously vs. Telerik releases of the past.

You can read the full details for this release here:http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-ajax/whats-new.aspx

SQL Server Dynamic Pivots Article

Mitchel Sellers DotNetNuke Blog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:14:00 GMT

I am proud to announce that an article that I wrote for SQL Server magazine, "Pivoting the Dynamic Way" was included in the November 2009 issue of the magazine. The article was published in both the print and online editions of the magazine, for those of you with subscriptions I encourage you to check it out!

A Reminder to Vote!

AppTheory DotNetNuke Blog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:33:03 GMT

Today is the last day to vote for us at the OpenForce Community Choice Awards.

What do you know about web standards with your DotNetNuke site?

Brian Scarbeau — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:19:33 GMT

First of all, you should go to this site to read about the ten reasons you should learn and use web standards. Next, you should travel to DNNCreative website to read an article by Stuart Colville entitled Become a better Standardista. Finally, you should travel to the Wrox site to read the Wrox Blox that Cuong Dang wrote on DotNetNuke and Web Standards. Many companies need to sell to upper management why they should have a DotNetNuke site and web standards often comes up in this conversation. Cuong start ...

Why DotNetNuke?

dnnGallery — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:38:00 GMT

“Why DotNetNuke?” is a question that comes up a lot from people with all different backgrounds; from project managers, developers and designers, to CTOs and CEOs. dnnGallery was launched to feature high quality DotNetNuke sites from the community, with the hope that all of these people asking "Why DotNetNuke?" would be helped by actually seeing some of the great things you can do with the framework.

Issue 50 - DotNetNuke 5 Admin Modules Access, Reset Logins, iPhone OWS

DNN Creative Magazine — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:40:00 GMT

In this issue we demonstrate how to setup a limited administrators access account. This option is only available from DotNetNuke version 5 onwards where the administrator modules can now be added to any page and configured for any user to access and use the features of the administrator modules.

DotNetNuke ‘Is Web Farm’ Changes

AppTheory DotNetNuke Blog — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:56:33 GMT

I was on one of our client sites this week and under Host Settings I noticed something odd. I saw that the “Is Web Farm” setting was set to true, the reason this is odd is because I know this particular install is NOT on a web farm as the setting says (shown in the screen shot below). So my next logical step was to jump over to the web.config for the install and turn this off.

Bubbling Up An Unhandled Exception From Assembly to Windows Service Causes Service Stop With No Logging

AppTheory DotNetNuke Blog — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:53:00 GMT

This one was very tricky to track down. We have a windows service that uses an assembly to transcode video files and upload them to a CDN. All of the logging of course takes place in the windows service. In our component the constructors of both the transcode and upload classes take a file full path as a parameter. We do a File.Exists() and if the file does not exist we throw an exception. Normally this is ideal as if an valid object cannot be created with the state given we want to know about it sooner rather than later. In our windows service we instantiate and perform the work of the upload or transcode objects within a for loop that has a try catch. In a non windows service the exception bubbled up will happily be caught and the iteration continues. However, it appears in a windows service it simply stops the iteration at that point. The service is not stopped in the Administrative Tools > Services MMC applet, nor is any information logged to the event viewer.

Be Careful Applying Permissions between Security Groups on AWS EC2

AppTheory DotNetNuke Blog — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:38:12 GMT

I have noticed that a couple of tutorials have gone into the basics for setting up DNN on AWS with two separate instances. One instance is the frontend web server and the other instance is a backend SQL server. Two security groups are created one for the Web server (WebGroup) and one for the SQL server (SQLGroup). This is a common setup that we have performed many times at AppTheory.

Selecting a DotNetNuke Hosting Provider 2009 Edition

Mitchel Sellers DotNetNuke Blog — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Back in May of 2008 I wrote an article “Selecting a DotNetNuke Hosting Provider Revisited”. Well, being almost a year-and-a-half later I thought it would be good to provide a 2009-2010 follow-up to the article to update based on new information, updates to hosting plans/offerings, as well as DotNetNuke performance in general. In this article I will talk though the thought process that I use when working with current and potential customers to select their hosting plan, environment and provider. This document has been updated based on current information, in addition, prior to going through the recommendations below I strongly recommend reading my article “Shared, Virtual Private Server, Dedicated of Cloud Hosting” to become familiar with the different levels of hosting.

