Official Blog of Will Strohl

Surprises for Day of DotNetNuke Charlotte 2012 That You Can’t Miss!

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:03:00 PDT

If you haven’t learned yet, the Day of DotNetNuke always has surprises that are only available to people that actually go to the event. It’s always been my style to save the best for last in terms of announcing those surprises. Also in that bucket is that I want for those that physically attend DotNetNuke events get the very best in value when these plans are made. If this hasn’t taught you anything, it should teach you this… DO NOT miss the Day of DotNetNuke. This year, the surprise is not just one, but TWO surprises. These surprises have been kept so quiet that the local event organizers and even people at DotNetNuke Corporation didn’t know.

One of the many reasons that the Day of DotNetNuke is being held in Charlotte is because the enthusiasm of the Queen City DotNetNuke User Group (QCDUG), and especially the user group leaders. This enthusiasm is seen world-wide on the various social networks on a monthly basis, but it was front and center when they brought the most attendees to DNN World 2011. As a result, they won a DotNetNuke Corporation sponsored user group meeting including a visit by a speaker of their choice. These folks are never ones to hold back or aim low. They chose DNN Corp CEO, Navin Nagiah. Navin was excited to visit the QCDUG.

Last month, the DNN Facebook page had some great artwork featured around the theme of baseball. In fact, the profile avatar was a DNN-branded baseball. Quite honestly, the number of people asking if that baseball was real and how to get one was overwhelming. The community was incredibly fired up about the idea of having a DotNetNuke baseball. I am not a baseball fan myself, but I am in that group of people too.

Surprise #1: 100% More Keynote Goodness

I am very excited to tell everyone that the keynote will indeed be Navin Nagiah as planned, but joining him will be Shaun Walker, the founder of DotNetNuke itself and a co-founder of DNN Corp. This is sure to be an outstanding keynote. Shaun always announces the super cool stuff!

Surprise #2: Suh-weet and Unique DNN Swag!

I am not sure what I am more excited to announce, because this is pretty awesome! Attendees at Day of DotNetNuke Charlotte 2012 will receive a DNN-branded baseball! That’s right… You will have your baseball, but it’s first come, first serve. They are in limited quantity, so make sure you show up early!

If you weren’t planning on showing up before, make plans. Beg, borrow, and steal to make your way to Charlotte this weekend. Well, please don’t actually do anything illegal, but do what you can to show up. Not only will you be on the front line of learning all about the world’s only social CMS, but you will be able to network with fellow DotNetNuke users, enthusiasts, developers, designers, and more. Learn best practices, tips, and tricks, and build long lasting and life changing relationships. Once you get involved in the DNN community, there’s no turning back...

WillStrohl.com Moves to Mandeeps Live Blog

Mon, 07 May 2012 12:32:26 PDT

Since WillStrohl.com has been up and running, its primary function or purpose has been to host my personal blog about many things, but mostly DotNetNuke. During this time, it has always run on the “core” Blog Module. Say what you want about the core blog module, but it has always been a very functional way to build and maintain a blog presence on DNN. There has always been a way to accomplish anything you wanted using it, whether it was adding other modules to the page, adjusting the design, or simply recompiling the module with any adjustments I’ve needed. I’ve traditionally had time to do this, all with the intention of helping to make the blog module a better module. Though, I recently changed blog modules, and that’s what this article is about.

Disclaimer: First, I work for DotNetNuke Corporation, if you didn’t already know. So, even though I have it posted everywhere, I should mention that this blog entry contains comments and opinions that are my own, and have no endorsement whatsoever from DNN Corp. Second, I am doing a thorough write-up of my experience with a specific blog module. While I feel that I have tried to not make this come off as an advertisement, I want you to know outright that I am not advertising for them.

The “core” blog module has had a very exciting, long, fun, and rough past. At some points it was simply misunderstood. Other times it was missing features. And yet other times, it was laying dormant, waiting someone to give it some long overdue TLC (tender loving care). Such is the nature of a purely open source project. It’s always at the mercy of those that hopefully have the necessary time needed to keep it updated. I’ve always been very patient with the module myself because I love doing things with “core” modules first before going to the ecosystem. After all, how else can the project know where and how to proceed if people are not using it and offering feedback, requests, fixes, code, and more?

Well, these days I have much less time to dedicate to helping that project than I used to. I mean, I already run or contribute to more than 15 other projects on CodePlex. This entire time I was basically working on a fork of the blog module anyway, since I had some specific requirements (or ideas) about how I best wanted my blog to do things on my site. After all, this is one of the many benefits of using an open source module to begin with. Unfortunately for the module itself, I needed to take that off of my plate, so the search for other blog modules began…

The Blog Selection Process

The DotNetNuke ecosystem has several modules that are either built to support blogging, or can be configured to support a blog. Whether it comes from the Store or the Forge, you’re given many quality options. Among them are some really great choices, and even some very flexible ones that aren’t a blog out-of-the-box, but can be after some configuration (some requiring more configuration than others).

After a bit of research, I decided to use Live Blog by Mandeeps. Mandeep Singh heads up Mandeeps, has long been in the DotNetNuke community, and their solutions have always had a positive reputation during this time. All of their modules have regular releases and very responsive support. I tested this through the Store before moving forward. This was the first step to feeling better about choosing Live Blog as my solution.

Next, with very few exceptions, all of his extensions that have been reviewed continue to have 5 star reviews. Whether I looked there, on twitter, or in the DNN forums, Mandeeps overall has had great feedback from those that use their modules.

The final piece that really sealed the deal was that it seemed that no matter which blog solution I was coming from, Live Blog had the hardest part of the migration path already solved for me. It would simply import all of my blog posts and comments for me, maintaining the original integrity of by blog with nearly no effort at all. I tested this several times in a staging environment, and it always worked great! This alone is highly impressive.

The three components mentioned above were the critical first steps in my selection process. Mandeeps Live Blog had very responsive support, great reputation & reviews, and it allowed me to easily migrate my content to it.

My Feature Requirements

Not every blog is created equal. Although many blogs are created or used for the same general purpose, they all have their own agendas and goals. My main goal is SEO. I want to make sure that by blog entries can be found by people, regardless to whether those people were coming from Google, Bing, or {Gasp!} Yahoo. Yes. Yahoo is still around. ;)

Since my main goal was SEO, I needed a solution that practiced some very specific key things in order to not hurt whatever goodness my SEO had already attained. I needed H1’s and H2’s in the right places, great looking page titles and URLs, categories with friendly URLs, site maps, and so on. Live Blog has all of these features and more.

Comments are important to any blog. I have wanted to transition to use Disqus for my blog comments for a long time because their comment engine is unmatched in capabilities and stickiness. Unfortunately, I’ve either been too busy or too lazy to write the code to export my comments using their WP standard. There were two great things about Live Blog in this area… First, it already has them implemented as a forward only feature. However, a very recent release also allows you to export your existing comments to Disqus, allowing you to choose to use their comment engine at any time! Suh-weet!

I also track my own feed status through Feedburner. I have really grown to like this service and didn’t want to move away from it for my RSS links. Live Blog doesn’t get in the way here at all.

The final requirement I had was to be able to make the new blog fit into my own design. Luckily, my design isn’t terribly complicated. Regardless though, the template feature in Live Blog makes generating your own template to suit your needs incredibly easy.

