Okay another fun little thing for your DNN portals. Ever needed to create a bunch of tabs all at once under another tab?  Its kind of hard to sit and click through the add page dialog 10, 20, or 30 times. So I created a small little module (its still sort of Alpha at this point) to allow you to create a whole bevy of tabs in one stroke. Simply fill in the names of the tabs, one name per line, set the other parameters and hit the Update button.

I have tested this on 4.9.5 and 5.2 so it needs more testing but it should be solid because it uses the same code as the core manage tabs functionality. In fact if you ask me this should be in the core!

I put the project up on Codeplex so feel free to download comment and mess with it all you want. The project url is http://masstabs.codeplex.com.

Thanks!!!!

Recently I have started helping out with some development and support for FindEightDigital.com. FindEight has a dedicated server and has smartly split up portals into databases that correspond to the level of traffic they receive.

This presents me with a bit of a problem because I need to discover what portal is in what database and its id. After looking this up in about three databases I decide to get my friend (http://zackue.com) to write me a little query so I can always find the right database. Here is the nice little query he came up with.

IF OBJECT_ID ('tempdb..##TempTemp','U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE ##TempTemp CREATE TABLE ##TempTemp (ID INT, Name NVARCHAR(MAX ), DbName NVARCHAR(MAX)) exec sp_MSforeachdb 'IF OBJECT_ID (''?.dbo.Portals'',''U'') IS NOT NULL INSERT ##TempTemp SELECT PortalId, PortalName...

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Building DNN for clients sometimes can take finding some custom module on Snowcovered or building one yourself but there are some modules and other objects I really like to have in my DNN portal no matter what it looks like or does.

Oliver Hines Advanced Control Panel. This replacement for the control panel that admin and host accounts see is slick and optimized for the web. Makes working with the control bar just that much easier. (Download) Oliver Hines Optimized Skin Objects. Something that has been long overdue for DNN! By taking out some of those post backs it really does appear to make the site peppier to end users. (Download) Oliver Hines Primary Portal Alias. Now this little install is actually a core modification so you might want to think about it before installing but if you...

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Here are a four strategies you can use to get the most out of your time at home:

When is your peak efficiency? At what time during the day are you most alert, focused and ready to go? How long does it last? Maybe you work best from 8am to noon. But, are so brain dead in the afternoon, you might as well be doing something else. Then perhaps you get a second wind after dinner for 3 or 4 hours, and voila, there’s your 8 hour day. Not quite your typical day at the office, but you’ve gotten twice as much done as you would otherwise. For some people it’s starting a 5 am, others like to work through the night. The trick here is to pay attention to your internal clock and figure out when your energy is highest. Do other things during your down time: Exercise, groceries, oil changes. If you are not the 9 to 5 type, then this works perfectly because you avoid the crowds at stores, the gym, and the garage filled with the people who only have time on weekends and after 5pm on weekdays. No line ups,...

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I installed the new DNN blog on a test install again today. The beta 3 is really shaping up to be a nice package. Its sort of late to add my 2 cents now but I will anyway.

The ‘Recent Entries’ and ‘Recent Comments’ modules might want to be split out into their own Module instances and not part of the overall Blog module. The reason I say this is when setting up a blog in a larger site. I wouldn’t set these on the blog page these go to something like the home page.  Putting them as their own module instance would make it easier for users to move those around and have them where portal builders want.

If we now have categories is there really a need for child blogs? This is a feature that I have always found a little hard to use.  I think it has some validity but categories seems to be more mainstream and understandable.

I did not see anything on any roadmap but I also wondered if it was ever going to be possible to have multiple people manage one blog. We use the blog for a lot of communication...

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Okay with some excitement I downloaded the new Beta of the DNN blog – and since it comes with the great big warning in red from Antonio.

“Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway; in fact, I’ll make it bold and red as well), this is a BETA, and as such it is not supported and it should not be deployed in production environments. This is for test purposes ONLY. So, to re-iterate, if you screw up, sorry pal, you’re on your own.”

I decided to be smart and try it on my test install first. After all I didn’t want to mess up this blog.

 

My test install runs the same as this site DNN 05.02.00 and the Blog 3.5.1.

My first attempt was to install the new beta right over the old Blog. From the word go this caused some problems. My first clue was the nice SQL Provider warning.

‘SQL Execution resulted in following Exceptions: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Incorrect syntax near '.'. Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'with'. If this statement is a common table expression, an xmlnamespaces...

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Let’s say you are a small organization, perhaps a nonprofit or business-to-business, and you are looking to redesign your website. This might include a new graphic design, new content and functionality. As with most small organizations, you do not have an IT department or Web guru on-staff, so you have turned to a Web development company to put it all together.

The question for you now is, what can you do to keep costs low, move the project along quickly and, ultimately, make the site successful?

Outline your website

The outline will illustrate the navigation structure of your current website. A good way to do this is in Microsoft Excel. In Excel, you would enter in each page of the site and where they fall within the site structure. For example:

Home



Brief description

About Us



Brief description

...

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One of the aspects I really like in Stackoverflow is that it uses OpenID. Now a lot of sites use OpenID already but none have made it as easy as Stackoverflow has. This really should be viewed as a model to get larger adoption of the OpenID standard across the web.

What’s so great about it? Well the Stackoverflow site has used images of the big OpenID providers clear (Goolge, Yahoo, AOL, myOpenID) then a lot of the the lesser ones that are used a lot (Live Journal, Wordpress, Blogger ,etc..). Simply click an icon or image and Stackoverflow uses a little jquery to try and log you in or ask you for the username at that OpenId provider. Many sites and the DNN provider included simply present the user with a field to paste in the  url of the OpenId provider. Not a problem, but not every user on the web knows what that url  is or where to find it.

My first project to make my site operate like Stackoverflow is going to be to add so enhancements to the default OpenID provider built by the DNN core group....

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I love Stackoverflow! If you are a programmer and haven't heard about it or used it yet visit it today!  Stackoverflow can be as addictive as any other social networking fad out there and more so because of the shear amount of content. The ideas behind Stackoverflow seem to me to be the natural progression of the older forum setup but if you want a clone you either have to pay (http://stackexchange.com/) or you can find and use one of the few clones out there. Quench (http://anantgarg.com/2009/12/09/php-stackoverflow-clone/) seems to be an okay start, there is a simple c# implementation by the guys at RA-Ajax (http://stacked.ra-ajax.org/), and there is a Chinese language site (http://cnprog.com/) that uses a clone that is available at GitHub (http://github.com/cnprog/CNPROG). Those are all great and good starts but since I use DotNetNuke all the time I wanted a module or series of modules that would allow me to duplicate the functionality...

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Lots of people have the perception that effective search engine optimization (SEO) is impossible in DNN. Some of this comes form older versions of DNN where it was hard to do it right and the limited menu capabilities of the older SolPart menu made it difficult.

For those that haven't looked or who may have looked long ago and given up I urge you to reexamine the SEO landscape for DNN today. Tom Seablick has an excellent article on his website that discusses some of the ways to make your site more search engine friendly. The plethora of menus now for sale on Snowcovered also overcomes the limitations that menus may have had.

If you thought SEO for DNN was difficult take another look the latest releases make it easier than ever to have a dynamic...

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