Oliver Hine has just released a new authentication provider for DNN that works with the Open Auth system Twitter has put in place. While this is his first release of the provider I can’t seem to break it in the 4x version (haven't tested the 5x release yet). You can get the provider here http://oliverhine.com/DotNetNuke/Providers/TwitterAuthenticationProvider.aspx. If you want to experiment with it I have it installed on the site here. Go to the login page and try it out.

I had someone forget their admin password to a portal I installed 5 years ago, apparently the sticky note fell off the site administrators monitor and got thrown away (#grin*). They called me to get it back but of course I had them change it when I left. Thinking this is a problem for others I have the standard database hack/solution for this that works for the DNN user system.

*You need access to the database to do this:

Create a new user account by registration (this time, please remember the password you enter!) If "register" is not displayed for the portal, go to table "Portals"  in your database and enter value "2" into column "UserRegistration". Go to database, enter table "ASPNet_Membership" Go to new user account (usually the last one) and copy the encrypted values of columns "Password" and "PasswordSalt" into the same columns of user account "host" (usually the first entry in this table)  Login as user "host" using the new password and delete the newly created...

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We recently deployed a report library for our online application and one of the parameters that exists for almost all reports is what locations to run the report for. Fairly standard huh? So far so great. When we went and looked at how the parameters were presented we were surprised there was no way to adjust the width of those drop down lists, they are hard coded to 184px, this cut off almost half the name of the locations for a lot of our clients, made it very unfriendly to our users.

After some Google searches and a Twitter post basically discovered the only way to really change those is a CSS hack. Thanks to Brandon Hays for his blog post on it located here (Changing the Size of ReportViewer Parameter Dropdown List). Take a look at that blog post for the theory behind this solution. Our problem was that Mr. Hayes stopped a little short of what we needed and so...

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As I start building more skins, look for a new skin club site soon, I find more and more little things that need a tweak or two to make them portal specific instead of static. The DNN label help icon is one of those. Here is a simple way to change it so your site can have different icons per skin.

*Warning this does involve two small edits to files in the core of DNN. DNN updates may or may not overwrite these changes. Backup your site before making any changes and changes are made at your own risk!

Some history on the DNN label control. Way back when in version 3x one of the contributors came up with the nifty label control for DNN. It solved a few problems, like having help in the user registration and login dialogs and providing localization with the localization provider. However, like all things it has a few limitations one of them being there is no way to change the little help icon for one portal and not for another. Keeping with the multi portal aspects of DNN this is something of a puzzle...

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I was thinking of building out a site for free skins. I know there are hundreds of free and some are bad skins out there why do we need another site to show them off?

I was thinking this site could be a gallery presentation of skins.  Skin developers would put up pictures of the skins they want people to see and then we allow users to vote. The winning design for the last month would be available for download by members.

Members would pay a small monthly or yearly fee and most of that fee would go to the skin developer the month they are the featured download. Or maybe a portion of the fees based on how many times theirs is downloaded?

Anybody think this is a good or bad idea?  Why or why not? Should this club focus on just DNN or is it valid to have other CMS’s?

On Twitter Antonio Chagoury came through with a nice little tweet about his new tag cloud module, DNN Universal Tag Cloud.

The module is a nice tight package and integrates into the search provider for DNN so you have to have that enabled on the portal. I was able to quickly install the package without any problems on my DNN install and add it to my Blog page without any hiccups at all (look to the left here to see it in action).

The setup for the module is very simple and straight forward. Click on settings and pick where you want the tag cloud generated from, how many tags to generate, if you want an RSS feed of the tags, and if people can sort the tags. Click update and the tag cloud is there. Clicking on a tag takes you to a search for that term. You can even designate an outside search results page such as Google if you want, great for generating a little extra...

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Usually I stay away from posts like this because I end up with my foot in my mouth but its starting to get to me more and more. Many people and sites try to gauge how popular a site is by where its rank is on Alexa.com. If you haven’t used or looked at Alexa please do so you can see what I am talking about, I’ll wait for you.

Back? Okay!

‘What’s the problem?’ Alexa uses a browser toolbar to track what sites are visited and for how long. Supposedly they don’t collect personal information but that a different discussion. Using this information they rank your site against other sites.  Now the hilarious thing is computer technical sites rank consistently lower than comparable non technical sites. I suppose one reason is that computer techies and geeks don’t install these tool bars all that much (too many problems and increases load times for the browser). The main demographic for these type of sites is totally ignored and discounted or at least skewed to the low end.  So the ranking is totally unfounded....

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In a meeting and client started playing with super glue, a golf tee, and a ruler. This picture was the result.

Since I have started doing more and more WordPress work (who would have thunk it :)). I have to start paying more attention to the things that make WordPress work the way people want it to work.

 

*For those WP people out there I don’t think WP is any easier than DNN to use or tweak to do things I want, it’s just different.

 

Here is a link to 40 WordPress Tricks and Hacks - http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-most-wanted-wordpress-tricks-and-hacks/

One thing I notice absent in a lot of these articles is reference to building a site map for Google and other engines to use to help crawl the site. So I am adding in my suggestion to always add the sitemap plug-in to your WordPress blog. The plug-in can be found at - http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/.

UPDATE: If you are using WordPress.com and not hosting your own they already supply an xml site map for you. (Thought I should add that.)

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