Any Bells or Whistles?

If you’re not familiar with the term “bells and whistles,” it is simply a slang way of talking about really cool add-ons or features. Live Blog has plenty of them.

Beyond what I’ve already mentioned, you get some really cool things like deep Windows Live Writer integration. You can choose your own URL structure for each new blog post. It has an easy to use control panel-style settings view. It will automatically “ping” some common ping services for you such as blog search and feedburner. You can simply paste in social bookmark code from sites like AddThis or ShareThis. It will also allow you to automatically post new blog entries to twitter, but I have to admit that I haven’t tried using this feature yet.

I am sure that you will find some other things to be your own bells and whistles, but these few things are what stood out to me.

Is It Missing Anything?

Unfortunately, like with many 3rd party extensions, Live Blog has the need to fill the use case requirements of a large range of customers, including customers on many different versions of DotNetNuke. As a result, this prevents Live Blog from implementing newer DNN features and APIs, such as editing pop-ups, client dependency framework, integration with the taxonomy API, cloud folder providers, mobile-friendly displays, and more. This is not a deal-breaker (yet), but it will likely be frustrating for me moving forward since I always like to be on the latest version of DotNetNuke.

Did I Have Any Problems?

First, I would like you to know that I tested this module thoroughly in a staging environment before deploying this on my own website. And even then, I made sure to retest everything since I was on my production website. I highly recommend that you do this as well. You never know what might creep up as a problem if you don’t. I was able to do this side-by-side on my production site with the core blog module still actively in use. However, in order to test on my own site and to mitigate any need to re-sync the data, I made sure to cease any blog posts during the testing phase, and I turned off comments during this time frame as well. This made the migration path one that only needed to be followed once. I wouldn’t categorize this as a problem, but you definitely need to be aware of this as well. Otherwise, you will need to manually import and new blog posts or comments when you do the same thing.

There was one specific problem. Unfortunately, the URL structure in Live Blog did not match that of my original URLs. This is not an uncommon issue when switching module vendors or creating a new section on your website. In this case, the original URLs used EntryId to denote the blog id number used to generate the blog post page dynamically in DNN. Live Blog does this same thing, but uses PostId instead. Unfortunately, there is no way to change this in Live Blog. Along the same lines, the imported blog content did not respect the original ID numbers. So a blog post that was previously 123 could be another value like 119 after import. Finally, the URLs that are generated by Live Blog follow a different set of rules when created. Basically, this could result in a scenario where your new URLs are essentially very different from their original URLs.

Initially, I looked to IFinity’s URL Master to fix this since I use this on my site, but without a bit of development by Mandeeps, a solution wasn’t available here. However, if you do have a vendor ready and willing to do so, Ifinity has a module provider solution that allows you as a module vendor to map and generate URLs on sites that use URL Master.

At the end of the day, I couldn’t use a built-in or existing feature to re-map URLs to ensure that when search engines visited or visitors clicked on existing inbound links, the visitor would not only get the content they were looking for, but they would also get the SEO-friendly HTTP 301 redirect. So, in order to fulfill this requirement, I ended up writing a slick little module called Simple Redirect. It’s sole purpose in life was what you just read – and, to keep things simple in doing so.

What About the Future?

One of the things I am going to miss deeply is the ability to immediately support the latest and greatest features in DotNetNuke for the reasons mentioned above. However, the convenience of being able to not need to maintain a separate code base right now is too great to ignore. Mandeeps has been incredibly responsive to feature requests so far though.

Summary

So that’s it. I wanted to have a supported blogging solution that didn’t require me to have a forked and self-maintained version of the code base to achieve my blogging platform requirements. I also wanted to see active releases that incorporated more and more features without the need for me to merge my codebase. In looking for possible blog solution providers that could give my site what it needed and more, I found and moved forward with Live Blog. It was able to meet all of my needs, has great support, actively releases, and is extremely reactive to feedback. At this point, I couldn’t be any happier with my chosen path.

Plan Now for Day of DotNetNuke Charlotte 2012

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:34:04 PDT

Man… What a year. Really. A lot of things have happened, and it’s already 1/4 of the way over. The best part is that we have a brand spanking new release of DotNetNuke that features social features for all editions of DNN in the 6.2 release. That release is right around the corner, and DNN Corp folks have been busy blogging about 6.2 features quite regularly. But wait, there’s more! That’s right… This is my elevator pitch, or boardwalk pitch. You choose. Just don’t call me Billy Mays or Vince Shlomi. Go ahead, look them up. One was great but passed away, and the other. Well, let’s just not go there.

DNN 6.2 is Around the Corner

There are a ton of new capabilities coming in version 6.2 of DNN that include two huge areas: social, and service framework. The social topic is big enough at this point that we all understand it even if it’s only from a high level, but the service framework is the beginning of a much broader area that developers will simply love!

This release marks the long anticipated integration of the beloved Active Social suite of social capabilities. You see, a little over a year ago, DNN Corp acquired Active Modules, and their most popular app offering was a suite of features that made up a product called “Active Social.” If you desired, Active Social nearly gives you a Facebook experience within minutes on your own website. However, the features are much more powerful than that. They allow you to build, maintain, and grow communities on your website that center around your brand, cause, or products. This is the most powerful way to market to and engage with your customer base.

The service framework is just the beginning of something bigger, but if you’re the techie type and look under the hood to see what it’s about, you can’t help but geek out over it! The service framework lays the foundation of what will be centering DotNetNuke as your primary point of managing online content, and allowing content to broadcast from, or import to your website. Integrate this feature into your website, and the possibilities are endless, regardless to the device or platform we’re talking about.

Got a PHP web property? So what.
Have a cutting edge handheld device. Check.
Need to integrate with a Java app? Easy.
Want to have two way communication with the next social website? Done.

This and more is what will be possible in the future using the service framework.

All of this is great and all… But how in the world do you learn about how to use any of these new features? What can you do to ensure that you will be productive with these features from day 1? This is where the Day of DotNetNuke Charlotte comes in!

Attend the Day of DotNetNuke

The Day of DotNetNuke has always been and always will be a free event to attend. All you need to do is find a way to get there. Once you do, you will be able to enjoy DotNetNuke swag, sponsored giveaways, numerous DNN sessions, and more. You will also get to meet and chat with some of the very same engineers that built these features. There’s nothing more geeky in the DNN world right now than that! Oh, and don’t forget the always fun DNN After Dark party. If you haven’t found out yet, attend and you will soon find out that the DNN community knows how to have a great time!

Be a Speaker

There are already a variety of speakers for the event, but anyone could potentially be chosen as a speaker. Just create a compelling session abstract about DNN 6.2, or social on DNN, and submit it. This is easily one of the most rewarding ways to give back to the community, and make a name for yourself at the same time.

Be a Sponsor

Sponsors are what make this event great. I’ve said it time and time again. Without the generosity of sponsors, the event wouldn’t be free, and there wouldn’t be all of the great events and freebies that we’ve enjoyed in previous events. If you are interested in sponsoring, just fill out the sponsor form on the website. The DNN community never forgets about the great companies that help support it. This is easily one of the best ways to build and maintain your brand in the DNN ecosystem.

This is all well and good, but what can you expect? Check out this video montage from the Chicago event!