DotNetNuke Symbol files and Intellisense

Joe Brinkman — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:58:48 GMT

For the past 7 years, the DotNetNuke project has provided various packages for users to simplify different installation and upgrade scenarios. Each package was built to address specific requests from the community. We have recently begun receiving requests for symbol files (.pdb files) and xml comments. As a result of these requests, starting with DotNetNuke 5.2.0, we will be releasing a new Symbols package with each release.

The first set of files included in the Symbols package are all of the .PDB files for the core framework. Essentially, any project which is included in the default solution file will generate a .pdb file that will be available in this package. Many developers have long assumed that .pdb files were only generated for debug builds, however, that does not have to be the case. It is possible, and even desirable, to generate .pdb files for release builds as well. To generate the pdb files follow the steps outlined below:

Open the Project Properties
Select the Compile tab
Set the configuration mode to Release
Click on the Advanced Compile Options button
Set the “Generate debug info” to “pdb-only”

You should see a screen similar to the image below.

Most users will never need the pdb files for their installation, however, if you are troubleshooting error messages in your event log then the pdb files will provide additional information which can aids in troubleshooting. To see how pdb files can help, lets look at a sample error message from the event log:

While there is some useful information in this error message in the stack trace, it just gives you a list of classes and methods to look through. If your methods are not granular enough, just knowing the method may not be enough. If you have installed the pdb files into your DotNetNuke installation then you will receive additional information in your stack trace as shown below.

Notice in the highlighted section that I now have an exact line number where the error occurred in the DotNetNuke source code. This greatly simplifies identifying the root cause of errors and makes it much easier to take corrective action. This is just one of the uses for pdb files, but is a great benefit when trying to isolate and troubleshoot problems in a production environment

In addition to symbol files, the new Symbols package will include XML Comments that are generated as part of the build process. The XML Comments will be used in the near future to create detailed API documentation for the core DotNetNuke framework. In addition to their usefulness in creating documentation, they are also useful when you are writing code that uses the core API. Lisa Feigenbaum has a great article in the May 2009 issue of MSDN magazine that fully explains the benefits of the XML Comments files.

Over the coming months, the new DotNetNuke Reference team will be going through and helping to get the core framework documented with XML Comments. This will allow us to provide more useful Intellisense and complete API reference documentation that also includes code samples for how to use various portions of the API.

The first version of the Symbols package which was released today along with DotNetNuke 5.2.0 Beta 5 requires you to unzip the files over the top of your existing DotNetNuke installation. It doesn’t matter if you are using the Install, Upgrade, Source, or StarterKit package for creating your DotNetNuke installation. The only requirement is that the Symbol files are only valid for the specific version where they were generated. This means that you cannot use the 5.2.0 Beta 5 symbols with any release other than Beta 5.

We are working on updating the Symbols package so that in the final 5.2.0 release you will be able to install and uninstall the Symbols package from the Host/Extensions page. This will make it possible to install Symbols for any installation where you have host access, even if you don’t have full access to the file system for directly uploading files.

In the end, I think this is a good addition to the current set of packages we already provide. For those who care about symbol files and intellisense, you will be able to use them without much difficulty and install them with whatever package you prefer to use. For those people who don’t want them, you will be able to continue using the same packages you always have without any size bloat from files which you don’t want.

Javascript to Convert State Name to Abbreviation

Hilbert Solutions, LLC — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:16:27 GMT

Doing a little javascript these days to handle some presentation changes. I wanted to convert a State Name spelled out to the state’s abbreviations. I found a little javascript that got me started and then reworked it from there.

