Will Strohl's Blog

Getting the Most Out of Your Google Analytics DNN Integration

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 16:57:52 GMT

Google Analytics is often taken-for-granted in too many ways. When the average company thinks about Google Analytics, they simply ensure their Google Analytics code is in place and they keep track of what I refer to as vanity metrics. Copy. Paste. Done, right? Vanity metrics are quite deceiving, to be honest, and you’re only scratching the surface with what you could (and probably should) be doing with Google Analytics. In this article, we’re going to discuss how to dive deeper into your Google Analytics integration to grow your business.

I’m going to approach this from a content management system perspective, or CMS. If you’re not already using a CMS for your website, you really should be. A CMS is perhaps one of the most critical tools you’ll need for your web presence. Having a CMS literally empowers your entire organization to do more with your website, both onsite and off – including getting more out of Google Analytics. In this instance, I’m going to talk about how you can use features found in the DNN CMS along with 51Degrees to begin to raise your business to the next level by making data-driven decisions.

What is DNN?

DNN is the shorter name of my favorite content management system (CMS), previously called DotNetNuke. DNN has run hundreds of thousands of websites over the years, including some notable ones like the U.S. Department of Defense, Bank of America, NASCAR, and many more. DNN helps entire organizations to be able to run their own website while also being able to integrate with their other systems. It’s the ultimate CMS-based toolbox for the website of any growth-focused organization.

What is Google Analytics?

Really? You haven’t heard of Google Analytics? I don’t believe you. But just in case…

Google Analytics is hands-down the most popular service that website owners choose to use to help learn more about their website and how customers use it. You have many features that simply just work out of the box without any additional configuration to get all the basic information you’d want to know about your online business. However, Google Analytics is also a very flexible platform to help you learn and make decisions based upon almost any activity your website visitors perform.

If you want to truly learn about how your visitors are using your website, you need to do a little to a lot more work to really benefit from the data.

What is 51Degrees?

Since we’re using DNN in this example, we’re very lucky to have 51Degrees in our toolbox. I mean, it’s already there. We can just get started with it immediately. 51Degrees is known worldwide to be the fastest and most accurate mobile device detection service available to developers and website marketers. A great example of their accuracy can be seen when a handheld device browses your website using the UC mini browser. 51Degrees correctly reports this as handheld device, whereas Google Analytics thinks this is a desktop device.

51Degrees powers over 1.5 million active implementations around the world and they are adding up to 200 device definitions every week. It really is a no-nonsense decision to use them for anything mobile like this, even if you’re not on DNN already. They’re available to nearly any platform you can develop on. If that’s not enough, they’re trusted by brands such as Subway, Disney, Hyundai, and Home Shopping Network.

51Degrees + DNN and Beyond

In the case of DNN, again, you’ll see that it’s already there for you as a built-in feature. In the free and open source version of DNN (called DNN Platform), you’ll have immediate access to a free version of 51Degrees, which doesn’t give you all the data you may be looking for, and it only supports quarterly updates. You can upgrade to their Premium Cloud or On-Premise plan which gives you automatic weekly updates and access to additional data properties such as device type (e.g., knowing tablet, smartphone, TV, etc.) and physical screen dimensions (which is necessary for the examples below).

By the way, DNN is only one of many web platforms that 51Degrees is integrated with.

Growing Your Company by Making Data-Based Decisions

There are seemingly countless ways to use and speak about how you can further leverage Google Analytics, but we’re going to focus on the fastest growing and arguably most important segment of your website visitors – mobile. Basically, anyone that comes to your website using a tablet or mobile phone. There is a lot of anecdotal information about these visitors out there, but it’s imperative that you know more about your own visitors if your site is in any way meant to drive revenue for your business.

Let’s take a very standard example, namely advertising. If this doesn’t sound like the best example, consider this… This year alone online advertising has increased nearly 16% to $83 billion the U.S according to eMarketer.

It’s easy to think that you can just place some sponsored ads on your site and then wait for the dollars to start rolling in. Sure, you may have even done a bit of usability testing and user experience research before rolling them out. But did that also include the habits, context, and form factors of the various mobile devices that are potentially coming to your site? I’m guessing not. If you don’t measure, you can’t forecast. If you can’t forecast, then there’s no way to ensure it will be a successful part of your business.

FYI… Even though we’re talking about advertising, this article can apply to any content on your site. These principles are equally relevant to articles, calls to action, and marketing forms.

In the case of ads, it’s quite common with all the web frameworks out there today for the ads to always look good, even when browsing using a mobile device, but that’s pretty much where most organizations stop. Are those ads still functional? Is the placement in a mobile context still functional? Meaning, are people still seeing it? If they are, how often? Is it performing any differently, and on which devices? If we know the devices, do we also know if they’re viewing the page primarily in landscape or portrait orientations? These are all very important questions, but the answers are even more important.

Enabling 51Degrees in DNN

Today, enabling 51Degrees is something that you’ll need to do using configuration files. So it will feel a bit technical, but it’s quite easy. This will change in the future to be configurable as clickable features, and I’ll write a follow-up article once those features are available again in DNN.

Once you’re logged in with a superuser account, you’ll find a feature in the persona bar called Configuration Manager.

51Degrees has its own configuration file, called 51Degrees.mobi.config. When you choose it, it will be loaded into the editor area.

You’ll only need to change two values, and you’ll find them at the bottom of the configuration file. We’re going to want to enable the feature (“enabled”), and also turn on feature detection (“featureDetection”). Both values will be “false” when you first load the file. Simply change them both to “true” like in the image below.

If you have the premium data subscription, you’ll have one more step and it will require access to the file system of the website. You’ll find a folder named Bin in the root of your website. You’ll want to create a new file there named 51Degrees.lic. In the file, you’ll want to paste the premium data license key and save it.

After saving all of your changes, you’ll want to go to the Servers page in the persona bar and restart the application. Your updates won’t be applied until you do.

If you’re a premium data subscriber, the data files that contain mobile data will begin to automatically update a few moments after your application restarted in include the additional data that you’d otherwise not have access to.

Enabling Google Analytics

There are plenty of articles and tutorials out there to help you enable Google Analytics in DNN, and it varies depending on the version you’re running. I recently wrote an article on how to enable Google Analytics in the most current release of DNN (as of the time of this writing).

Now that you have Google Analytics enabled, let’s get to some of that advanced data we’ve been talking about…

Advanced Behavior Tracking

Let’s imagine we have an advertisement that is on the right sidebar area of a page when viewed on a desktop device, like a laptop. Assuming the website is already mobile-friendly, this ad will be repositioned once a mobile device visits the page. In many cases though, this ad may be below the content, making it unlikely that it gets seen. We could just move the ad, but what if that increases the bounces on the site? We need to figure this out, and the only way we can do that is to measure it.

When you look at the placement of the ad in mobile, it could feel like an easy decision as to what to do with the ad, but that’s most likely going to be a gut decision. It’s far more important to know if it’s even necessary to reposition the ad for mobile.

Add Custom Dimensions

Before we go any further, you should check out an article written by James Rosewell, 51Degrees CEO and co-founder, where he details how to add custom dimension track to Google Analytics. Go ahead and add some of your own custom dimensions.

To keep things simple, here’s how to quickly add custom dimensions, but the article linked to above will go into greater detail.

First, navigate to the Custom Dimensions area in the Google Analytics administration area. The screenshot below will help you.

You’ll most likely first see an empty grid. Click the button to add a new custom dimension.

We’re going to add two dimensions. First, a dimension for each page load that specifies the orientation of the device when the page is loaded, called “Orientation.” Then, another dimension that tells us the screen size of the device, called “ScreenInchesDiagonalRounded.” You’ll see the settings in the next two screenshots.

Once you have both dimensions added, you’ll see that your custom dimensions grid has dimensions now.

Now that we have some custom dimensions added that are mobile-specific, we can leverage the dimensions together with the data from 51Degrees to begin learning more about our customers’ habits while browsing the site.

First, update the Google Analytics script we updated earlier in the article to include the dimensions upon page load. You’ll see two new lines of code that each add a new dimension. You’ll also notice that there’s a new script reference added to allow the 51Degrees object to be loaded. This script is dynamically generated at page load based upon the unique visitor, so you’ll need it before Google Analytics runs, and you’ll want to ensure that this file isn’t cached.