Public Speaking Videos Including DotNetNuke Demonstrations

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:24:08 PDT

It’s always been a topic, but even more so recently… People are asking more and more about various things that relate to public speaking. Whether it’s for user group meetings, code camps, DotNetNuke World, meetings with colleagues, or strategic business meetings with partners and prospective customers – public speaking is a critical tool to have honed and in your professional toolbox for your career. Honestly, many of us believe that we are good at speaking in front of an audience, or at least good enough. This first part of the year, I took it upon myself to build some presentation-style videos to explore and teach some of the most important components for public speakers.

I joined DotNetNuke Corporation in June of 2010. I was already speaking at many events before accepting the position. I had countless public events as well as business-centric presentations under my belt. While I knew I wasn’t an expert at public speaking, I knew that I could hold my own and get things done. The position I took was to not only do some of the very things I was already doing, but it also entailed representing a brand and company that I was pretty much obsessing over. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was misrepresent the brand in any way through my presentations.

As a result, I quickly did some research to find out who the “experts” on public speaking were. I found a small handful of people that specialize in the topic and not only authored books, but also had businesses based on the subject. Some of my favorite include Garr Reynolds and Nancy Duarte. I literally spent many hours reading their books, attending live webinars, reading their blogs, and more learning what they had through real world experience. I had already blogged on their books in the past, and I invite you to read them as well.

What I put together over the past couple of months is the beginning of a larger amount of resources that are intended to help everyone, and especially the DotNetNuke community, become better at public speaking as well. Introducing, the public speaking series of videos on the DNN YouTube playlist… The channel is also embedded below.

As of today, there are nearly 2 hours of videos that introduce ideas, experience, tips, best practices, and more that all help you to ensure that you always have the best presentation possible, regardless of your audience. The videos start from the very beginning, and continue through to DotNetNuke demonstrations.

There are of course plans to add more resources just like this. Hopefully, you enjoy this as well.

Meet DotNetNuke Community Member Adam Humphrey

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 06:46:30 PDT

If you have not heard of Adam Humphrey, I wouldn’t be surprised. While he is an excellent DotNetNuke community member, much of his participation is under the radar. However, he is in my opinion one of the better designers that our community and ecosystem have. He is most importantly, the owner of Adammer.com, which is the flagship company that he does most of his work out of.

Chances are, you’ve used one of Adam’s skins for DotNetNuke. Chances are even better that you’ve even used a DNN site that has one of his skins or a derivative of it applied to the site. The skin design I am talking about is much better known as Greytness. As far as free designs for DNN go, this seemingly one of the most popular and widely used free designs for DotNetNuke. There are many reasons that I could guess as to why… It’s more complete than most free skins, has built-in WAI compliance, fully commented CSS, and more. Anyhow, I will let you put your own eyes on it.

Adam has also been a speaker at the Bay Area DotNetNuke User Group, or BayDUG (@BayDUG). A presentation he gave recently was called “Pushing Pixels in the DotNetNuke Ecosystem: Principles of DotNetNuke Skin Design.” Having been in the DNN community for as long as I have, I have seen countless presentations about skin design, many of which were given by people I would call friends and experts. However, this is by far one of the most useful presentations about skin design that I’ve ever seen.

Pushing Pixels

Adam Humphrey did an excellent job presenting his ideas and experiences with the fellow members of BayDUG. We enjoyed a similar presentation that he did last year so much, that we invited him back to do it again since DNN 6.x has changed a few things. He did not disappoint. I know most of you have no opportunity to join us at BayDUG, so we recorded this amazing presentation!

Interview with Adam Humphrey

Since I know that most of you are not familiar with Adam, I also asked him to do a quick interview so that he could be properly introduced to the DNN community overall. The resulting interview was great, and you can view both parts below.

DNN User Groups

There are many reasons to join, attend, and speak at DotNetNuke user groups. Hopefully, some of this information has inspired you to join or lead a user group yourself. But user groups are always looking for people to show up too. Participate in any way that you feel comfortable with – but PARTICIPATE!

Simple Redirect Module for DotNetNuke Released

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:32:30 PDT

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been on the top of most minds in the website design and development for many years now, so I won’t bore you with details about what it is and why it’s important. At this point, that should be obvious. However, maintaining your SEO is a never-ending challenge. This is never more apparent than when you switch platforms on the web, no matter how big or small that platform may be. I have recently run into such a challenge.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have switched blog modules. This post not only introduces my newest open source module, but it also clearly outlines the use case for why I built it, and why it might be of use to you as well. While my use case involves blog modules, this could very well relate to other types of modules like announcements, forums, and any other module that creates dynamic pages based upon content you are creating.

As of Sunday, March 25, I am now using Live Blog by Mandeeps instead of the “core” blog module. Don’t get me wrong, the core blog module is great. I’ve used it for many years now. It definitely fits the needs of most bloggers and blogging websites, but I really needed more, and Live Blog offers it to me right now. Also, the difficulties I outline are not to pick on Live Blog or Mandeeps. Both are truly great! What I speak about here would most likely be experienced with any software, platform, or module when making a switch that affects URLs.

URLs Changing

Anyhow, this switch of modules was really the motivating factor behind building the Simple Redirect Module for DotNetNuke. When migrating from one module to the next, the URL structure has changed. The change was minimal on the surface, but it certainly has the potential to have a pretty significant impact on SEO one way or the other. It really depends on how the URLs are handled now.

This is an example of a core blog module URL for a blog post, assuming the blog module is on a page named “Blog”:

http://domain.com/Blog/EntryId/123/This-is-Your-Blog-Title-in-the-URL.aspx

The Live Blog URL is very similar, and with very few differences in creating the page name – and sometimes no differences at all:

http://domain.com/Blog/PostId/123/This-is-Your-Blog-Title-in-the-URL.aspx

On a site like mine, you can also pretend the page extension isn’t there as well, since I am using URL Master.

Luckily, Live Blog does an incredibly great job of importing blog posts and comments from many places, including the “core” blog module. That feature is a life-saver!

Once again, on the surface such a transition appears to be simple. After all, the blog posts are imported, so the URLs should match up pretty nicely. However, on an installation of DNN where there have been multiple blogs on multiple sites and multiple test posts from applications like Windows Live Writer, there are some subtle differences.

First, some posts would not have the same “page name.” Let’s take a title like “Simple Redirect Module 01.01.01 Released.” The resulting page names would be slightly different for each blog module, shown below. Also shown is an example of the blog entry ID’s being slightly off since the new entries in the database no longer have the history of having had previous blog entries that are now deleted. Both issues are bolded to make it easier to see.

Core Blog: http://domain.com/Blog/EntryId/123/Simple-Redirect-Module-for-DotNetNuke-01-01-01-Released.aspx
Live Blog: http://domain.com/Blog/PostId/118/Simple-Redirect-Module-for-DotNetNuke-010101-Released.aspx

And worse… Sometimes (and this will likely be fixed by the time you use the module), you might have a URL that is truncated like seen here:

http://domain.com/Blog/PostId/118/Simple-Redirect-Module-for-DotNetNuke-010101-Rele.aspx

As you can see, it is not very straightforward to perform any specific rewrite rules in this scenario. At least, not easily and not without having some more information to more easily map blog entries between the two modules.

