The DotNetNuke Boston User Group is dedicated to the design, development, and use of DotNetNuke - the leading web content management system (CMS) and application development platform for Microsoft .NET. It’s a group mix of designers, developers and end users with one thing in common – they all use DotNetNuke in one way or another, and freely share their knowledge about how to get the most out of the platform.

Mandeep Singh will be the guest speaker at the November 13th, 2012 meeting.

Find out more about the meeting and the User Group @ http://www.dnnboston.org/

This meeting is virtual via WebEx and there are very few spots left so please RSVP if you’re interested. To reserve a space at the meeting, send an RSVP with your name/email to info@dnnBoston.org. In return, you will receive a WebEx invitation that will include connection details and a toll free call-in number.

One of the highlights at DNN World 2012 is that DotNetNuke strategically partners with Microsoft Azure for next 4 years. This virtually translates in cloud driven DotNetNuke sites available at instant notice with ability to scale up as needed.

DotNetNuke has finally laid the foundation for Cloud driven DNN Sites and we will see a significant adoption for Microsoft Azure with the DNN ecosystem.

The good news is for our customers is that we’ve been actively working to support Azure for all of our DNN Modules and as a matter of fact all of our recent offerings support Microsoft Azure. Going forward, all of our modules will be Azure compatible.

DotNetNuke World 2012 is next week and we're all set to meet DNN enthusiasts from all over the globe.

Are you coming to DNN World 2012?

If so, be sure to check out our App Showcase on Thursday @ 10:00 AM - 10:35 AM. We will be previewing our all new Live Tabs, Live Accordion, and few other modules. Feel free to leave a comment here if you would like to meet in person to say hello. See you at DNN World in Florida.

DotNetNuke 7 Beta was just released and we've been working hard making sure that all of our modules are quickly updated to support it. Over the past few days, we've reported several bugs and issues to DotNetNuke and simultaneously made several changes to our own modules to support the new UI/UX patterns of DotNetNuke 7.

DotNetNuke 7 will be announced next week at DNN World 2012

As always, I (Mandeep Singh) will be attending this annual event to meet and greet DNN enthusiasts from all over the world. We have 3 new releases inline with the DotNetNuke 7: Live Tabs & Live Accordion (two of our most popular modules), and all new Live Articles. All of these new releases will be DNN 7 ready.

Over the next few weeks we will be releasing an update for all of our other modules to make them DotNetNuke 7 compatible.

 

Besides working on creating top notch DotNetNuke Modules, we’re also committed to providing a great user experience and after sales support. If you’ve logged on to our site recently then you’re probably familiar with the customer dashboard we introduced a while ago. Dashboard slides down into view when you click on your account name on top right after logging in.

 

 

Dashboard provides quick access to most important information such as your MPoints, pending reviews, open support tickets, purchased licenses, account/profile, and your affiliate referral balance.

MPoints
Dashboard shows how many MPoints you’ve accumulated so far. You earn MPoints by interacting with our site. Each MPoint is equivalent of $1 USD redeemable on our store. Find more about MPoints

Manage Reviews
Provide us with your valuable feedback on our products. We automatically reward you with MPoints for writing a review for your purchased licenses.

Support
Provides a quick access to support to view your open tickets or create a new one.

Purchases
Allows you to view your purchased licenses and their relevant details.

Account
Update your password or manage your profile

Affiliate Referrals
Shows your current referral earnings or a link to become an affiliate if you have not signed up yet.

Attend Charlotte Day of DotNetNuke and enjoy a full day packed with tips and techniques from world-class speakers at this international event. While there, be sure to attend the after dark party and win some cool prizes including DNN Essentials from Mandeeps. We're sponsoring the event by contributing a standard edition of our DNN Essentials module collection. 

The official site of Charlotte Day of DotNetNuke is using several modules from our DNN Essentials module collection as well. Live Blog can be found on the official Day of DotNetNuke blog page and Live Content is used throughout the site for subtle informational overlays. 

So if you're heading to Charlotte, be sure to attend the raffle event and you may be the lucky winner!

This past week we had couple clients interested in migrating from WordPress to DotNetNuke. Every client had its own reasons for the switch and it varied from hacked WordPress sites' to lack of powerful DotNetNuke features. Whatever the reason might be, we have a solution with our Live Blog DotNetNuke Module. 

Live Blog now supports importing from WordPress. It's a simple few clicks process in which you can export your WordPress blog into a WXR (XML) file which can then be imported into DotNetNuke Live Blog seamlessly. 

All your blog posts, categories, tags, author information, and comments are imported. Live Blog also supports exporting your existing comments to Disqus if you're interested in using their comments platform. 

Note: Live Blog WordPress Import Features is part of upcoming v1.5.0 of Live Blog; however, this build is available now for those that require it and it can be requested by opening a support ticket. 