         <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
        <AnalyticsEngineConfig>
            <Engines>
            <AnalyticsEngine>
                <EngineType>DotNetNuke.Services.Analytics.GoogleAnalyticsEngine, DotNetNuke</EngineType>
                <ElementId>Head</ElementId>
                <InjectTop>False</InjectTop>
                <ScriptTemplate><![CDATA[     
                        <script type="text/javascript" src="/51Degrees.features.js"></script>
                        <script type="text/javascript">
                            (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
                            (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
                            m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
                            })(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
        
                            ga('create', '[TRACKING_ID]', 'auto');
                            ga('set', 'dimension1', window.innerHeight > window.innerWidth ? 'Portrait' : 'Landscape'); 
                            ga('set', 'dimension2', FODF["ScreenInchesDiagonalRounded"]); 
                            ga('send', 'pageview');
                        </script>
                    ]]></ScriptTemplate>
            </AnalyticsEngine>
            </Engines>
        </AnalyticsEngineConfig>

We need to add some code to the page to help track new event information. We’re going to assume that your ads are all wrapped in a DIV tag with “adContent” as the class name like the example below. You can even apply this using the settings of any module.

 
        <div class="adContent">
            <a href="/My-Promotional-Page">
                <img src="/Image-Path/my-banner-ad.jpg" />
            </a>
        </div>

We'll also need a code snippet to look for the ad, and then push event data to Google Analytics if the ad is visible. In this case, we’re only doing it when the visitor is using a mobile device. That code snippet is discussed below.

Add the Event Code to DNN

There are many ways to add this kind of code to DNN. You could technically even use the out-of-the-box HTML module. However, I’d suggest using a solution more tailored to your site. In some cases, that might be a custom extension, such as a skin object or module. In this example, I’m going to use an open source module I created years ago specifically for this kind of use case where you may not necessarily want to get a developer fully involved. It’s called the Content Injection module. You can always find the latest release of my open source extensions on the GitHub site.

Install the module using the normal installation method, and then add it to a page where you want to track the ad. This may be your homepage or blog page, for example. Then, you can copy and paste a code snippet into it and modify it as desired. The great thing about this module is that you can use it on one or many pages – even across the entire website. This means that you can write the code once, and potentially not have to manage it again.

Add the module to a page, and then choose to add a content injection.

You’ll then simply give the code a name, specify that it’s HTML content, and paste the snippet into the textbox. It’s also best to inject this to the bottom of the page.

The code snippet below can be done any number of ways, and it could even be less code if you used a jQuery plugin. This snippet first creates an extension to look for and report that an element has entered into the viewing area of the page. The next bit of code will use that extension to report the event to Google Analytics.

        $.fn.isOnScreen = function(){
            var win = $(window);
        
            var viewport = {
                top : win.scrollTop(),
                left : win.scrollLeft()
            };
            viewport.right = viewport.left + win.width();
            viewport.bottom = viewport.top + win.height();
        
            var bounds = this.offset();
            bounds.right = bounds.left + this.outerWidth();
            bounds.bottom = bounds.top + this.outerHeight();
        
            return (!(viewport.right < bounds.left || viewport.left > bounds.right || viewport.bottom < bounds.top || viewport.top > bounds.bottom));
        };
        
        $(document).ready(function(){
            // set a local variable to track if the event occurred already
            var seen = false;
            
            $(window).scroll(function(){
                // if we can see the element AND it's the first time seeing it
                if ($(".adContent").isOnScreen() && !seen) {
                    // The element is visible, tell Google
                    // swtch AdVisible to your own event name, and SideBar1 to your own criteria
                    ga("send", "event", "AdVisible", "SideBar1");
                    // flag the event
                    seen = true;
                }
            });
        });

Once you save this code snippet in the Content Injection module, it will immediately begin to do its job, and report the scroll event, which you could then report on later in Google Analytics.

Test the Code Snippet

Now that the code is in place, we can test it. There are several ways you can do this. We can use the built-in mobile emulators in browsers like Google Chrome for example. We can even use our own devices if it’s a public site. When you do, simply scroll until you see the ad. After the event is triggered, you’ll see the data appear in Google Analytics like the images below.

In the first image, you can see how many devices were looking at specific pages holding their device in portrait versus landscape mode. The second image illustrates the screen sizes of the various devices that came to the same pages. In either case, we now have accurate data to help us make informed decisions about how to move forward with any other updates on the site.

This data won’t be game-changing immediately, but it will once you begin using it. This is exactly what you need to help you make those game-changing decisions that could do something amazing, like double or triple ad revenue.

Getting Real Results

You should let the data aggregate over time. After about a month, you’ll already have some great data to use as a baseline. From there, you can make small adjustments and experiment with ad placement on mobile devices. Each time you make one of these changes, wait another 2-4 weeks and compare the data. It’s best to only make and test one change at a time so your results are always as accurate as possible.

There are countless success stories from companies that have successfully implemented advanced behavior tracking as part of their online strategy. GiveMeSport increased ad revenue from tablets by 40%. AccuWeather increased revenues per 1,000 sessions by 45%.

Summary

This article only gives you a taste of how powerful it can be to leverage advanced behavior tracking for mobile devices using Google Analytics. You should use these techniques for anything on your site that can potentially increase revenue or reduce costs. Imagine augmenting your marketing automation strategy with additional behavioral data to help increase the number of times your white papers are downloaded or increase the number of people signing up for your webinars.

By the way, this also puts you at a huge competitive advantage over your competition. It’s surprising how seldom organizations of all sizes track, measure, and adjust their online strategy based upon their actual visitor behaviors. In a world like we live in today, where customers are becoming more and more difficult to attract and engage, we need every competitive advantage we can get.

At the end of the day, when you combine the available best-of-breed tools, the possibilities of how you can apply them are potentially endless. Though, this wouldn’t truly be possible without being able to leverage the speed, power, and accuracy of 51Degrees. You should give them a try, no matter how your website is built. They make it easy for you with both Cloud and On-Premise options, and they even have a free trial, so there’s no risk.

This blog post is cross-posted from Upendo Ventures.

CMS State of the Union: Data-Based Insights From the Past Two Years

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 02:50:56 GMT

If you didn’t already know, CMS is an acronym for “content management system.” A CMS is used by many developers, consultancies, and companies to build their website. It’s an incredibly common thing to do, as any flavor of CMS you choose will always save you effort and money, compared to building a website from nothing. This is especially true if you look at the lifetime investment of your website. Using a CMS framework or solution of some kind just seems to make sense. After all, this is what I’ve built my own career upon since 2001. However, then, CMS was known as a portal or portal framework. That’s a long time ago, so it’s not a bad idea to take stock of things every now and thing to see if what you’re doing is the correct thing. To this end, I asked myself, “How is CMS doing right now, and does it make sense to still be doing CMS-related work in the future?”

Please note that this article is mostly focused on the perspective of those of us that in some way provide website development services, where you deliver a website to clients.

Riddle Me This… Is CMS Worth My Time?

This article is the result of me asking that very question. If I’m going to invest my own time, effort, money and that of others into CMS, is it still a good investment today? This is an easy question to ask, but how exactly do you go about making that determination? This, it turns out, is not so easy. There’s a lot of disconnected information out there. The most useful information it seems is locked behind the closed doors and high-priced clutches of research firms like Forrester. So what now?

Before I move forward any further, I should get one thing out of the way for my fellow DNN community members… This is not a look specifically at DNN, nor is it meant in any way to speak directly to DNN. For that matter, not only is this article not intended to hurt DNN, it’s also not intended to disparage any CMS. This was purely done as an exercise to research CMS in general. If CMS as a whole is doing well, then any good or great CMS will do well too.

Another worthwhile disclaimer would be that I’m not necessarily a professional researcher, only in that I’ve never held such a title in my professional career, but like most of you, I have performed research that has informed entire companies since I’ve been in the workforce. So, generating data, parsing it for commonalities and abnormalities, and making decisions based on that data are all tasks that I’m very familiar with. I’m just not a mathematician, statistician, or a formal research analyst.

In doing a similar exercise to answer similar questions in the past, it occurred to me that there actually is a way to do this research and it would only cost me my time. I guess I’ll have to bill myself later, as it took a long time and this is valuable information. Information I’m now giving to you.

Gathering The Data

Gathering the data for anything like this is often the most time-consuming part. You need to find it first and foremost, but then you need to find a way to make sense of it, then do the same thing again to make sure others can make sense of what you figured out. This is a process, it’s not always the same process, and it takes a lot of time with a few dashes of trial and error.

The data I found was hiding in plain sight. Long ago I’ve learned to use services like BuiltWith to help me get to know prospects, clients, and competitors. BuiltWith is a great way to get a lot of information about the various technologies used on nearly any website, sometimes in as quickly as a click or two. It’s surprisingly very accurate. Since BuiltWith came onto the scene, others have been doing similar things and one of my favorites in this area is a company called Datanyze. I’m much more a fan of them because of their great UI and convenient tie-ins to lead generation and business development processes. However, in this case, I used their free service that’s similar to what BuiltWith offers, that shows you market share. In this case, their CMS market share area.