The Solution

I tried several things before finally resorting to writing a module. I tried to find a rewrite method in URL Master, but nothing existed without writing a provider for URL Master. I also tried using rewrite rules in SiteUrls.config, but not being able to predict the URL pattern changes consistently meant that there would need to be a direct 1-to-1 relationship in the configuration – and such a thing would adversely impact performance on every page load on the entire site and installation of DotNetNuke.

Finally, I warmed up to the idea of building a module for this. Enter the Simple Redirect Module for DNN.

This module allows you to simply enter a URL that no longer exists, and map that to a URL that does exist. Easy stuff! In the background, the module is not only pointing visitors to the right place, but it is also performing something known as a HTTP 301 Redirect, which also notifies search engines that the new page is the right one. This instruction results in the search engine wiping out the original URL and replacing it with the new one.

This blog actually comes to you after 3 releases of the module. While the first version worked fine, I found some performance issues when a certain number of redirects were loaded into the module. That was release 2. A significant amount of caching was added to address the performance issues. Unfortunately, I had made a mistake in the packaging of the second release, so today’s release is the recommended download.

How Did I Map The URLs?

With over 700 blog posts, it wasn’t realistic to add a redirect record for every single blog post that I have. Instead, I used Google Webmaster Tools to identify the most popular pages on my site that were impacted by the blog module change. I mapped a redirect entry for every page that had 10 or more direct inbound links to it from another website. Yes, that was quite a few pages. I could have set a different benchmark to use, but that one seemed good to me. For the rest, I am able to submit an XML Site Map to Google Webmaster Tools for indexing. An XML Site Map is automatically generated for you by Live Blog.

In total, I’ve spent 4-5 hours working on the module, and another ~2 hours mapping URLs. Of course planning, testing, and implementing the blog module itself took time too. At the end of the day, that was all time well spent to retain traffic on my site, and put my best foot forward to minimize the impact to visitors that are visiting my site.

I invite you to play with the module. There are many different types of redirect modules out there. This one was meant to handle a very specific use case, hence the name. I hope you like it!

Download the Simple Redirect Module

Logistics of Your DotNetNuke User Group Meeting

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 PST

Some of you may be already running your DotNetNuke user group meetings. If that is the case, let this be a refresher or a guide. For the rest of us, this is meant as a reference to help you plan out your first meeting, or the ongoing logistics of future meetings. If you’re doing the right things, holding the meeting should be the least amount of work for a user group leader every month. It should begin to run itself…

Know the Venue Layout

Knowing your venue is important. Every meeting place will have attributes that you will have to describe and know before announcing and holding your meetings. For example, there may be multiple entrances that your members could enter. There might be multiple hallways, stairs, or elevators for them to take. There might be multiple meeting rooms with similar or same naming conventions. The worst is when more than one group of people are meeting at the same time. You need to expect and plan for these things.

Probably the easiest way to plan for these things is to have pre-made and re-usable signage to help point people in the right direct. The signage should have arrows on it to guide your attendees all the way up to the right door.

If you are meeting in a secure location that doesn’t allow anonymous people to enter on their own, make sure that you do one of the following:

Have a Greeter – Place an attendee or volunteer at the door(s) to let people in. They should be there through any opening announcements to allow for stragglers to be let in.
Give Out a Phone Number – Have a phone number for people to be able to text and/or call you to be let in. Most of us don’t want to have our private numbers displayed publicly, so services like Skype and Google Voice make this easy without costing money or compromising your privacy.
Attach a Wireless Doorbell – I’ve see a wireless doorbell work quite well. They are battery-powered, low cost, and allow you to temporarily have a way for people to let you know when they’ve arrived without permanently altering the door way or giving away your personal information.

The last thing to remember in this area is to keep an eye open. You cannot expect your volunteers to stay at the front door for the entire meeting. Instead, it will normally fall on your shoulders as a leader of the user group to keep an eye out on the phone and doorway to help stragglers gain entry to the meeting after it has begun.

Assign Common Tasks

There are a great number of things that you could possibly do at one or more meetings. You should find a dependable volunteer to assign responsibility for any tasks that repeat from meeting to meeting. This is a great way to make someone feel like they are part of the group, they have ownership in the group, and ensure that they will continue to show up at as many meetings as possible. Informal leadership positions can change the dynamic in so many ways – and almost always for the better.

Here is a list of the most common things that you might need to consider assigning tasks to people:

Greeter – As mentioned above, this person would let attendees into the building where the meeting is being held.
Registration – If you keep track of who attended, this person would make sure that everyone signs in. If you’re doing any kind of raffle, they would likely hand out raffle tickets as well.
Raffle – This person would do any of the following: call winning numbers, hand out prizes, record any required information for/from winners, report winners to sponsors as required.
Announcements – Announce any news about DotNetNuke that had occurred over the past month, as well as any member-related announcements.
Newsletters – Draft and send newsletters to known members of news and upcoming events.
Manage Events – Depending on where and how many places you post your events, it might be great to have a person who posts your events in the various places for you.
Post Session Information – Speakers usually have links, sites, slide decks, example code, and more that attendees would be interested in later. This person could coordinate with the presenter and post it to your website for you.
Recruiter(s) – There are two different types of recruiters that you will want to have, and you can name them anything that you want. You need someone to continually recruit new speakers, and someone to recruit and communicate with sponsors.

There could be any number of other duties that might need to get done. These should just give you an idea. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to do something either. You’d be surprised at how many people really are willing to help if you ask them.

As a leader of the user group, it probably isn’t a good idea to do everything yourself. If for some reason you are no longer able to lead the user group as thoroughly as you were for any length of time, the people that were helping would generally be able to step up for you to make sure the meeting still took place.

The most important thing that you can do as a leader of a user group is to identify the various things that need to take place over the month, and assign those tasks to people as much as possible.

What to Bring

Along with hopefully bringing some attendees to your meeting, there are some must have items that you should consider, as well as some optional things depending on how your meeting is formatted and what kind of support you have.

Pens & Paper – Sometimes you can get this donated as swag. People won’t always remember to bring their own materials to take notes. Sometimes accidentally, and other times they didn’t think that they would want to take notes.
Technical Equipment – This could include projectors, power cords, a wireless router, LAN cables, web cam, and more. I am the type that likes the have a spare, just in case a piece of equipment goes bad. Of course all of these items depend on the format of your meeting, what your venue is able to support, and what resources you have. Many of these things could be purchased by a sponsor.
Cameras – It really is a best practice to take some pictures and post them online. If you have the resources, recording the meeting is great too. These two things can really add some interaction and exposure to your user group before and after a meeting. It can even help during the meeting too if you’re updating Twitter and Facebook.
Sign-In Sheet – It would be great if you could do this online using a laptop or tablet, but you will usually see a standard paper sign-in being used.
Signs – This of course could be tasked out above, but know the number of signs you need to have and bring them. Ideally, they should be laminated or in sheet protectors to make them re-usable.
Door Prizes – This of course depends on if you have sponsors or not. But bring the prizes if you’re going to give them away.
Raffle Tickets – Raffle tickets are usually pretty cheap, but you only need them if you have something to give away. You can get an entire roll for about $3-5.
Drinks – Ideally, you would have a sponsor bring the drinks, but otherwise, it’s a good idea to have some soda and water on-hand. I’ve always bought a small case of water for a meeting anyway. Lot of people prefer water, and most food that is delivered to a user group meeting doesn’t have the choice of water.
Food – I wouldn’t suggest that you purchase food on your own. This could very quickly burn a hole in your budget in a way that you wouldn’t be happy about. Get this sponsored or don’t provide food. Though, if you have a disposable budget, feel free to donate some food. In the past, I’ve even gotten restaurants to sponsor food. All you have to do is ask.

