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....

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...

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...

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...

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?

Okay sounds like a proverb or something but when I coach kids in swimming its what you do. You tell you show them and you make them do it. One of the best ways to learn right?

So the new design is blue and has these little playdoh guys I think are neat. The blog has gotten a little bit of a work over and the other pages will get some enhancements and design elements as I get to them. The great thing is most of this design work is done with CSS. I really think that I am starting to ‘get’ it. Of course I still have a long ways to go but I have to say the 960 grid system and @nokiko’s grid program have been a big helper. I put the new skin together in less than a day. Yes its sort of simple and the menu needs some color work but I ran it through the W3C xhtml checker and it actually came back with only 2 errors. One is a DNN attribute on the form tag (don’t think I can fix that one) and the other I think has to do with a div tag inside of a span tag, again not sure what to do on this but I figure I did fairly...

I like CSS but it seems like it takes so much more time to develop and troubleshoot CSS sites than table based designs. (Okay you CSS people can send all the comments you want but that's my experience.)

Hopefully I can change that for myself with a new framework I found, the 960 Grid System. The website has a more complete overview but basically what the framework aspires to do is codify the layout of sites on a 960 pixel wide grid system with that width split up into 12 or 16 columns of equal width with a gutter between each column. For people like me who tend to think very linearly this is about like drawing on graph paper.  The whole framework minified is about 4k or 5k and saves me from writing a lot of the CSS that I would need write to build the same site. I know this framework isn't for everyone or every site but artistically layout impaired developers like me its a blessing and very effective tool.

@Nokkio (on twitter) has developed a DNN skin and system based on this idea which can be seen...

I am a developer not a designer! I think most of the people I talk to on a regular basis say this at least once a week. Most developers, okay the ones I hang out with, don't have a lot of artistic ability. I don’t mean they aren't creative, I mean how else can programmers deal with visualizing all the variables and interactions of data, text and logic. What I mean is, hand them Photoshop and you will not get one useable graphic from them much less a straight line.

Knowing this I went looking for tutorials to make myself a better designer. Know I know quite a bit about CSS and something about how it works but trying to develop a skin for DNN with CSS is something of a mystery. Now, with this tutorial http://www.subcide.com/tutorials/csslayout/, I feel a little better about trying to get going on a design. Still can’t draw a straight line but when I learn how to do that I’ll be able to show it with a better page design.

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The Back Story When building Version 3, well that’s what we call it, of our online safety tracking and compliance software we created a small monster. In the initial stages  of design I added in the ability to send users alerts about events that happen. For example a person in a Kansas grain elevator gets hurt and the incident is added to the recordable incident list and the manager in New York knows about it and can get an investigation going on what happened. Really helps the corporate guys stay on top of things right! After the first iteration of reporting I intended to move this to a purely online alert system with daily overview emails so users didn't get deluged with emails. I tried to change to a full web based system and users revolted! (Yes, users are revolting sometimes but this was users demanding to get more rather than less emails and worse yet it was the users who pay the bills!)

The Problem At the time it was no big deal if an incident happened the alert email got sent to maybe 20 people...