The market share tool is based upon people landing on a site while having the Datanyze browser plugin installed, and I believe they have bots that scour the web as well. They first analyze a site and then determine which technologies are being used by the site. Then, over time, when those technologies change, they can help you make informed decisions for your needs based upon the migrations.

If you just look at the market share tool on its own, it doesn’t do much for you. You can simply see the figures for all CMS’s over a small period of time. This is convenient enough to figure which CMS is the best and worst at any given moment, but it’s not at all useful to make any actual decisions. That is, unless you aggregate the data and begin charting it. Herein begins the time suck…

Now, before you begin harping on the accuracy and latency of tools like this, I agree with you. At any given moment, a website could be refreshed using a completely new set of technologies. When this happens, the data is a bit off. This introduces a certain degree of inaccuracy. You’re also dealing with the fact that these tools are essentially crawlers, depending upon end users initiating the scans of various sites. So, they don’t likely have the picture of the entire internet. Despite these drawbacks, this is still incredibly useful, as it allows you to have a true sense when drawing a picture. This is increasingly more interesting with Datanyze since it also analyzes internal or non-public websites in some cases.

For example, it’s not at all important for this kind of research to know that a specific number of sites are using WordPress or Drupal for example. What is definitely useful though is using the numbers to draw conclusions based on percentages. This is where it gets fun. If you can now say that 89% of websites are using this CMS or that one, that means something.

What’s to follow are insights gathered from data from January 2015 to November 2016. I won’t have December 2016 until next month, but we have enough as it is. In the data itself, I kept mostly to the top 20 CMS’s in use today.

But What is a CMS, Really?

You’re probably already drawing a pretty common conclusion without seeing any of the data, which is that WordPress is ruling the CMS kingdom in terms of overall adoption. If you’re thinking this, you’re right – but that doesn’t really mean anything. Also, it doesn’t really matter if you consider WordPress or any other solution a CMS or not. It matters that the marketplace uses it as such. For example, I didn’t know until this exercise that some people consider Blogger a CMS. Now, if you’re even remotely close to being a purist, you’ll be one of the first to scream an expletive at someone who suggests that. In discussing my findings with various people in the CMS ecosystem and technology community overall, I was just as surprised by this and was even more surprised to find that some individuals whose names may be synonymous with CMS use Blogger and similar tools to roll out client websites in the same way as most people do with traditional CMS’s. Don’t forget that this is how WordPress itself began too, and few people argue the merits of it being a CMS today. (I do though, but I digress…)

There are few types of CMS as you probably have figured out by now. There are many that are aimed at a specific vertical, such as car dealership or auto part CMS’s. There are others like Blogger who focus on brochure-style websites. There’s e-commerce CMS’s. There are application frameworks like DNN or Umbraco. There’s so very many, and they’re all more or less included in this article.

Media Outlook

When you look at the various news stories and industry articles, there’s no shortage of CMS-related news. However, you may have noticed a similar trend that I did. The CMS news has become ambiguous. You’ll find e-commerce news alongside CMS articles, and sometimes in the same article. The same goes for other types of solutions as well. This is part of what prompted me to look into this more. Why is there so much non-CMS news on a CMS industry site? There are many reasons for this. It’s just yet another symptom to keep in mind.

Despite the news shift, there’s plenty of money being reported as being spent in the CMS space. In the past, you could spend only a moment though looking for the amount expected to be spent, and have a few pages of search results. Try searching for that now. CMS is not the hot topic keyword it used to be. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any news article addressing CMS spending specifically. It’s just not an actual line item anymore. The conversation and outlook have changed. Instead of talking about CMS, the conversation is about overall budgets in IT and marketing departments. Media reporting on CMS is instead mostly sponsored by the various vendors out there now, and focus primarily on features and releases. It’s a marketing engine instead of a true news engine. Again, this isn’t necessarily good or bad on its own. it’s another symptom.

Something that’s more interesting, is the attention that the 2016 Gartner report on IT spending got last year. In this report, web isn’t even really spoken about in any meaningful way. Instead, the conversation is all about the internet of things (IoT), 3D printing, and RFID. However, the amount of spending in these areas is worth talking about. In the chart below, they speculated that 24% of the overall $3.14T IT budget would end up being spent on IoT.

Market Leaders

Overall, you’ll find that WordPress is by far the winner when it comes to market share. This should surprise no one. This is just a snapshot, but in looking at it, you may want to immediately shift your time and resources to support WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal since they’re all on the same stack. Sure, there’s a huge market share there overall at 72% collectively, which is a big pool of prospective customers to fish in. Though, there’s much more for any business to consider. When you look at the chart below, the CMS vendor list on the right is listed from the biggest market share on the top, to the smallest on the bottom.

Another thing to take away from this is that ASP.NET CMS’s don’t total more than 1% of the overall market share, where 1% is around 150,000 sites. If you’re someone like me, who makes their living on the Microsoft stack, that could feel a bit discouraging, but again, this is a snapshot. This alone doesn’t paint a full enough picture. Also, don’t forget that this is only the sites that they can see, and only CMS’s. So while the number is discouraging, the percentage is what’s more meaningful. When you apply 1% across the entire internet, it’s a pretty big number. I’m not proposing that all sites will use a CMS in the future, but most will (or something like it).

Oh My, The Trends…

The most important part of my research is that I wanted to look for positive trends. Having existing market share is like owning an entire bag of M&M’s, buying them one at a time. Once you have the whole bag, there’s nowhere to go from there. You need a new business. Is the CMS market growing? I’d love to give you good news here. I really would. Alas, I’d like to tell you the truth.

Until I refreshed the data for this article, only a single CMS vendor was showing positive growth over the past two years, and it wasn’t WordPress. Despite being the giant on the playground, it seems businesses were beginning to play with someone else. It seems Datanyze had an anomaly in September 2016 though, adding nearly 600,000 sites in a single month. This is almost a factor of 4 higher than their highest volume month. This could most likely be attributed to an algorithm being updated, and those additional sites should have already been added over time. If you were to normalize the September anomaly, WordPress would still be trending down over the past two years.

This overall trend in the non-ASP.NET stack can be seen across all of the most popular CMS’s in that category.

Until August, Adobe’s Experience Manager (formerly Adobe CQ5) was the only non-ASP.NET CMS to be seeing growth. It was all positive. Unfortunately, the last few months has reversed their trend line. Despite this, Adobe’s Experience Manager has shown very consistent growth over the past two years. They’re a very clear competitor out of everyone I’ve looked at so far.

So that means people are fleeing the LAMP stack and running to the Microsoft stack, right? As a fan of that stack, I wish I could tell you that. I really wish I could. It would be a lie. When you isolate only the ASP.NET CMS’s, they’re showing the same anti-growth trend I saw in the others above.

In fact, the largest ASP.NET CMS market share over the past two years is surprisingly Kentico. They edged out DNN by 1,000 sites. DNN has traditionally been considered to be the behemoth to battle against on the Microsoft stack ever since it was first released. Having been in this ecosystem for a long time now, this may have been the most surprising thing to me about this exercise. Unfortunately, even isolated on their own, all of the ASP.NET CMS’s show an anti-growth trend almost identical to Kentico’s.

Since most of my readers are DNN enthusiasts, you may want to see how that stacks up, first with DNN on its own. You’ll find the downward trend to be painfully obvious.

When you stack DNN up against Kentico, they both show a very similar migration pattern, but it’s trending downward regardless. Sadly, you don’t even need to have the trend line in the graph to illustrate this.

Why No Growth?

Whoa… so if you’re hearing for the first time, I’m guessing you’re no doubt a bit speechless. Everyone I’ve spoken to about this so far seemed to be completely caught off guard. An important note about this is that while the trends are all going down, the gains in the marketplace are mostly net positive over the same period of time. More sites are being gained than lost by most vendors, but that is something that’s clearly not going to last. People are leaving traditional CMS as a trend. It begs the question, “Where is everyone going?”

I tried for a couple of weeks to try and find the answer to where people are going. I poured over the data I do have, and I simply could not find the gains to show where companies are going, when they’re not choosing an existing prominent vendor. None of the smaller vendors are showing the growth necessary to explain it.

The answer came to me through an off-chance conversation with someone I know in the South Florida startup scene. He had literally just gotten off of the phone with someone at Forrester the week before, having a similar conversation about website trends. They weren’t speaking about CMS specifically of course, but they were talking about where and how companies were deploying their websites. As it turns out, there are multiple factors playing at the same time to cause the anti-growth patterns you’ve seen above.

First, there are cloud solutions being more and more prominent, each taking on a specific task from a company. In many cases, they’re even things that previously used to exist on their own website, such as a company blog. All of these are chipping away slowly at features that used to be gained from a CMS. Why deploy an entire CMS if you just need one specific feature? Sure, there are pros and cons to going or not going with a CMS, but budget and total cost of ownership will generally point towards a non-CMS decision.

