By Dylan Barber on 8/19/2009 12:38 AM

Been buried in work for awhile so this blog post has been festering in the back of my mind for a few weeks now.  My full time job has lately been taking up a bit of my usual free time with extra employees coming on and new clients coming on but the one area we seem to be having real luck with is how we can quickly train new users and new clients to use the software. I think the way we have built our modules for use could serve as a lesson for others looking to build modules for ‘non techie’ users.

Early in development of our online safety management system I used the normal drop down menu on the container and used the settings or implement the menu interface to add a menu to the container menu for managing the module and what we considered its ‘Corporate’ administration functions. Usually these functions consist of setting up lists and setting parameters for employees further down the chain to manage a safety program. Out initial tests with the management of the modules in this manner was a dismal failure....

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By Dylan Barber on 8/5/2009 9:06 PM

I have writers block! I am not a professional writer, so times like this are real stressful for me. Usually I have no problem going on and on about useless stuff, as you can tell from my other posts. Sometimes I have ideas and post them and sometimes, well, its just the regular c*** that you find on other blogs.

 

I have ideas about what to blog about but I cant seem to get the mental block out of the way to write it all down. As my main boss would say ‘I don’t see as much mental vomit coming from you’, great visual huh?

 

How do you deal with writers block would love to see your ideas!

By Dylan Barber on 7/14/2009 11:57 PM

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.

By Dylan Barber on 7/8/2009 10:34 AM

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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By Dylan Barber on 6/26/2009 10:44 AM

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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By Dylan Barber on 6/23/2009 2:36 PM

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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By Dylan Barber on 6/18/2009 9:25 AM

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?

By Dylan Barber on 6/17/2009 9:17 AM

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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By Dylan Barber on 6/3/2009 12:26 PM

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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By Dylan Barber on 6/3/2009 9:50 AM

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