If you end up being as thorough in your meeting format as possible, you might end up with too many things to carry into a meeting. This was certainly the case at the last user group I ran. In the event that this happens, a large plastic bin, a cooler with ice, and some bungee cables will become your best friends.

Hopefully, this blog post was able to identify some of the things you need to remember and do for your meetings – and maybe even give you a couple of new ideas!

My First 20 Mile Bike Ride

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 PST

I for the first time in my life since I was a teenager am the proud owner of a bicycle. Purchasing the bicycle was a conscious decision in an effort to have an easier barrier of entry to working out, and less of an excuse not to. A bicycle is the perfect answer for me to burn time and energy on the way to and from work. I can commute since I am only about 7 miles away. For the times when it’s not so convenient, I can simply jump on the train with my bike.

For those of you that are readers of my blog, please rest easy knowing that while Chris Hammond was quite pushy in influencing me to get a bike, I didn’t get it for or because of him! :D

I am not a bike rider. Even though I have ridden nearly 150 miles within the last month (since I’ve owned my bike) as of the writing of this post, for me the bicycle is my gateway to putting my feet to the pavement again. I suspect that I won’t stop riding the bike, but I really can’t wait until I am once again running 3+ miles as a regular workout – like the good ol’ days!

Back to the topic of the post though…

From the first day that I tried riding, I found that riding longer distances wasn’t difficult when you have the right conditions and bicycle. My first ride was with my son. We were just fooling around on a Saturday and decided to see where we could explore. We rode 12.5 miles before we realized how much time and how many miles had transpired!

This is an area where I will give Chris Hammond full credit. The Strava website and app are incredibly great! You can track and compete on all of your bike rides and runs. I highly recommend using this app and service if you run or bike (or both).

Immediately, I set some goals for myself… The most prominent one was to ride at least 20 miles in a single ride. Heck, if I could ride 12.5 miles, what’s another 8 miles?

Luckily, there are great websites like TrailLink that help you find great places and trails to ride your bike, and do other outdoor activities. That’s my primary place that I go to in order to find a new route to ride on the weekends. However, the site isn’t perfect, so it’s a great starting point. I usually end up on Google Maps before I actually leave the house. Another great site if you’re in the San Francisco Bay area is BayTrail.org.

Using both sites, I had intended to have a 20 mile ride under my belt 2 weeks ago. Unfortunately, the maps and sites have no way to let you know if a reserve is closed off due to construction or conservation, preventing access to part of the trail. Those rides were 14.3 and 12.9 miles, respectively.

Finally, I was able to accomplish this on Sunday! I went on a trail that starts in East Palo Alto (almost next to the Facebook headquarters), and ends in San Jose, CA. This is part of the greater Bay Trail, called San Francisco Bay Trail (East Palo Alto to San Jose).

The main portion of this trail is 22.5 miles all on it’s own, but there are other trails connected to it, including loops, making the actual possible distance many more miles longer. I rode from the northern most possible point in the East Palo Alto portion, down to Mountain View (right next to the Google campus). That was just over 11 miles and was the first moment that I remembered to look at my distance traveled. There was so much scenery that I was completely distracted up to that point.

Above all, my proudest realization of this ride is the fact that I didn’t rest for any longer than the amount of time it took to drink a bit of water or take a picture!

Those of you that are bike enthusiasts, you might notice that I don’t have much elevation in my rides. I am not very interested in elevation. My highest elevation so far has been just over 300 feet. I wouldn’t have gone that high if it weren’t me trying to get home. Hehehe…

I wrote all of this for a purpose… I have neglected my health for far too long, giving way too many excuses. Once I put my mind back to it and I stopped accepting my own excuses, I have found that I can put myself on the right road to being fit once again. If I can do it, so can you! :)

The coolest thing is that you can get the whole family out, and you can see some cool things like I’ve been taking pictures of and posting to my Flickr like you see below.

How to Gauge User Group Interest in Your Area

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:00:00 PST

Yesterday I wrote a blog that introduced you to 4 new user groups that are having their first meetings very soon. At the end of the blog there was also a question, “Do you want to start your own user group?” As a result, I got a very good question that is very common. “What’s the best way to find out if there is any interest for a user group in our area?”

I love this question, not for the answer, but because of the thought process and activity around it. It’s also the tipping point of someone actually embarking on the rewarding journey of running a DotNetNuke user group. This is the part that excites me the most. Community is what we are all about, and user groups help our DNN family grow.

There are many ways to gauge interest in your area. The exact methods you choose will depend on your level of effort and availability of these methods in your region.

Attend Other User Groups

Go to the other user groups in the area. Microsoft .Net user groups, developer guilds, and SQL Server user groups are often the best ones to go to first, as there will likely be several people there that already use or know about DotNetNuke. You can find these user groups quite easily by either contacting or looking up the website for the local Microsoft Developer Evangelist, or simple searches on your favorite search engine.

If you are looking for user groups in your area, here are a couple of example queries. They assume you are in Dallas, Texas.

.net user group in dallas, tx
sql server user group in dallas, tx

When you attend, ask the user group leader if you can speak to the group for a couple minutes and poll the members about DNN. You can even get into their opening announcement slide deck, newsletter, and more. You’d be surprised at how helpful the area user group leaders will be. The typical user group leader would jump a the chance to help someone else create a new user group.

Try to have an easy to remember website or email address to point everyone to. A business card for the user group or yourself will work just fine. If you don’t have any, services like Vista Print work quite well to allow you to create business cards online and sometimes for free.

It would be best to have a date set for the first meeting about a month in advance, even if you’re not sure if anyone would show. If people express interest, then you have a meeting to set-up. If not, then no harm – just don’t hold a meeting.

Forum & Social Networks

Use the DNN user group forum, Twitter, and the DNN Facebook Page to ask if there are any people in your same area looking to attend user group meetings. Be sure to cross-promote your inquiry as well. If you post in the forums, post a link to the forum thread on Twitter and Facebook.

Think outside of the box as well… There are other social sites that can help advertise the existence of an existing or future user group leader and meetings. Post your inquiry on places like Craigslist, and local bulletin boards at local newspapers.

Become the Leader on DNN

If available, make sure you become the leader of the user group on the DNN website. This will allow you to point potential user group members to something and allow them to register for the user group. This enables you to have a count of potential attendees, as well as a way to send a newsletter to everyone that has expressed interest so far.

If you have enough people registered, send newsletters at least once a month to find out how many people are willing to meet and what their preference is for a date, time, and area of town.

Real Life Venues

Go to your local community colleges, technical colleges, and universities. Place your card or a flyer on the area bulletin boards (yes, and actual bulletin board), and ask the staff to include your user group in their own newsletters. Sometimes you can even leave flyers in the libraries, labs, and more.

Like before, make sure you have a website or e-mail address to point people to. This allows you to efficiently collect and archive their information for when you finally hold a meeting.

Website or E-Mail

I have said a few times to point people to a website or e-mail address. The average person is more likely to register on a website than send you an e-mail expressing their interest. E-mail is often perceived as being much too personal – so you will likely not get as many people contacting you.