Second, among cloud and traditional software, many vendors are now offering add-on services that fulfill the basic needs of most companies. For example, a CRM vendor may not have what you may consider being a traditional CMS, but they may offer a website service that’s nearly just as good. It offers exactly what the company needs, without all of the bells and whistles that a CMS usually comes with. You may know from experience yourself that while a business may have a formidable checklist or RFP, they only really intend to deploy a small fraction of those requirements initially. As with most IT projects, all of those nice to have’s and wish list items tend to get forgotten – prioritized below other business objectives. If you pay any attention at all to startup mergers and acquisitions over the past 3 years, you probably have already been seeing the evidence of this without even realizing it.

A third factor includes all of the vertical-specific CMS solutions that have sprouted up over the past few years. There’s far too many to show up on the radar in reports like Datanyze offers, and so it’s possible that all of these are collectively stealing the market share, and we can’t even see it yet.

A possible fourth contributor is custom-built websites. However, I have yet to find any data to show that this has any larger growth than it typically does. Anecdotally, all of the agencies I know that build custom-made websites aren’t showing any growth in this area either.

Your Future with CMS

Where does that leave you if you want to CMS still? Well, it’s far too early to panic, but you need to get into gear and start making plans now. If you haven’t already diversified, you need to. There are of course the immediately obvious options, such as specializing in multiple CMS’s in the same stack, or choosing one each from both stacks. However, this is fairly short-sighted in my opinion.

Do you remember that IT spending chart from Gartner waaaaaaaay up at the top of this article? IoT and 3D printing are massive areas of opportunity if you provide any kind of software solutions, but especially mobile- and web-based solutions. It would be a very safe bet that your CMS future is somehow going to merge with those areas, whether you like it or not. Ideally, you may want to jump on that preemptively, to shortcut your competition. There’s simply far too much money being spent in those two areas.

There’s another area of diversification though. You may need to find yourself specializing in a handful of CMS’s, each focusing on specific verticals. In this case, you may even find there to be opportunities for integration work, but even that is getting chipped away at. Companies like MuleSoft have done a phenomenal job of taking care of that for companies. There are even many cases where a company such as this prevents any code from being written at all.

The bottom line from my findings is this… If you’re specializing in CMS today, you should make that only one of a few specialties you offer in the future. That is unless you specialize in many CMS’s. CMS isn’t going to die, but its bubble had burst a long time ago, but no one really has begun talking about it yet.

What do you think though? Do you have your own research on this? Are you still planning to stick to just one CMS option? Why or why not? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

DNN 9 Appears to Be a Foundational Step Forward for the Future of DNN

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 22:28:01 GMT

DNN Corp is on the verge of releasing their latest DNN Platform release, version 9.0.0. As a DNN MVP, I of course had to take a look around at the new stuff coming. It’s still in the early stages though, so there are a few areas where the new updates have some smoothing out to do, but overall, the updates we’re seeing in version 9.0 are very nice. In short, it’s a much more contemporary user experience for all involved – but a very important step in the right direction for the future of all DNN’ers. Here’s my preview and insights after using DNN 9.0 for the first time – a pre-release version of DNN 9.0, that is.

Everything I’m discussing here are things I’ve looked at while viewing the nightly builds. If you’re not familiar with what a nightly build is, it’s basically a software product that’s still actively being developed on. There’s work and features that aren’t even checked-in yet. It’s not the final release, so please keep that in mind in this article, and any others like it.

Once you get by some of the rough edges that are in still in the nightly builds, like clunky animation transitions, help labels docked in random positions and/or partially hidden, and figuring out how to exit the persona bar views, the primary new feature begins to open up with a lot of subtle, but powerful updates. First and foremost, the administration experience is indeed a lot more contemporary. You’ll hear that word thrown around a lot by DNN Corp folks, but the new persona bar that replaces the control panel we’ve come to know quite intimately does a great job of tucking away a lot of the things that would previously get in our way in a large number of ways (right, skinners?).

As you can see above, the control panel is no longer docked at the top of the page. Instead, you see two new bars docked, at the bottom and on the left side. These both comprise the new persona bar, allowing you to edit numerous aspects of your site, without having to wait for page reload after reload. This is sure to be a time-saver, especially when you find yourself configuring multiple things at a time.

While I mentioned words like rough edges, this is by no means a completely new feature. Don’t be scared. The persona bar is something that’s been back-ported from DNN Corp’s commercial product suite. Only now, there’s a bunch of new features added to it to make it more usable across all of the DNN Corp products. What this means to you is that this feature has been under development and tested in real world environments for quite a long time now, and it’s inclusion into 9.0 is lower risk than nearly any zero point release before it. We can almost certainly expect for those rough edges to be smoothed out by the time 9.0 is ready for release.

Unexpected Multi-Tasking

What seems to be an unexpected feature is that you never know when your work is saved or not. Follow me here… If you do something like edit a configuration file. You may be working on multiple lines in the configuration. Next thing you know, an urgent phone call comes in asking for a quick SQL query report. You switch to the SQL view, and run the query. Problem averted! Just as you begin to return to the configuration updates, someone asks you over IM what the URL is for an important new content campaign. So, you leave the persona bar and navigate to the page, then send the URL. Awesome, now you can finish your work, right? Right. Just navigate back to the configuration manager, and your updates will still be there, waiting for you to click “Save.” Just be careful that you don’t forget about saving those updates.

Added Usability

The admin and “host” modules we’ve grown used to over the years are removed and replaced with streamlined counterparts. These new additions are more thoughtfully grouped together, as are the various settings that used to play hide-and-seek with us in the past, hidden across any number of configuration views and collapsed sections. You literally had to be using DNN for years before you could even consider yourself as an anything remotely close to a “DNN expert.” Another thing I liked while digging around is how the global and site-specific settings are both put side-by-side and easily distinguishable. When you’re not logged in with enough permissions, the global settings are neatly tucked away, and you’d never know they existed.

Some Missing Things

You shouldn’t look at “missing” as being necessarily a bad thing. Change is necessary, and DNN has had way too many features to get in everyone’s way for far too long now. The admin and “host” pages you’re used to using will mostly be gone when you upgrade, replaced by newer and easier to use counterparts in the persona bar. Some other things are missing too, like the Store/Forge integration in the Extensions management area. Again, the missing things aren’t necessarily a bad thing. In order for DNN and the DNN ecosystem to grow, this kind of change will be necessary. So far, the things I see missing are all very good. Although, I’m on the fence about the Store/Forge integration.

The Future Looks Even Brighter

We could find all kinds of little things to continue to talk about when it comes to the updates coming in DNN 9.0. However, the biggest thing I think we can look forward to with the updates we see applied in this release are the things that haven’t yet happened. Two of the most popular complaints about DNN are its speed, and how old the administration looks. The administration issue is clearly fixed here, and speed is addressed to some degree as a byproduct. The thing is for me though, this series of updates lay the foundation for something that will be much more impactful to the future of DNN – a reliance on the ancient .NET technology we call webforms. Once DNN 9.0 is released, the only things that really use and depend on webforms are the modules you see on individual pages. Architecturally speaking, DNN 9.0 appears to be the first step towards the newer ASP.NET Core we’ve all been anxious to see for quite some time now.

Moving on from DNNCon

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 04:42:35 GMT

Don’t let the headline freak you out. It’s not as bad as it sounds… We’ll start with some background, and then I’ll tell you the details.

Where it All Began: OpenForce Connect Orlando

The DNN Corp-run commercial conference that used to occur every year was originally called OpenForce. However, many of us felt that the DNN community could and should have its own event. One that was focused on the community, and less on anything commercial.

In 2008, I helped as a local organizer for the very first community conference in North America. It’s described in detail in the first chapter of any Wrox DNN book, and it was known as OpenForce Connect Orlando. At the time, I was a co-founder of the largest and most popular DNN user group, known as the ODUG or Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group. We put together an amazing event in less than 2 months’ time. We had over 200 people there for a one-day and one-track event.

Day of DotNetNuke (now DNNCon) was founded on the principle of being a community-run event, for the community. If you’ve ever been to a code camp before, this was one of the events that DNNCon was modeled after. No matter if/when DNN Corp has their own commercial event, this event was meant to serve the needs and desires of the community.

The following year, the community kept pinging me and others in the user group to put on another one. We really wanted to, but we also weren’t sure if we could. After all, we didn’t want to step on any toes (so to speak) since DNN wasn’t really ours. It belonged to DNN Corp. For those of you that haven’t been around for that long, you may not know some of the ways people tried to “steal” DNN in the past. So we wanted to make sure we did this in the right way. We kept e-mailing the folks at DNN Corp for several months, but no answer. Eventually, we took things into our own hands.