    function changeStateAbbr(theValue){    
        
                if (theValue == "Alambama"){
                    document.write("AL");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Alaska"){
                    document.write("AK");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Arizona"){
                    document.write("AZ");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Arkansas"){
                    document.write("AR");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "California"){
                    document.write("CA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Colorado"){
                    document.write("CO");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Connecticut"){
                    document.write("CT");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Delaware"){
                    document.write("DE");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "District of Columbia"){
                    document.write("DC");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Florida"){
                    document.write("FL");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Georgia"){
                    document.write("GA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Hawaii"){
                    document.write("HI");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Idaho"){
                    document.write("ID");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Illinois"){
                    document.write("IL");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Indiana"){
                    document.write("IN");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Iowa"){
                    document.write("IA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Kansas"){
                    document.write("KS");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Kentucky"){
                    document.write("KY");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Louisiana"){
                    document.write("LA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Maine"){
                    document.write("ME");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Maryland"){
                    document.write("MD");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Massachusetts"){
                    document.write("MA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Michigan"){
                    document.write("MI");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Minnesota"){
                    document.write("MN");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Mississippi"){
                    document.write("MS");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Missouri"){
                    document.write("MO");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Montana"){
                    document.write("MT");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Nebraska"){
                    document.write("NE");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Nevada"){
                    document.write("NV");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "New Hamspire"){
                    document.write("NH");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "New Jersey"){
                    document.write("NJ");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "New Mexico"){
                    document.write("NM");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "New York"){
                    document.write("NY");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "North Carolina"){
                    document.write("NC");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "North Dakota"){
                    document.write("ND");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Ohio"){
                    document.write("OH");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Oklahoma"){
                    document.write("OK");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Oregon"){
                    document.write("OR");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Pennsylvania"){
                    document.write("PA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Rhode Island"){
                    document.write("RI");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "South Carolina"){
                    document.write("SC");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "South Dakota"){
                    document.write("SD");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Tennessee"){
                    document.write("TN");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Texas"){
                    document.write("TX");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Utah"){
                    document.write("UT");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Vermont"){
                    document.write("VT");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Virginia"){
                    document.write("VA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Washington"){
                    document.write("WA");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "West Virginia"){
                    document.write("WV");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Wisconsin"){
                    document.write("WI");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue == "Wyoming"){
                    document.write("WY");
                    }
                
                else if (theValue){
                    document.write(theValue);
                    }
                
        }

Active Social Comments Module

Active Modules, Inc. — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:57:30 GMT

We have been trying to make many of the core components within Active Social as reusable as possible. This makes adding new features easier and keeps the overall package small. Evidently I have been doing a better job of this than I realized.

We have made several improvements within the Events area for the Active Social 1.3 release. One more feature I wanted to add was the option for you to leave comments on events. I thought this would be a good time to also extend the comments control so that it could be used in other areas as well. First thing I did was add the comments control to the EventsView template. All I had to do was specify one parameter with a token on the control and Events instantly had a comments section.

Obviously, I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't realize this from the start. The good news is that Active Social has the ability for you to use the comments feature anywhere on your site. I've made a few minor changes for the 1.3 release so that you can specify something other than an Active Social token paramenter. Once that is released, you should be able to place the control in a custom view then add it to any page as a module.

Leave a comment and let me know if this will be useful to you or not.

Pros and Cons of Using CSS Framework in DotNetNuke

dnnGallery — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:35:00 GMT

I’ve been a big fan of using grid in most of my work in recent years. One of the main things I enjoy doing it is because of the symmetrical of the design and the aspect of re-using many of the CSS selectors within the same project. It’s exciting to write less markup and CSS to do more with design and implementation. And as many have heard “less is more”; by using CSS framework, it allows you to do just that. I consider DotNetNuke community (at least the web designer community within DotNetNuke) is sort of a laggard group in adopting web standards until recently. Many people have talked and written books about the benefits of using web standards as well as how to do it properly, but I’ve seen a slow progress within DNN community.

Can you run DotNetNuke on Oracle?

DotNetNuke Developer — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:50:28 GMT

A few days ago I was surfing through the forums on DotNetNuke.com and came across a post asking if you could run DotNetNuke on an Oracle database. In short, yes you can. But why would you? This blog post will talk about that, and some of the reasons why...(read more)

RezHub Begins a Chat on Twitter, Focuses on Green Topics

The Mighty Blog — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:59:00 GMT

Being employed at RezHub definitely has its perks. The biggest perk is that I get to do fun and exciting things for a great company! One of the most recent things that we just started is moderating a chat using Twitter. I know, I know… That already sounds odd to you. A chat on twitter is not all that different from a conventional chat room. With this being our second try at this idea, we feel pretty good about it.

If you don’t already know, RezHub is a discount travel provider. We provide booking options for hotels, rental cars, and flights. Just to give you an idea, even though I work for a travel company, I still pay for travel. My money is important to me. Like you, I don’t have an unlimited supply of it. I always use RezHub. I have rarely found another site with a better deal. Enough of that though…

While we provide discount travel, our real passion is to be a socially and ecologically responsible company. One of the many ways we feel we are accomplishing that is through our #GreenChat. Our intention with the green chat is to provide a forum where like-minded people can share their ideas and opinions about green topics. Even if you don’t know anything about the green topics we bring up, you can follow the dialogue, and learn more about it. You can join our chat every Wednesday at 2pm EST.