DotNetNuke will be showcased at CMS Expo 2012 and Shaun Walker will be giving a keynote on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012.

If you’re not familiar with CMS Expo then it’s the place to be for timely, relevant, actionable advice on the worlds’ leading Content Management Systems and the talented people behind them. The expo is packed with over 90+ sessions showcasing the following Content Management Systems:

• Cloud CMS
• DotNetNuke
• Drupal
• Hannon Hill
• Joomla
• LIFERAY
• MODX
• Movable Type
• Mura
• Perforce Chronicle
• PyroCMS
• Sitecore
• Sitefinity
• TYPO3
• Wondercode CMS

 

Attend the expo and support DotNetNuke with discount of $100 off a 3-day registration. Use discount code: DNN2012 and register at CMS Expo 2012

I've been working with DotNetNuke for over 7 years now and I find that following URL manipulation tips and tricks have saved me enormous amount of time. 

Changing the DotNetNuke Skin & Container 

Every now and then we find ourselves in the need to change the Skin/Container on a particular page but we do not have admin access to the site. Mostly this is when we're viewing our clients' sites and we want to rule out a CSS/JS conflict between our module and DNN Skin/Container. 

We can easily switch the DNN Skin by passing the ?SkinSrc=[G]Skins/_default/No+Skin parameter which is self explanatory: [G] points to the Portals/_default/ and the No+Skin is the name of the skin you want to override. Of course, the parameter should be URL Encoded. 

Similarly, we can override the container by passing the ?ContainerSrc=[G]Containers/_default/No+Container

Here are few ready to use URL Parameters that have been URL Encoded:

No Skin & Container
?SkinSrc=%5bG%5dSkins%2f_default%2fNo+Skin&ContainerSrc=%5bG%5dContainers%2f_default%2fNo+Container

Default DotNetNuke Skin & Container
DNN 5: 
?SkinSrc=%5bG%5dSkins%2fMinimalExtropy%2fIndex+1024&ContainerSrc=%5bG%5dContainers%2fMinimalExtropy%2fTitle_Blue

DNN 6: 
?SkinSrc=%5bG%5dSkins%2fDarkKnight%2fHome-Mega-Menu&ContainerSrc=%5bG%5dContainers%2fDarkKnight%2fPageTitle_Blue

View Specific Module Only

Sometimes we're only interested in viewing a single module on the page to rule out conflicts with other modules. This can be easily achieved by appending ?mid=xxx where xxx is the Module ID of the module.

Login & Register

It's often hard to locate login links on sites that are in their native languages other than English. Besides, sometimes we find skins with no login links at all. It's easy to login to any DNN site by simply appending ?ctl=login to the URL. Similarly, we can reach the registration page by appending ?ctl=register to any DotNetNuke URL. 

Show Specific DNN Module in iFrame

Using the tricks above, it becomes quite easy to show a specific DNN Module in an iFrame. We can use the ?mid=xxx parameter to target a single DNN Module and then override the Skin/Container if needed. This is great if you want to show a module from another site/page using an iFrame.

DotNetNuke World 2011 by far has been the most successful conference in terms of attendance which surpassed over 400 attendees this year.

DotNetNuke continues to reshape the CMS industry by redefining it as Cloud, Mobile, and Social (C.M.S). DotNetNuke platform has been in the Cloud with Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, and other private clouds but with release of DotNetNuke 6.0, it’s now officially supported on Windows Azure as well.  The platform made a leap into mobile world with release of DotNetNuke 6.1 last week which now allows the platform to seamlessly handle mobile devices such as phones and tablets; which brings me to the first highlight of DotNetNuke World 2011

DRUID Project by Nik Kalyani

If you’re serious about supporting mobile platform within a DotNetNuke ecosystem then you must look at a very promising upcoming project by Nik Kalyani named DRUID. It’s an open source project and available at http://druid.codeplex.com

Here are some of the features of DRUID:

• Rule Based Engine & Actions
  • This could be as simple as redirecting iPhone users to a specific URL or switching to specific DNN Skin or as flexible and powerful as rendering a new completely new page bypassing DotNetNuke framework altogether using Razor Engine
• DotNetNuke Module Integration through Interfaces
  • Allows module developers to implement an optional interface to quickly support rendering an alternative view of their modules for mobile platform.

DRUID is fairly new but looks promising so keep a tab on CodePlex for updates.

Service Layer API Framework

Another interesting upcoming feature in DotNetNuke core is support for REST based web service layer API which would open many opportunities such as Desktop Software, Mobile Apps, and other solutions seamlessly integrating with a DotNetNuke site. At this time, there is no timeframe for when this would be available but we do know that there will be two major DotNetNuke releases in 2012 Q2 & Q4 which would be primarily focused on Social aspect of C.M.S and we may see this new service layer API surface then.