Now don’t go all conspiracy theory in the comments… They literally couldn’t respond to us, but we wouldn’t know that until much later. 2009 was the year that DNN Corp got funding. Part of the funding process required silence on their parts, so they couldn’t respond.

Day of DotNetNuke is Born

With a literal 2 months to the day, a group of us decided to put on the first Day of DotNetNuke event, and I was unanimously “volunteered” to be the organizer. In two months’ time again, we filled an entire event with people from all over the world. We had 5 or 6 tracks, training, and even exceeded the fire codes due to having too many people. Getting down the halls was a challenge to say the least. (Luckily, we didn’t get into any trouble.) This event would boast the most attendees for any future event until the first one held in Palm Beach some 4 years later.

Over the years, you’ve seen numerous people as the organizers of each respective event. I made it my role to recruit and empower event organizers in any way I could. I helped them to plan, organize, and execute each event. Without these people, this community event may have only happened once.

Here we are in 2016, and since then, Day of DotNetNuke has been rebranded to Day of DNN, and then to DNNCon. It’s been held 10 times in 3 countries, 2 continents, and 8 cities worldwide. By my guesstimate, it’s helped several thousand people all over the world from every walk of life learn more about DNN. I’ve heard too many amazing and life-changing stories to recount. At each event, I’ve collected new friends from all over the globe – relationships that in some cases are as close or closer than family. In fact, the first time I met my soul mate was at a DNNCon. Needless to say, DNNCon means a lot to me.

My Decision

If DNNCon has a “daddy,” I guess it would be me. As a father, sometimes you need to let your kid grow up on their own. This decision isn’t just about that though – but it’s not any less true.

Any of you that know me know that I’ve recently been going through some personal issues with a tragedy that literally hit close to home. I need to clear my plate a bit. Keeping up with everything I used to do before the tragedy has proven to be too exhausting since.

At the end of the day, I had a vision, together with hundreds of other DNN’ers we were able to make it happen, and it was nothing short of inspiring to see it continue to be adopted by so many people all over the world. These past 8 years have been very rewarding as a result. However, the only constant in life is change, and now is the time for a change to be made for DNNCon. We are at a critical point of growth in our community, and DNNCon needs a fresh vision and a renewed energy.

The Future

DNNCon Baltimore was the first event that was run in a committee manner. I’ve tried a few different models in the past, and this one was pretty successful. There is now a committee of well-known and experienced DNN community members who will take DNNCon and push it forward to bigger and better things. As of today, they’re 8 strong – eight of the brightest and most creative minds ever to be involved with DNNCon. Needless to say, the event we’ve grown to love is in good hands. If you have any questions about anything DNNCon, please e-mail info@dnncon.com.

I’m very excited for the new life and energy the committee will bring to you in the future events to come. As of right now, they’re closing in on making a decision for either Fall or Spring for the next DNNCon, but I’ll let them give you the details.

As for me, I’m not leaving the DNN community. You’ll still see me at events, online, and I’m still going to build and maintain DNN modules. This is simply a passing of the DNNCon torch from me, to a new group of people.

In closing, I’d like to thank you all for the support in putting on this event over the years. If any single video can sum up what DNNCon is, was, and could be, this would be it. Enjoy, and I hope to see you at the next event (where/whenever that may be).

DNN Hangout - March 2016 - DNN Community, User Groups, and MORE

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 06:19:49 GMT

David Poindexter is our guest in this month’s show. David is the “GeekEO” of nvisionative. I’ve interviewed him before in a Hotcakes Hangout, so you can get a lot of information about David and his company nvisionative there. In this show though, we wanted to focus on community activities. David and his fellow DNN’ers in the Charlotte, NC area have been doing great things for years now, so we wanted to pick his brain a bit, and then we finished things off with a very HUGE surprise for the DNN community.

Want to Be on the Show?

We’re always look for new guests to be on the show. Please contact me or send me a note in the comments below if you want to be featured, or know of someone that should be.

Next Episode

Our next episode isn’t yet finalized, but when it is, you’ll find it on the DNN community events page.

Site/Extension of the Month

We’re always looking for sites or extensions to feature in this segment. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites or extensions.

DNN Community, User Groups, and MORE

Show Notes

David Poindexter interview on Hotcakes Hangout
Southern Fried DNN User Group
DNNCon Baltimore 2016
DNN-Connect 2016
DNN 8 Module Contest Modules
- BBImageStory by Torsten Weggen
- Call Tracker by Dan McDonald
- Code Camp Events by Will Strohl
- DNN Connect Conference by Peter Donker
- DNN Connect Map by Peter Donker
- DNN Dev Tools by Jan Jonas and Matthias Benfer (Winner: SPA category)
- DNN Job Board by Dylan Lopez and Aaron Lopez
- DNN Video Course by Ralph Williams (Winner: Community Choice category)
- Intelequia Vault by Kepa González; Alberto Mendoza; Víctor Calero; and Aarón Suárez
- Log Analyzer by Scott Wilkinson
- Message of the Day by Chris Hammond
- MyDNN Live Chat by Mohammad Mehdi and Eskandari Jajarm (Winner: MVC category)
- ShoutBox SPA by Mark McAvoy
- UManage by Davide Espertini, Davide Galimberti, Paolo Roth, and Matteo Benedusi
DNN Community Links
- Community Exchange
- DNN Events
- Community Voice
- Community Forums
- Working Groups
- Documentation Center
- User Groups (contact me and I’ll help you)
- DNN Store
- DNN Forge
- DNN on Github
- DNN Community on Github
nvQuickSite
- Download
- Documentation
David’s slide show/presentation

Blogs & Articles

Debugging JavaScript Errors with a Modern Browser and F12 by Daniel Mettler
New Visual Studio 2015 Templates for DNN, Now with Wizard for Customizing by Chris Hammond
Using Cloud Storage for DNN Images, Users and Other Folders by Bruce Chapman
Community Blog Guidelines by Joe Brinkman
DNN Hangout: February 2016 by Will Strohl
DNN Hangout: January 2016 by Will Strohl
And the Winner is… by Joe Brinkman
DNN 8 DnnImageHandler.ashx 404 by Chris Hammond
3 Reasons Why We're Moving from Grunt to Gulp by Daniel Mettler

Extension Updates

Cross Photo Gallery 6.1 by DNNModule.com
OpenContent 2.1 by Sacha Trauwaen
Classified Pro 8.7 (E-Commerce, Store, Auction, Ads, Content Localization) by DNNModule.com
Blueimp Carousel Slider App 2.0.2 by Daniel Mettler
YouTube Vimeo Timeline by coolDNN
DNN PayPal Add-On 2.0 by DNN Sharp
Bluebird JS Library by Brian Dukes
DNN Core Russian Language Pack by Roman Yagodin
DNN Chat by Chris Hammond
Less.js by Brian Dukes
IE6 Shim by Brian Dukes
2sxc by Daniel Mettler
DNN Simple Article by Chris Hammond
SystemJS by Brian Dukes
SystemJS Polyfills by Brian Dukes
Crewstone Codesmith Templates 7.4 by Keith Stone
R7.Documents by Roman Yagodin
Doris Responsive Theme by SpeedyApplication.com
Unlimited Responsive DNN Theme by DNNGo.net
BD008 Theme 12 Colors by JustDNN

DNN Hangout - February 2016 - DNNCon and DNN-Connect 2016 Questions and Answers

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 07:22:28 GMT

There are two DNN conferences coming up very soon. DNNCon is in April, held in Baltimore, Maryland, and DNN-Connect is in Girona, Spain in June. Our guests are all organizers or co-organizers, and they spend some time with us

Want to Be on the Show?

We are always looking for new people to be featured on the show. You don’t have to be an “expert” in anything. Just be prepared to chat with us about anything interesting about DNN, no matter how big or small.

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be on DNN Hangout (or if you know of someone that should be on the show).

Next Episode

Next month, we speak to David Poindexter from nvisionative, and a co-leader of the Southern Fried DNN user group. He’s going to talk to us about user groups and other community topics. However, I hear that he might have a HUGE surprise presentation during the hangout as well.

Reserve Your Spot

Site/Extension of the Month

We’re always looking for sites or extensions to feature in this segment. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites or extensions.

DNNCon and DNN-Connect 2016 Questions and Answers

Show Notes

DNN Hangout - January 2016 - DNN 8 Release Overview for Developers

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 06:37:10 GMT

In this episode, we decided to have our guest be the topic. The DNN 8 release was so HUUUUUUGE that we felt that it needed to speak for itself. DNN 8 brings with it a ton of new features that developers can take advantage of. These things include new MVC and SPA development patterns. Patterns that never before existed officially and never before came supported out of the box.

Want to Be on the Show?

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be on DNN Hangout (or if you know of someone that should be on the show).

Next Episode

That’s already happened. See the next post about the next episode.