In the twitt world, this means nothing to you, because you can continue to use twitter how you already are, and still participate. All you need to do is add the following text to the end of your tweets, “#greenchat.” (Known as a hashtag.) Consider the following example:

It is a great idea to recycle your bottles and cans, even when you’re on vacation. #greenchat

Today, we spoke about:

Green tips for making Halloween more eco-friendly
How to be green while staying in a hotel
Newsweek article about companies exploiting green as an angle
Favorite or new green gadgets

We had some great participation, some new followers, and great information. You can read through the green information and videos that were posted in our twub. What’s a twub? Let me tell you!

RezHub Uses Twubs.com

A cool way that we found to make this more fun is to use a website called Twubs. The cool thing about this site is that it’s integrating content from other social sites without any additional effort on your part. For example, if you post a video from Vimeo or YouTube, it will show up in the media section on your page.

Additionally, if you use TwitPic when posting your pictures, it will pull those to this same media section. This is an automated process. All you have to do is what you’re already doing. Just add “#greenchat” to your tweet.

I have conversed with the Twubs staff, because there are other media sources that I prefer over these. They have plans to integrate more. So, contact them to let them know which ones you like to use.

Some other cool features would benefit any organization. Once you get verified, you can rebrand the page (to a point), and you can also add your own logo and description to the hashtag. Another part of the verification allows you to create and specify aliases to your hashtag. This is especially useful if your hashtag is easily misspelled.

Twitter users can tweet directly from the page. The tweet section allows you tweet directly from the page, inserting shortened links, videos, and pictures.

Anyone on twitter can also join your twub, displaying them as a member on the page. This is a very visual way for your followers to benefit from participating in your twub. Unfortunately, the only way to join the twub is through your twub page.

Your organization can also add related links in the links section. This is a great way to aggregate one or more links that your twub members might be interested in.

There are two more options that get even better. Twubs utilizes a tagging system to help new twubbers find twubs that they might like, or other twubs similar to those that they might already be a member of.

Finally, there is a feature to consume one or more RSS feeds that your members might enjoy. For example, you can consume the RSS feed for a related news or blog site. In my example, you can see our Green Travel Blog feed consumed.

Pretty cool, huh? At RezHub, we are very excited about social media and the interaction we have with our friends through these various websites.

RezHub Social Media Hub

We are so excited about our participation with our online friends, that we even created a page on our website that connects all of our social network accounts in a single place. This is our Social Media Hub on RezHub!

Check it out and let us know what you think. I love it! From a glance, you can see what we’re doing on all of our social sites. You can see our friends giving information on our Green Travel Hub Facebook page, and information on our greenchat twub as it gets posted to twitter.

Technorati Tags: RezHub,Green Travel,Green,Twubs,Social Networking,Social Media,Twitter,Facebook

First OpenForce over, next one about to start

Peter Donker — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:42:54 GMT

A week ago the first OpenForce (the main DNN conference series) ended. Two days of presentations surrounded by lots of downtime with DNN colleagues. As a speaker I got the best of it this year. Paid hotel accommodations, paid food, paid drinks. What more could you want? Plus you get the wonderful Holland tour the day after the conference. This is where the conference speakers are shown a piece of folkloric Holland to remember their trip by. Here is a quick ‘n dirty report from those days.

Southwest Florida Code Camp 2009 Video

The Mighty Blog — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:27:00 GMT

Earlier in the month, I spoke about DotNetNuke® in 3 different sessions at the Second Annual Southwest Florida Code Camp. While there our Microsoft Evangelist, Joe Healy, always does a great job of not only promoting all things Microsoft, but doing so in an engaging manner through interviews, pictures, and video. He did the same thing for the Day of DotNetNuke®, but the video hasn’t been released yet.

This time though, I was one of the lucky people to make the final cut of the video. Even though my son stole the show, I am still glad to make the video. :)

I say that, because I brought my son with me to the speaker party, code camp, and after party. He was wearing the smallest Day of DotNetNuke® shirt we ordered – an instant hit! Check out the video that Healy made on the Channel 9 website. You will see him and I at 2:06, and he is showing of his DNN shirt with Stan Schultes at 2:28.

Technorati Tags: DotNetNuke,DNN,DNN Blogs,Events,Community,Southwest Florida Code Camp,Code Camp,Video