Lately I have been helping some users upgrade DNN sites from older versions, some all the way back to 3.x. If they had kept up with the DNN upgrades and advancements in .NET some may have saved themselves some cash.

Christmas is right around the corner and it is time to to make sure that Christmas wish list to Santa is ready to send, if not already on its way. Here is my list to Santa for DotNetNuke.

SEO is a vital part of a successful site, especially if you offer a service or sell anything on your site. Sometimes the SEO abilities of the core blog are a little lacking. Here is one way to help control the permalink URL for blog items.

With the release of DNN 6 have been seeing a fair amount of requests for upgrades. Thought just to help out I would put together a simple upgrade checklist.

Thanks to Will Strohl (@willstrohl) for his suggested upgrade path (http://www.willstrohl.com/Blog/EntryId/102/Suggested-DotNetNuke-Site-Upgrade-Path-s)

Check List Download

I have been working on a new web application and recently ran into an interesting situation where I wanted to add possibly hundreds of records from one data entry screen. In the past I have done this a few different ways:

Loop through set of data and add each row one by one. Create some delimited string and create some SQL to parse it into a temp table.  Both of those methods work but have serious drawbacks. Method one is very easy to program but all those insert statements cause a lot of traffic to and from the database, this can cause a lot of scaling issues. Method two works if you are only inserting one value at a time and that value is not complex like lots of text or image byte arrays. A much easier method of doing this would be to create a table fill it with data and simply use a insert statement to select all records from the table into our datatable. Now with SQL 2008 we can pass Table Valued Parameters (TVP) to a stored procedure and use it just like any other table in the...

The next few months will be hectic as I reach into every trick I can to start building what I consider my masterpiece. Built on DNN and Telerik controls hopefully this will become a standard.

This question came from Twitter but thought it was a good quick fix here is a step by step on doing just that.

1. Log in a host account
2. Navigate to the SQL module under the Host menu
3. Run the following script

   UPDATE Users set UpdatePassword = 1 WHERE UserID in (SELECT UserID from UserPortals WHERE PortalId = X)

   --replace x with the id of the portal
4. Select 'Run as script' check box
5. Click Execute

Of course this script assumes you know what portal you are running this against, and that there is no object qualifier for the DNN database.

One of the great parts of the DotNetNuke environment is the choices developers and site owners have. Modules can provide just about any functionality that can be imagined, skins can provide any look, providers can simplify interopability. The other great thing is there is a paid for version of DNN that gives you some benefits and features not seen in the Community version. Sometimes it is necessary to stop using the Pro version and go back to the humble Community version. I ran into such a site this week and went looking for the answers to remove the Pro depencies (and annoying Pro version license message). I found plenty of examples of enabling the Pro version and of the features that the Pro version has, however, no real information on moving back to the Community version. So here are the steps I finally went through to get the site moved to the Community version. In the BIN directory locate and remove or rename...

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/3055/DotNetNuke-Tips-and-Tricks-25-Module-Magic-with-Form-and-List.aspx

Great article on fixing a small SEO problem in DNN from Eguana Solutions - if you are serious about making the DNN sitemaps reflect the correct priority of your pages this is a start.