Today Bruce Onder (@bonder) posted a link on Twitter to an agile development blog for Target Process (link: http://www.targetprocess.com/blog/2009/10/our-development-process.html ). Now I appreciate reading about other development processes but I just wanted to say some of us don’t get the luxury of developing in such a controlled environment.

In my company there are three developers and I act as a coordinator. Now we usually don’t even work the same projects. In fact one of my developers spends almost all his time just writing reports and another is spending almost all his time wrangling ancient dBase stuff into .NET so we can move the company as a whole forward.

 

Our development process:

Boss walks in with an idea or a client request. I start to ask questions and start writing on the whiteboard He agrees that its bigger than it first sounds. Tells me he promised it by Friday, of course its already 5:00 pm Wednesday! I decide if I will do it or hand it...

When I build my sites in DNN I really do not like to use the default ‘Terms of Service’ and ‘Privacy Statement’ controls. For one thing the controls place the content in the Content Pane of the admin skin the site uses and sometimes this is problematic for a pleasing and cohesive site design. I found a possible ‘bug’ that helps me create my own privacy and terms pages without a lot of work. This is one bug I hope the DNN team doesn’t fix anytime soon! :)

Any skin that uses the current skin objects for ‘Privacy Statement’ and ‘Terms of Use’ can take advantage of this little hack.

Make sure your site  is using a url format of HumanFriendly. So in your web.config file you will need to find the line for the friendly url provider and if you are using the DNNFriendlyURL provider make sure it has  urlFormat="HumanFriendly" as one of the parameters. Create a new tab/page with a page title of ‘Privacy’. Add your own content, move modules around on this page, and change skins as you would any other...

The website I work on as a fulltime developer has some unique challenges. Besides covering over 10 languages for both content and UI we have a lot of text areas where users can describe and enter various bits of free form data. We provide reports for the information but for some reason unknown to me lots of our users print out the form with all the text areas they filled in as a ‘report’. This was never intended so the first request to make the text area larger so all the typed in info would print sort of struck me as strange, why not print the report that shows all the info? Well as any developer can tell you it doesn't matter if the problem is the programming or not its your problem!

I set out to fix this with jQuery since I did not want to go back and revise 62 data entry pages! jQuery.com had a few plugins that I was never able to make the work the way I wanted. One of the problems with the plug-in I first used was that they required the user to click in the text area to activate the function and expand...

OpenForce '09 Connections in Las Vegas promises to be a great opportunity for DotNetNuke and Microsoft .NET developers to meet and learn about the latest developments in the DotNetNuke world. DotNetNuke enables organizations to develop rich, interactive websites and web applications for Microsoft .NET in a fraction of the time that they can develop directly in .NET.

This year features a great selection of speakers who will provide insights into DotNetNuke module and skin development and administration.

Visit the DevConnections/OpenForce '09 website now to register. The conference is held in conjunction with the Microsoft DevConnections conference at the Mandalay Bay Hotel from November 9th through the 12th.

 

I’ll be there and really looking for people to hang with!

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?