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!!!!

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...

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...

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...

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.