Site/Extension of the Month

We’re always looking for sites or extensions to feature in this segment. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites or extensions.

DNN 8 Overview for Developers

Show Notes

If any links are missing from the show notes, you can blame Joe. But if you leave a comment, I’ll be sure to update the post with any missing links.

DNN Hangout - December 2016 - Module Development from a Skinner’s Perspective

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 01:27:04 GMT

While this is nearly a month late in getting posted, the show isn’t any less important. Not by a longshot. In fact, it’s one of my favorite episodes we’ve ever done. In this show, we speak with Ralph Williams. If you’ve been around DNN for any length of time, you know that we all know Ralph for one thing… his amazing theming (skinning) work. He’s one of the minds behind the initial Day of DotNetNuke branding, technical presentations on best practices as it relates to DNN theming, theming training at all of the recent DNNCon events, and wrote the theme chapter in the latest DNN book. In this show, we didn’t speak to Ralph about themes at all. We spoke about the MODULE that he built. Not just any module either… a SPA-based, video-centric LMS module!

Want to Be on the Show?

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be on DNN Hangout (or if you know of someone that should be on the show).

Next Episode

That’s already happened. See the next post about the next episode.

Site/Extension of the Month

We’re always looking for sites or extensions to feature in this segment. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites or extensions.

A Skinner’s Perspective After Building Their First DNN SPA Module

And now, let Ralph tell you about “the Angular.” That’s what he says at 53:51.

Show Notes

DNN Hangout Special Episode - October 2015 - Building Modules Using the DNN 8 MVC Pattern

Sat, 17 Oct 2015 02:13:55 GMT

This is the second of two special episodes of the DNN Hangout, focused on helping DNN developers world-wide to learn more about the DNN 8 module development patterns. This time, we walked through the MVC development pattern in DNN. Following this hangout, you should have all of the knowledge you need to get started building your module for the DNN 8 Module Development Contest.

Previous Episode: Building Modules Using the DNN 8 SPA Pattern

Show Notes

DNN Hangout Special Episode - October 2015 - Building Modules Using the DNN 8 SPA Pattern

Fri, 09 Oct 2015 02:29:18 GMT

Every now and then, we throw in a special episode of DNN Hangout. These special episodes are normally by request of you or another viewer in our audience. This time, we didn’t need to wait for a prompt… With the announcement of the DNN 8 module development contest, we already knew that people would be more than eager to get started… but before you can get started, you probably need a primer on just how to do that. That’s the sole purpose of this hangout.

Next Episode: Building modules using the DNN 8 MVC pattern

Side Note: If you talk to, meet, or otherwise run into Ian Robinson, please thank him for creating dnndev.me. The little bit of time that everyone in the community saves with this contribution is pretty awesome!

Show Notes

DNN Hangout - October 2015 - Getting Funky with the Form and List Module

Thu, 08 Oct 2015 03:46:51 GMT

This month is a hangout that I’m very proud to have been a part of. For one reason, we announced an exciting DNN 8 module development contest. A contest that will yield some people in the community a lot of cash. The other reason, is that I have the honor of interviewing one of my favorite DNN brothers, Clint Patterson. I think you’ll agree by the end of the hangout – if it takes you that long – that Clint is one of the smartest people in our community, and easily one of the most resourceful, passionate, and sincere members we have. We are lucky to have him in our community.

Want to Be on the Show?

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be on DNN Hangout (or if you know of someone that should be on the show).

Next Episode

Next month, we originally were reserving the show for DNN 8. With that release being pushed to January or so, we’re looking for a guest for November now.

Site/Extension of the Month

We’re always looking for sites or extensions to feature in this segment. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites or extensions.

Getting Funky with Form and List

Show Notes

Clint Patterson
- We Hunt SC
- @CBPSC
- Clint, playing football
- His book, American Epidemic: High Maintenance Women
- Arrow Consulting & Design
  - Meet the Team (rollovers)
- Southern Fried DNN
DNN Form & List
- CodePlex (install packages)
- Github (latest source)
Using dnnModal.show in your modules and content by Chris Hammond
Live Content module by Mandeeps

Thank you to Mark Buelsing, for your very useful comment during the show, with additional Form and List module examples!

Events

DNNCon 2016 currently in preliminary planning
DNN 8 module development contest

Articles, News, Blogs

A Break with the Past by Joe Brinkman
Announcing the Dynamic Content Creator by Joe Brinkman
Vendor Interview: Jason Lichon, Founding Partner @ BlueBolt Solutions by Aderson Oliveira
DNN News by Aderson Oliveira
Contribute? Yes you can! by Ernst Peter Tamminga
DNN 7.4.2 Security bulletins released by Cathal Connolly
DNN Platform 7.4.2 is Released by Joe Brinkman

Extension Releases

Content Injection Module 2.0.1 by Will Strohl
Hotcakes Commerce 1.9.0 by Hotcakes Commerce
Hotcakes Add-On by DNN Sharp
Various JavaScript Libraries by Brian Dukes
News Viper 1.0 by Bite the Bullet (Cart Viper)
Ninja Backup and Optimizer (free beta access) by OnyakTech
PortalKeeper 4.2.2 by Aricie
R7.Documents by Roman Yagodin
Revindex Storefront 7.4 by Revindex

DNN Hangout - September 2015 - Miscellaneous DNN News and Goodies

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 02:31:12 GMT

We had planned to speak with Phillip Becker this month, but he had a personal emergency he had to tend to. We’ll get that rescheduled for you soon… Go figure – we got the technical issues solved, and we loose the speaker. This left us to get creative last minute and come up with a show for you – and we did. In this show, we pull out some of our tips and tricks, in addition to bringing you the typical DNN news.

Want to Be on the Show?

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be on DNN Hangout.

Next Episode

In our next scheduled hangout, we’ll be speaking with Clint Patterson, the unofficial official southerner of the DNN community. He’s done some very creative things using the Form and List module, and he’s going to show us just how easy that is. In his own words, we’ll be getting funky with form and list!

Join the Hangout

Site/Extension of the Month

We’re always looking for sites or extensions to feature in this segment. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites or extensions.

Miscellaneous DNN News and Goodies

Show Notes

Events

DNNCon 2015 – Unfortunately, there’s no update on this yet (if you want to organize it, please let me know)
Hotcakes Hangout

Articles, Videos, and Blogs

Understanding the DNN Platform Source Code by Will Strohl
DNN 8.0.0 CTP 4 by Joe Brinkman
Baby Steps by Joe Brinkman
Vendor Interview: Chris Wylie, CEO @ Accord LMS by Aderson Oliveira
What are DNX, DNVM, DNU and other ASP.NET 5 components? by Bruce Chapman

Extension Updates

Ninja Click Point by OnyakTech
Cross Video Gallery by DNNModule.com
Advanced Visitor Analyzer by Kevin
Umanage by OPSI
Hotcakes Cart Item Count skin object by nvisionative
HammerFlex by Chris Hammond
2sxc Content by Daniel Mettler
Content Injection by Will Strohl
DNN Hangout by Will Strohl

DNN Hangout - August 2015 - Understanding the DNN Platform Source Code

Thu, 27 Aug 2015 06:28:15 GMT

Every now and again, we’ll throw in a special episode of DNN Hangout, where we talk about something that we believe will be extra beneficial to the community. Sometimes this will have one or more special guests attached to it, sometimes it won’t. In this special episode, Joe Brinkman and I walk through the source code of DNN platform. It’s grown so much over the years that we realize just how intimidating it can be to someone. After watching this hangout, that intimidation should be at a minimum.

Want to Be on the Show?

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be on DNN Hangout.

Next Episode

In our next hangout, we’ll be speaking with a return guest. I heard about and unfortunately had to miss his session at last year’s DNNCon. He showed everyone his tips and tricks to putting together a socially engaging DNN site, and he used DNN-Connect as an example. Phillip Becker will be joining us and filling us in on the things he learned.

Join the Hangout

Site of the Month

We’re always looking for sites to feature in our Site of the Month segment. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites.

Understanding the DNN Platform Source Code

Show Notes

DNN Hangout - August 2015 - Introducing Aricie’s PortalKeeper Module

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:59:46 GMT

It’s always exciting for me to meet someone in the DNN community that I haven’t met before. This hangout is one of those times. In this hangout, we speak with Jess (or Jean-Sylvain Boige) of Aricie. He’s the CTO of Aricie and the genius mind behind the module for DNN called PortalKeeper. I must admit, I didn’t know anything about PortalKeeper before this hangout, but rest assured… this is going to be a pretty standard tool of mine for current and future projects. If you’ve gotten even the beginnings of a technical bone in your body, you’re sure to geek-out just like I did!

Want to Be on the Show?

We are always looking for new people to be featured on the show. You don’t have to be an “expert” in anything. Just come prepared to chat with us about anything interesting about DNN, no matter how big or small.