Instead set-up a website if you have the resources. With DotNetNuke, it doesn’t take much effort to do so. Just have people register on the site. That’s easy enough for most people and it gives you their contact information and the ability to build up a contact list for newsletters.

If you don’t have the resources to build a website, then simply point these people to the user group profile page on the DotNetNuke site. The URL isn’t very easy to remember, so I would suggest using a service like bit.ly to create a shorter URL, and maybe even a short URL that is easy to remember. Bit.ly allows you to specify the end portion of the URL.

Whatever you do… Have a SINGLE ENDPOINT to collect potential user group member information. Point everyone there on your cards, flyers, forums, social networks, and elsewhere. This will make your life easier by leaps and bounds.

Do this even if you are not the current leader of the user group. This will show interest and you can still end up being the leader later, or assist the existing leader now that enough members have been recruited. There are many options from this point.

The Biggest Mistake You Can Make

Nearly everyone that I have met that ended up running a user group has made the same mistake. They continually go through their process of gauging interest, and if they don’t like the number of responses, they put off plans until the next round of communications. DO NOT do this!

There isn’t a magic number. There isn’t a minimum number of responses. There isn’t a better time to start your first meeting than now. A large number of people will not respond to your for any number of reasons. However, if they know a meeting is scheduled, quite a few more will show up than respond.

Schedule your first meeting. Invite the entire list of people you’ve gathered up to this point. People will show. And if you’re consistent, more people will show at each meeting.

Summary

You have nearly an unlimited number of options available to you when trying to recruit user group members and interest. Even if you’re in a rural area that has few if any other technology-minded people, there’s nothing stopping you from creating a virtual user group.

Use as many of the available options that you can without expending all of your energy. The more feelers you have out there, and the more exposure you create, the more real your prospective user group seems. People will respond to that. People gravitate to others that project that kind of positive energy. That’s the core of what makes user groups great to begin with.

Here are is a summary of the steps I’ve outlined:

Create or join a user group on the DNN site
Create short or memorable URLs to your user group
Create a business card and flyers for the user group
Post and leave the user group information in as many places as you can
ENSURE that all flyers, cards, and verbal recruitment points to a single place

I hope this gives you a greater insight into how to get started. There’s no magic formula to get started. You just start.

New DotNetNuke User Groups For You to Join

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 PST

User groups in general are great. They do for the average person what few other venues and mediums can… They connect people in meaningful ways. Sure, you can log onto your favorite social network and find people with similar interests, but you have to build a relationship first. That takes time. At a user group, everyone is there for the same reason. They all want to learn more about the overall topic. Once you share a slice of pizza or a drink with your fellow user group members, you have quite possibly built a meaningful relationship for life.

You may or may not know, but I assist in managing the user group program for DotNetNuke. Over the past month or two, there have been a greater number of requests for helping people find user groups, but also people wanting to run a user group in their area. This is very exciting! There are numerous reasons that we could point to as possible reasons for this increase in activity. Regardless to the reason, I just wanted to highlight some of the new user groups that are forming.

Queensland, Australia

The SE Queensland DotNetNuke User Group is being run by Ian Sampson (@glantonian), Director of Glanton Solutions. He is a long time DNN user and supports some very impressive DNN websites for some of the higher profile customers any of us can hope for. They have landed a heck of a first speaker too… Bruce Chapman (@brucerchapman) of iFinity Software. If that doesn’t ring a bell, iFinity’s flagship product is URL Master.

Their first meeting is on March 22, and their topic is “What’s New in DotNetNuke 6.2?” This is certainly a must-see topic and presenter!

Portland, Oregon

The west coast of the US in general doesn’t have as much user group activity as I would like. I am not sure of the exact reasons why, but Greg Griffin hopes to be the catalyst to change that. He and the previous leader spoke and chose to handoff the responsibility. I don’t have quite as much information about the plans for this group, but if Greg’s emails are any indicator, Portland should have some great meetings very soon, beginning March 13.

Tampa Bay, Florida

Tampa Bay had a user group in the past that began to catch some momentum. It had several great meetings and included Joe Brinkman and myself as speakers. However, it ended up having to cease having meetings.

Bernadette McCarthy has eagerly asked to take over this user group, and I am extremely glad that she has. She brings a very high level of excitement to the group, and they haven’t even met yet! This user group has great potential, considering that it is so close to the ODUG, and Tampa is a hot bed of Microsoft-related user groups. I hope to see them grow quite quickly.

Their first meeting is a meet & greet on April 2.

Central Ohio

The Central Ohio DotNetNuke User Group has an extremely motivated individual taking the reins. He is quite simply the most excited person that I’ve spoken to about user groups in the recent past, and he cannot wait to meet all of the people in his area. Dustin Eastman is the new leader of this user group and has scheduled their kick-off meeting on March 15.

Do YOU Want to Run a DNN User Group?

With all of this renewed interest in user groups, I have to ask… Are you interested in running a user group? If you are, please let me know. I’d love to talk to you about the user group in your area.

Discuss Running Your Own User Group

Content Slider 01.02.00 for DotNetNuke Released

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 00:00:00 PST

It’s always kind of difficult to tell what modules will become popular when you create them. For the most part, I really don’t care because usually the modules I release to you and the rest of the DotNetNuke community are those that I built specifically for a specific need I had anyway. However, Content Slider module was meant to fulfill a need. There was a gap in the Forge. As a result, this module has had over 3,500 downloads in about 6 months. THANK YOU for enjoying this module so much!

Well, no one can ignore that kind of interest, so I spent quite a bit of time working on a new release this week. I was able to close all of the reported bugs and suggestions, and I even added a couple of my own. The highlights are below.

Feature: One-Click Enabling of Pager Setting
Feature: Cache Sliders for Performance
Feature: Configurable Cache Setting
Enhancement: Transitions can be Selected
Bug: Secure Folder Images not Viewable
Bug: Sliders Disappear on Postback
Bug: Remote Images Cause Errors
Bug: Deleted Images Case Errors

These updates have helped to solidify this module to be higher performing, easier to use, and more stable than it ever has before. In my opinion, its simplicity makes it competitive to most of the commercial options you have today.

Pager Setting

This is probably the most exciting update to this module. Prior to this release, implementing the pager setting was quite difficult to do and required some general technical understanding of how the module and the jQuery cycle plugin worked. This was obviously not a good thing for any module.

As a background, the “pager” I am speaking of is simply the navigation element that can go with a banner slider. See the example below.

Now, you can enable that functionality within a click! All you have to do is make it look pretty, or at least make it look like it belongs in your site. A little bit of CSS magic is all you need.

Caching Enhancements

While tracking down some other bugs and issues, I stumbled across the need to cache a bit more for performance and stability. If you’re not familiar with the term “cache,” it is simply a technical term used to describe the ability to save program information into memory for quicker retrieval. Done right, caching can make even the most sluggish applications look speedy-quick.

This release not only explicitly caches the slider information above and beyond what the module will do, but it also allows you to custom define the amount of time that your cache will remain relevant. However, it is also smart enough to override the cache when you add new sliders and save the settings.

Before moving on, I do want to give a little blog love to Bruce Chapman of iFinity – the maker of the favorite URL provider for many of us. During my testing for this feature, I stumbled upon his free Cache Master module. This module is incredibly useful for any developer that is performing explicit caching in DotNetNuke.