Please let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be on DNN Hangout.

Next Episode

In our next episode, we’ll be having a very special show. Joe and I will be taking a deep dive into the source code of DNN. When it first began, it was a fairly simple project. Not anymore.

We’re looking for any special guest to join us for this. You don’t have to do anything, except help us introduce you, and ask questions during the hangout.

Join the Hangout

Site of the Month

We didn’t have any sites to show off this month. It was mostly my fault for not promoting it as much as I had in the past. I could have shown some that I have, but I much rather highlight yours. Please let me know if you’d like for me to do a quick segment on one of your sites.

Jean-Sylvain Boige: Introducing the PortalKeeper Module

Show Notes

Events

DNNCon 2015 – Unfortunately, there’s no update on this yet (if you want to organize it, please let me know)

Articles, Videos, and Blogs

DNN 7.4.2 Beta by Joe Brinkman
Vendor Interview: Will Strohl, Co-Owner @ Hotcakes Commerce by Aderson Oliveira
DNN 8 CTP 3 by Joe Brinkman
To MVC or Not to MVC by Peter Donker

Extension Updates

Cross Article 8.0
Evotiva Upgrade 1.4
OnyakTech Custom Forms 7.0
ZLDNN Lightbox Gallery 7.2
OnyakTech Easy User Import 2.0
PROdnn Mighty LMS
EasyDNNMaps 1.3
Hotcakes Commerce 1.8.7 (1.9.0 in beta)
Events Module by Ernst Peter Tamminga
OpenForm by Sacha Trauwaen
2sxc 7.2.2 by Daniel Mettler
Christoc's DNN Development Templates by Chris Hammond
Session Warning by Ainsof So'o
OpenContent by Sacha Trauwaen
JavaScript Libraries by Brian Dukes

DNN Hangout - July 2015 - How Many Ways Can You Extend DNN?

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 00:36:45 GMT

This month we had the pleasure to speak with Mitchel Sellers. He’s a long-time DNN supporter and advocate. Aside from being a DNN and Microsoft MVP, he’s literally written the book on extending DNN through modules. He’s regularly found at community events, and pretty much everywhere online, attempting to help people with their C# and DNN needs.

Want to Be on the Show?

We are always looking for new people to be features on the show. Please let me know in the comments of via email if you’d like to be on the DNN Hangout.

Next Episode

Next month we’ll be speaking to the CEO of Aricie, Jean Sylvain Boige. He’s going to be walking us through his open source Portal Keeper module, and how it will help you make your DNN site administration easier.

Join the Hangout

Site of the Month

MRA was our site of the month this episode, courtesy of our speaker, Mitchel Sellers. MRA is a non-profit organization that has been around for over 100 years, and helps companies with their HR needs.

Mitchel was kind enough to walk us through their site, where he pointed out that the upgrade helped them getting to a responsive site to help increase membership and membership activity. Mitchel and his team also paid a lot of attention to make sure that document management and search worked well, using Ventrian News Articles and DNN Sharp Search Boost.

Mitchel Sellers: How Many Ways Can You Extend DNN?

Show Notes

The resource listing below is provided for your reference and convenience. Listing a resource does not imply an endorsement or guaranty of any kind.

Articles, Videos, Blogs

DNN core extensions have moved to Github by Ernst Peter Tamminga
DNN monthly MVP meeting notes by Ernst Peter Tamminga
DNN 8 module development – Part 01 by Charles Nurse
DNN 8 module development – Part 02 by Charles Nurse
DNN 8 module development – Part 03 by Charles Nurse
DNN 8 module development – Part 04 by Charles Nurse
DNN 8 module development – Part 05 by Charles Nurse
DNN 8 module development – Part 06 by Charles Nurse
Interview with Peter Donker of DMX by Aderson Oliveira
Using Luke to peek into the Lucene search database by Ash Prasad

Extension Updates

DNN Hangout - May 2015 - Mandeeps Presents the New Live Forms Module

Sat, 06 Jun 2015 00:59:52 GMT

In this episode, we have the pleasure to speak with another veteran of the DNN community, Mandeep Singh. Mandeep is the CEO and founder of Mandeeps, one of the most successful and seasoned vendors in the DNN ecosystem. Like some of our previous guests, Mandeep has been using DNN since the beginning – and it shows. He and his team have been extremely successful in building up a large following of customers due to their focus on usability and support. As you’ll soon find out, they are raising the bar with the latest Live Forms release.

Want to Be On the Show?

We are always looking for new people to be features on the show. Please let me know in the comments of via email if you’d like to be on the DNN Hangout.

Next Episode

Next month (sometime next week), we’ll be speaking to a special guest from Microsoft. Make sure you tune in! Follow @JBrinkman and/or @WillStrohl on twitter to hear about when it will be scheduled.

Site of the Month

This month, we featured the website for the Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri. It is the regional site for the Girl Scouts of America. This site was built perfectly for their target market, with it being fun, colorful, and easy to use. There are a lot of third party modules being used on this site, including Content Injection, Events, DNNGo DNN Gallery, DNNGo PowerForms, and Iframe. In addition, they’re using the oddly named 20030-UnlimitedColorPack-016 skin.

If you would like for your site to be featured in an upcoming hangout, please let me know.

Mandeeps Presents: The New Live Forms Module

Show Notes

Mandeeps
Evoq Preferred Products
EVS (Extension Verification Service for DNN)
Mandeeps review by Eric Swanzey
Mandeeps Live Forms
Jira
DNN API documentation
DNN-Connect 2015

Articles, Videos, Blogs

DNN Store vendor interview with Mandeep Singh of Mandeeps, by Aderson Oliveira
DNN Hero: New things in DNN 8, SPA, Razor, and more, by Aderson Oliveira
DNN Store vendor interview with Tracy Wittenkeller of T-WORX, by Aderson Oliveira
Workaround for a potential security issue, by Cathal Connolly
Building SPA modules using Razor and WebAPI, by Bruce Chapman
DNN development templates update, by Chris Hammond
POSSCON 2015 summary, by Clint Patterson

Extension Updates

DNN Hangout - May 2015 - Managing Pull Requests with GitHub

Sat, 06 Jun 2015 00:02:33 GMT

Practice makes perfect, right? At least that’s what “they” say. In this case, we attempted to do a special edition DNN Hangout about DNN and GitHub. Unfortunately, the first time we did it, we only showed a single screen. So we did it again! In this hangout, we focus on the process and steps that are performed when you contribute to the DNN GitHub project. This will be helpful to not only understand the process, but also get some ideas for process in your own projects.

Want to Be On the Show?

We are always looking for new people to be features on the show. Please let me know in the comments of via email if you’d like to be on the DNN Hangout.

Next Episode

Next month (sometime next week), we’ll be speaking to a special guest from Microsoft. Make sure you tune in! Follow @JBrinkman and/or @WillStrohl on twitter to hear about when it will be scheduled.

Site of the Month

This was a special episode, so we didn’t follow our normal format of highlighting a DNN site.

If you would like for your site to be featured in an upcoming hangout, please let me know.

Managing Pull Requests with GitHub

Show Notes

The New WillStrohl.com - Now Responsive With Acceptable Page Load Times

Mon, 25 May 2015 01:36:48 GMT

It’s been several years since I last updated the skin on my site. Thanks to Ralph Williams, the site is looking really good again and it’s responsive. If you need a new design for your site, I highly recommend him. However, the process to get to this blog post was quite tumultuous – chock full of hours troubleshooting and continuous frustration spread over the past week. Simply put, my site “appeared” to be loading okay whenever I came to it, but I rarely browsed my own site. The process of rolling out my new design had revealed to me that this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Before I go any further, everything I am about to tell you about how I got the site back to being “normal,” you should know that this could all have been easily avoided. Rule #1 of running your own site end-to-end is this – NEVER neglect your site or server duties. This was my downfall. I had neglected my duties for a few years now.

What’s Old is New Again

Everything I went through were things that I used to do on a daily basis. I was one of those people that wore every hat possible and I did it well. However, it’s been several years since I wore all of the hats, so this took much longer than it should have. Despite the frustration and lost time, it was quite fun to learn about some of the new tools and methods used to fix these kinds of issues.

The Symptoms

Every page load on my primary site (WillStrohl.com) seemed to be slower than desired. Then, about every 3rd or 4th page load, it would take an excessively long time. We’re talking up to 60 seconds or so. There are several other sites on my server as well, but their page loads only appeared to be affected when my primary site was having one of those excessively long page loads.

I had my task manager up during most of the troubleshooting and noticed that when there was an excessively long page load, both the memory and CPU levels would spike and stay pegged. My server has a decent amount of resources, so this was troubling.