Selectable Transitions

The last update I want to specifically dive into is the ability for end-users to now be able to select their own transition. This was a huge usability snafu by myself. Until this release, you had to know the exact words to use for the transitions you wanted. This is a lot easier said than done for nearly all users. You don’t have to worry about that anymore… Now, simply select an available transition, and save your settings to see how it looks! Easy as pie.

That’s about it. I hope you enjoy the Content Slider Module for DotNetNuke. It’s certainly an honor to maintain this module for you all.

Download the Content Slider Module now!

Content Injection Module 01.02.00 for DotNetNuke Released

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 PST

Today, I finally dedicated some time to give the Content Injection Module for DotNetNuke some much needed love. Fortunately, there aren’t too many reported issues or requested features, so the update went quickly and smoothly.

If you are new to the Content Injection Module, this module was built to allow you to inject literally any text, content, scripts, or anything at all into the header or footer of your DNN website. It can be quite useful to inject things like Open Graph Protocol, JavaScript libraries, CSS, startup scripts, and more.

There are a total of four (4) updates made to the module for this release. They are listed below:

Feature: Windows Azure Support
Feature: DotNetNuke Icon API Support
Enhancement: Increase Width of Content Injection Text Field
Bug: Content Injection Truncated

Windows Azure support will only affect a small subset of those using this module. Up until now, you would not be able to successfully install the Content Injection Module on instances of DotNetNuke running on Azure. Now you can successfully install and use this module on Azure.

The Icon API support is really only a cosmetic change, and most people won’t notice that this has even changed. However, if your instance of DNN is more advanced and chooses to use its own icon set, this module will work seamlessly with your instance.

The content injection field in edit view was quite small for some content administrators. It was too small for larger content injections – especially if they were over 100 characters or so. Now, you have a much larger view for this module. This enhancement was done completely client-side too, so you can change the height and width of this field on your own site as you see fit. Just override the following two CSS selectors in your portal.css. Your portal.css can be updated in your Admin > Site Settings page.

The final update was an unfortunate bug. A while back I had increase the number of characters for a content inject to be unlimited. However, the data access layer (DAL) that did the actual save to the database was still observing the original 2,000 character limit. This would result in your content injection being trimmed to the first 2,000 characters. This bug has been fixed. You can now save content injections of any size safely.

Lightbox Gallery Module for DotNetNuke Version 01.10.00 Released

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:00:00 PST

It’s that time again… This is one of my more popular modules, so I need to make sure it gets some attention from time to time. There was plenty to do too. Thankfully, all of the scoped updates for this release were fairly easy to implement, requiring minimal time. Don’t tell anyone I said that though… It was really, really hard work! Hahaha!

Just prior to opening Windows Live Writer to write this post, I took a quick glance to see how many downloads this module has had over it’s nearly 2.5 years in existence. Amazingly, this module is just under the wire for 10,000 downloads over its lifetime! I cannot express to you how flattering that is – especially considering that this module was simply meant as a proofs of concept for a demo. Thank you!

This module had quite a few updates applied to it for this release. They include:

Search support for Community Edition for albums and images
Saved audit information to see who last updated an album or image (through the module itself)
Implementing the new DotNetNuke Icon API
Improved error trapping and reporting

As much as it pains me to say it, this module is not unlike any other software… There were a few bugs to fix. They include:

Graceful handling of errors due to file locking
Admin icons missing on child sites
Folder provider compatibility issues
Observing the Hide Title & Description setting

This module currently supports all versions and editions of the version 6 series of releases of DotNetNuke. This means that it also requires ASP.Net 3.5 SP1 or 4.0 and SQL Server 2005 or newer.

Download Lightbox Gallery Module!

Media Module Version 04.02.00 Released

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PST

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

First, David Rodriguez had done some research on all of the modules that were previously known as core modules in the area of Microsoft Azure compatibility. As of this release, the Media Module is 100% compliant to run on instances of DotNetNuke on Microsoft Azure.

There were some minor enhancements as well. They include unique ID’s for easier jQuery and CSS targeting, automatically specifying WMode for YouTube videos to have better compatibility with the DNN menus, and a more graceful experience when oEmbed references no longer are available. These enhancements are expected to have a very positive impact on your DotNetNuke websites and user experience.

There were also some very annoying bugs that prevented the proper linking of files and pages.

Hopefully, you enjoy this release.

Download & Install the Media Module Today!

Open Graph Protocol Module for DotNetNuke Version 01.01.01 Released

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PST

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

Just a quick re-introduction to Open Graph Protocol for those of you that are new to it. OGP is the underlying technology that allows for the tracking, association, reporting, and more of a website that is shared to one or more social networks. This is also what allows sites like Facebook to enable you to manage how your website looks and how people interact with it on their site.

There are only two updates in this release of the Open Graph Protocol module for DotNetNuke. There was a compatibility issue found with a few other modules, including Ventrian News Articles. In some cases, a feature in the other module would simply cease to work.

There was also a problem with multi-lingual websites. The OGP tags wouldn’t get added to the page following the site having another language enabled.

Well, that’s about it. I wanted to keep this one short and sweet. Enjoy!

Install the Open Graph Protocol Module now!

Open Graph Protocol Module for DotNetNuke Released

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PST

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

Why Open Graph?

If you take the initiative to be in control of this standard on your own website, you can not only have a deeper insight and control over where and how visitors share your content, but you can make it look better on those other sites as well! You can define what and how your shared content appears on various social sites, such as the thumbnail image, link title, and description. Marketers and branding specialist, take note!

What happens if you don’t define your Open Graph Protocol tags? Some might think nothing. In fact, that cannot be further from the truth. Each site will first ping your site to see which tags exist and use that information to the best of its ability. If your site is missing these tags, the site that your content is shared to will take whatever content it can find and try to put together the information itself.

Notice how this shared content does nothing to catch the eye. There wasn’t any engagement with this content over the past 24 hours. Imagine yourself seeing that content on your social network page, listed with literally a long list of much more engaging content that was shared. They could all have thumbnails, images, videos, and more.

Unfortunately, the only site that does a decent job of figuring out how to display your content on its own is Facebook. Notice how the post below have all of the information you want. Even though the previous example had been out there for weeks, this post that was there for little more than half an hour already had been noticed by someone. It created engagement with the content that was shared.

That is, IF your site and content are well-thought out and put together. Let’s be honest. Most sites out there do not fit into this category – especially if you have more than one content contributor.

Wouldn’t it be better if YOU could control how this worked from your site in an easy to manage way? Wouldn’t it be great to see and manage how the Open Graph Protocol is impacting your brand on a site like Facebook?

Jess Coburn, CEO at Applied Innovations, does an incredibly great job of identifying to you the power of Open Graph Protocol, so I will let you read his post on this for the rest of the details. Go ahead and read it real quick. This post isn’t going anywhere.

That was an excellent post, right?

Open Graph Protocol Module for DotNetNuke

This announcement is coming to you very late. I had originally created and released this module with the intention of giving this to the DotNetNuke community as a New Year’s Eve present. I even kind of soft launched it with a twitter announcement. Thank goodness I did, because Robb Bryn did me such a huge favor by thoroughly putting it through its paces in and out of a production site – over, and over again.