Troubleshooting Begins

The obvious thing to do was to look at the Event Log in DNN (since that’s what my site runs), and in the event log in Windows. No matter what site software/CMS you run, the Windows event log will generally have information that your web-based event log won’t have.

The DNN event log had a number of module and page load exceptions showing, but nothing that made me think that my site was running slowly due to the software. Exceptions happen and the frequency simply wasn’t there. The Windows event log was another story altogether – there were nothing but exceptions showing. The most common ones were related to the w3wp.exe process failing.

I happened to be chatting with a friend that owns arguably one of the best Windows web hosting companies out there, Applied Innovations (shameless plug for my generous web host), and he turned me on to LeanSentry. I had conveyed the same information that you now know, and he mentioned how their services allow you to get better insights into the seemingly generic errors that are found in the servers event log. Their UI leaves much to be desired, but it is indeed a great way to get to know what’s happening at a glance. What I was dealing with originally is below.

If that image looks crazy to you, you’re right. The very active parts on either end are when I was actively troubleshooting the site and server. The middle part is where I had dinner and slept. The consistent thing you’ll notice are the orange and red lines. These are lines tracking worker process crashes and application restarts. As you can see, even with little to no traffic, the server and my site were not having a good time. Something was majorly wrong.

Keeping It Simple: Cleanup First

Like I said, there are a number of sites on this server – mostly for my pet projects, friends, and family. They’re pretty much all running DNN too, so first thing first – upgrade them all to the most current version and get rid of any that don’t need to be around any longer. I had a number of sites that had been shut down over the years, but still were loaded on the server in various ways. First, I deleted all of the unnecessary sites and their references. Then, I upgraded the few that were left and disabled 51 Degrees on all of them.

With my primary site, upgrading wasn’t as simple. The others were quite clean, but I’ve done a lot on my site over the years – that, and combine my new site getting rid of some of the previous features, there was a lot more work to do. I had to upgrade a few modules and uninstall some others. In fact, I also found that one of the modules had a repeating error that couldn’t be fixed, so I had to find a replacement for it and uninstall it as well.

As a result of this cleanup, all of my page load times had decreased dramatically, but it didn’t fix the real issue. The crashes and exceptions in the Windows event log were still occurring.

Security Updates

The reasoning behind upgrades is primarily two-fold: performance improvements in more recent versions of DNN, and the related security updates. This is because a couple of the sites were surprisingly still running DNN 5.x! Following the site upgrades and module upgrades, I installed and ran the new Security Analyzer module by Cathal Connoly. It did indeed note a few issues on a few of my sites. No performance was gained here, but I definitely felt a little peace of mind. This was especially true of my primary site, since it had a very deeply rooted PHP file in one of the HTML editor providers.

Windows Updates

Many of you are thinking, “Duh, Will.” The reality is that it’s far too easy to forget to run Windows Update on your server – especially when you login from time to time and see notifications that Windows updates had been applied since your login on your behalf. However, I still had 1 critical update to apply and 6 other optional updates. In total, 3 of them appeared to be related to performance improvements. This proved to be true. There was a noticeable improvement in page loads and even a noticeable improvement in the frequency of crashes in the event log, but this was not the fix.

Disable FCNMode

During another IM conversation with some friends, Clint Patterson reminded me of a performance blog by Shaun Walker where the FCNMode setting resolved performance issues on DNNSoftware.com. While my site doesn’t have anywhere near the same user base and traffic, I figured it wouldn’t hurt anything to switch it. Sure enough, there was again a noticeable performance impact. My application restart times were at least were cut by half – but still, the other issues remained.

Debugging the Crashes

I was getting nowhere pretty fast with the previous attempts at narrowing down causes, so I decided to debug this further by using Debug Diagnostic Tool (Debug Diag). There’s a blog post by Tess Fernandez that walks you through debugging ASP.NET crashes incredibly well. This step didn’t help me fix anything, but it did help me to narrow my search for causes down to one of two exceptions that were occurring. A little tip here… You’re going to be generating dump files if you do this – don’t forget to save your dump files to a drive with plenty of available space.

Getting to the Bottom of it All

The issue that was appearing the most in my application monitoring and event log was the fact that w3wp.exe (the process that runs the websites) was crashing quite often. There were a few other common exceptions. One appeared to be related to Windows complaining about a culture missing. This turned out to not be the real issue, but something that happens a lot and is often expected. So, I cleared the temporary ASP.NET files and continued looking into the other common exception.

The other exception was one that kept complaining about the Lucene.Net.dll file not being found.

Unable to find assembly 'Lucene.Net, Version=3.0.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=85089178b9ac3181'.

Unfortunately, not only was the file present everywhere that it should be, but it was the correct version as well. It just didn’t make sense to me at all. I poured over search after search to try and figure out why this might happen. I even tried explicitly wiring up the DLL and version in the web.config of my site. Nothing seemed to prevent the worker process crashes.

Now here’s what was interesting about this to me. I performed several searches related to this error – some specific to DNN and some much more general. Regardless, I kept seeing results appear with Umbraco mentioned. Originally, I kept ignoring those results in favor of others. At the end though, I got desperate, so I began reading those ones as well. As it turned out, many Umbraco implementations were having the exact same issue and the fix was astoundingly simple… Delete the search index files from the App_Data folder. In DNN, this folder would be as follows:

\App_Data\Search

I deleted all of the files files in that folder and recycled the application pools. (Don’t worry, the files will be re-created.)

I immediately saw a performance increase like none before it. Every page was loading snappy quick. The occasional long page loads were gone. The worker process crashes appeared to be no more as well. I sat there… I clicked on my site aimlessly for about 15 minutes before I finally rejoiced! No crashes and no noticeable changes were coming back. The site was back to normal!

This fix was something so simple… and it had been so difficult to track down. The end results are shown below. Note the dramatic dip near the center when the search files were deleted. All sites on my server have run smoothly since.

At the end of the day, all of these tools and methods helped to get all of my sites back to a state of being highly responsive in both ways that a site owner would care about. I highly recommend them all. Especially LeanSentry, but it’s expensive for a non-business site owner like me. If you ever hear of them having some kind of freemium edition, don’t forget to let me know.

DNN Hangout - April 2015 - Meet the DNN-Connect Association

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 22:02:31 GMT

We’ve been doing the DNN Hangout for almost a year now. The primary focus for each hangout is to help the community know what’s going on in the community and the overall ecosystem. This hangout seems to have captured that focus far better than any prior. We invited the founding members of the DNN-Connect Association: Peter Donker, Philipp Becker, and Vicenç Masanas. In this hangout, we learn more about the founders, what DNN-Connect is, and about the very near DNN-Connect 2015 event.

Want to Be on the Show?

We are always looking for new people to be features on the show. Please let me know in the comments of via email if you’d like to be on the DNN Hangout.

Next Episode

Next month we will be speaking with Mandeep Singh from Mandeeps. He’s going to walk us through the most recent release of the Live Forms module.

Site of the Month

We had a site of the month to feature this month, but I decided to postpone this segment to the next episode so that we had more time to speak with our 3 guests during this hangout.

If you would like for your site to be featured in an upcoming hangout, please let me know.

DNN Hangout with DNN-Connect

Show Notes

DNN-Connect 2015 (May 28-31 in Millau, France)
DNN 7 Book is on sale now, shipping on May 11
DNN Store Vendor Interview with Chad Nash
Training working group Trello board

Interesting Blogs

Ecosystem Releases

Presentation: Building a DNN Module in Minutes

Fri, 20 Mar 2015 07:12:45 GMT

I’ve always been passionate about helping people learn more about DNN and use it in new and creative ways. I noticed that Sean Gahan was giving a presentation at the Central California .Net User Group in Fresno, CA. (They told me this area is also called Clovis.) I immediately contacted the, because I was hoping that they might be streaming the user group meeting. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, but they invited me to speak.

Sean of course presented on DNN development, and they asked me to take this into a deeper level. I began by giving an introduction of DNN and it’s architecture. Then we walked through using the Christoc module development template. The demo was finished off by walking through the example solution I have that demonstrates what the environment might look like for team and enterprise development. We capped things off by discussing some best practices. Something I kept trying to highlight was how much code that they don’t have to write anymore.

The meeting was held at a place called Bitwise Mural District. The name and the look from the outside was deceiving. I had no idea what to expect, but it ended up being one of the coolest co-working spaces I’ve been to. It was like walking into a well-funded San Francisco start up office. I’ve been to tons of code camps and user group meetings across the country, and this was one of the coolest venues for a user group meeting.

If you’re in the “Clovis” area, I highly recommend this group. The format is very laid back, and highly informative. It doesn’t hurt that the folks in this group are all fun, smart, and incredibly interested in soaking up and sharing information. Oh, and my favorite attendee was Dilbert! (See the photo above.)

You can also download the PDF of the presentation.