The world-famous 2011 DotNetNuke SUPER Fan, Jonathan Sheely, also did some beta testing for me. His feedback was critical to have the best performance and security that is in this release. His spot-on analysis also nailed some critical bugs before anyone saw them!

The final issue that kept this module from being able to be released was finally solved by Mitchel Sellers. (Thanks for joining me on GTM at such short notice!) It’s always amusing (in a frustrating way) when an undocumented but very simple fix can be applied to such a huge problem. He literally took about 5 minutes – if that – to see and suggest the fix that is applied in this release.

Huge thanks to all of these guys. Without their testing, suggestions, and ongoing feedback, and bug fixes, this module wouldn’t be anywhere near as great as I think it is today.

I ended up spending about three times as much time building version 01.01.00 of this module than on both of the previous releases put together – a process that included a complete rewrite of most of the module – so these guys were instrumental in helping to iron out the kinks that resulted.

This process took 3 releases total to get to a point where I was comfortable announcing that this module exists to the world. Now is the time that I am very pleased to announce to you the existence of the Open Graph Protocol Module for DotNetNuke!

What Does it Do For You?

The Open Graph Protocol Module allows you to define on a page by page basis the most common Open Graph Protocol attributes, including your Facebook Application Id and Admin Id’s. It will take those values, and literally inject them into the HTML of your DotNetNuke web pages for you.

You don’t need to know a single thing about HTML to use it.

Those of you that actively manage your page titles and descriptions in DNN will be happy to know that you don’t have to duplicate your work with this module. The default setting is to re-use that information.

This module not only aims at being incredibly easy to use, but also tries to help you save time. It knows that some values should be site-wide and it remembers that across your entire site.

It also doesn’t dictate to you how deeply you choose to adopt the protocol. That’s up to you. It will, however, give you a couple of suggestions if you miss information that may be useful.

Why not try it out? It’s open sourced and freely available to you in the DNN Forge, like the rest of my modules. :)

Download the Open Graph Module now!

Media Module Version 04.01.00 Released

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 00:00:00 PST

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

There were several enhancements that I was originally able to turn around in a short period of time. First and foremost, I updated the user interface (UI) to look more contemporary and match what you see in DotNetNuke 6. Though, the DNN 6 improvements were not just in the UI, but also in the backend. The module also uses the DNN 6 folder API instead of the standard .Net folder and file access methods. This makes the module incredibly useful to those of you that might be using a folder provider on your DNN site.

One of the more common requests for this module was for it to implement ISearchable. This allows the module to be crawled by the search engine in the Community Edition of DotNetNuke without a third party search provider.

There were also many smaller enhancements, usability, and bug fixes that went into this release. The full list is below.

As you can see, this is a pretty good list for any module release. More is on the horizon, with version 04.02.00 already spec’d out!

The download link will update overnight on the official Media Module page. In the meantime, you can directly download it from Codeplex.

I hope you enjoy this release!

Media Module Support

REMEMBER: Please use the Media Module’s Forum and Issue Tracker for support. Blog comments are not conducive to get help or issues submitted for the module.

My DotNetNuke World 2011 Pictures

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 PST

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

I took around 2,000 pictures at the event alone. Only about 1,500 were usable, and that’s what you will find in my Flickr feed. It has taken this long to organize, add descriptions, tags, and tag people into the pictures. I have also broken those pictures down into various sets to look at specific events and activities, allowing it to be easier for you to find and browse the pictures.

My Sets

My sets from DNN World are broken down into the following sets of images:

There are many pictures and people in my Flickr stream. If you are not properly tagged or mentioned, please drop a comment on the picture or tag yourself for me.

Shaun Walker Bobble Head Pics!

There will be more formal announcements about this later, but be sure to continue taking your pictures of and with your Shaun Walker bobble head. There will be a contest around this later!

Your Pics

Did you also take pictures at DotNetNuke World? You can get your pics seen alongside mine and others. We set up a Flickr group to group together all of the pictures in one place. It requires that you have an account on Flickr though.

Be sure to tag all of your event pictures with “DotNetNuke” and “DNNWorld” so that they are easy for others to find. Here are examples of how that comes through on Flickr:

If you have pictures hosted anywhere else, please drop a comment here to tell us about it.

DotNetNuke Then and Now Videos

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 PST

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

What I have done over the past week is I installed DotNetNuke version 03.03.03 and compared it to version 06.01.02. It was for the intent of creating the videos I am about to introduce to you, but it was also a very eye-opening exercise. First of all, I wasn’t completely sure that I would get DNN 3.x running on Windows 7 – but as it turns out, all I had to do was create an application pool in IIS specifically for it. The other part is this… If you’ve been around for any length of time, you can already assume that there are major differences between now and then, but it was incredible to actually see it with your own eyes!

Without any further waste of your time, I give you “DotNetNuke: Then and Now” as a series of videos. I intend to add more, but you currently have 9 videos that give you an insight into how far we have gotten since June 2006. All of these videos can be found in our video library as well. Enjoy!

Restrictive Versus Non-Restrictive Open Source Licenses

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:00:00 PST

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

There are many areas of concern when first embarking upon entering the open source community, much less choosing any software or platform to adopt, should you choose to do that. I am going to speak just about licensing for a moment. Open source software of any kind is not without a license, and every license has pros and cons.

Probably the most elegant descriptions of the pros and cons I have heard have come from our own founder, Shaun Walker. He does a fantastic job of telling you how each license differs, in a very easy to understand way. This is much better than a book I have read, Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing. I literally had to read that book a few times over before I felt that I understood what the author was trying to say. It truly is a painful, but necessary, read.

DotNetNuke chose to adopt an MIT license. This appears to be one of – if not the most – OPEN licensing models in the open source community. I mean, you can literally take software that is licensed under MIT and do whatever you want with it. If you want to build upon that software, whether it’s recreating your own redistributable product, or creating add-ons for that product, you are unrestricted. Those code additions and updates can even be for commercial gain. The only real restriction with this license is that it requires that the original copyright statements stay within the code.

To quote the book I mentioned:

The MIT license, probably the simplest of those licenses, imposes almost no restrictions on licensees distributing derivative works.

Yes. Some people write code to earn money to feed themselves and their families.

Some other licenses like the GPL License (any version) have considerable restrictions, depending on what you’re trying to do with it. For example, if I release a piece of software under GPL, anyone that took that open source code would have to also release their derivative code under the same license, and it may only be used in software of the same license. Even the license itself cannot be legally altered. You also are not allowed to put forth any additional licensing. The GPL is therefore not compatible with any other kind of open source license.

The limitation that you may not immediately see with the GPL License is that any software created under GPL is and always will be free and open source. For any hobbyist or one-off consultant, this may not mean much. If you run a business, that story is more likely to be different. If you are writing extensions for a GPL-based product, you have no IP rights to your own code if that code compiles with GPL code. It’s open source as well. Any mission-critical business must be acutely aware of this, as your business processes and secrets could be at risk if using a GPL-based software product.

This isn’t to say that everyone out there would be at risk, but if you build any customizations, you are.

Just to be clear, I am not bashing any license whatsoever. Every single one of them have a purpose and work well for those purposes. However, it really is in your best interest for the safety of yourself and your company to look at the license of any software you choose very closely. It may not fit your business model. Heck, you may have been doing things illegally the whole time. Unknowingly, I am sure. ;)