DotNetNuke News

Business Directory in DotNetNuke

paul.solheim@faktnet.com — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:40:00 GMT

Last month in the DotNetNuke universe (jan/feb 06)

paul.solheim@faktnet.com — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:47:00 GMT

Core news:

The 9th of february DotNetNuke membership passed 250.000 persons!

That is a quarter of a million people, making the future of DotNetNuke ever more secure and each adding their needs and know-how to the DotNetNuke mix.

The Core Repository module version 3.1.8 was released about a week ago and we are already using it on our DNN Websites Directory on this website.
A great new version which made it possible to customized the dialog for adding a website and also to view custom attributes for each entry in the directory.
Localization is also possible even for templated labels and the templating system is excellent. There is a bug: when changing the sort order and selecting an item to rate or visit the module selects the wrong item. I hope this will be fixed in the "mars release" even though they are mostly working on documentation in this release.

A great thank you from us at FaktNet to Steve Fabian and his team for developing this great core module!

The long awaited Core Store released a beta on 1st of february and already there is a live site the module at:
http://www.just6degrees.com/
We have not had a chance to look at the beta yet, but it is great to see this module taking a big step forward.

DotNetNuke January Newsletter w/message from Shaun, this about the next version of DNN:

"I am pleased to announce that work on the next major product release is well underway. The focus of this release is on the refactoring of the Membership, Roles, and Profile services - the foundation of the DotNetNuke web application framework. Our early adoption of the ASP.NET 2.0 versions of these providers reaped some tremendous rewards for the project, but also provided the opportunity for us to identify their limitations. In order for us to deliver some of the enhancements requested by the community, we need to extend the functionality of these providers quite significantly. Taking a lesson from Microsoft, our goal is to provide a set of extensible APIs which satisfy the specific business requirements of the DotNetNuke application. Long anticipated features such as a run-time extensible searchable Profile, enriched Role management, and advanced Membership security management will be delivered in this iteration."

3rd party modules:

UCanUse has released User Attributes 2.7 with a functional usermanager and View Mode as a first step towards their upcoming User Profile module that integrates with User Attributes which will not be long to follow. We are using this module on a site to collect extra information and automatically assigning users and redirects based on that custom information.

DNNJungle has released a new version of the excellent InfoMap module, this time with a provider model that shall make it possible for developers to provide their own custom data and have the infomap module visualize it. I have made a test of this new version on the website for a Hotel and it is now possible to have different icons on the map for different items. I plan to use this to visualize resources so travellers can see where are the restaurants, bus stations, travel agents etc. (it is a small town in Peru so no Google Maps coverage).

Swirl AJAX Chatroom 1.6 version was released with support for localization and each user can pick their color. This module works great and is a nice addition to a special interest website, a family website or as support chat for a business.

Activemodules has released Mail Connector version 1.0 for Active Forums making it possible to interact with a forum via email. I have tested the module at the demo portal demo.activemodules.com and found some "bugs", but it looks promising for a 1.0 release and Will & co makes quality stuff. Activemodules has also released a new product "Active Cases" which I have not had time to look at.

DotNetPark has released a Community Preview Release of their soon to be official "DotNetPanel" which is a hosting platform developed and integrated with DotNetNuke. Imagine something like Plesk or Ensim only that the user interface are DNN modules and can be integrated in your Portal. We hope the official product proves solid and that features are added continuosly. I think the concept is brilliant and hope people will support this DNN integrated Hosting panel, the website is www.dotnetpanel.com.

DNN Skins:

Nina Meiers has released a new free skin at www.xd.com.au

Akrion has released a free CSS only skin at www.akrion.net

Major skin developers with new commercial skins are: akrion.net, SalarO.com, Rhoek.com and SkinArt. Most template commercial skins can be previewed at our DNN Skins Gallery on this website, when returning just check out the "New Skins" Album in the Gallery.

DNN events:

20th january we announced the DotNetNuke Websites Directory with 188 websites. The aim is to be a resource for the community so that people can easily see what others have done with DNN and get inspiration for their own websites. Today we have 380 websites in the Directory. If you know any cool or inspirational DNN based websites please use the feedback form on this site or register as user and add website to the Directory yourself (or just post a comment here).

13th february there was a webcast on VBNetExperts if you didn't watch it you can find the slides at their site: http://www.vbnetexpert.com/Default.aspx?tabid=32

Philip Beadle blogged about an issue with web farms and DNN4 with separate file server and told about a new Great DNN based website for The National Rugby League in Australia:

We built the www.nrl.com site on DNN 4 with 3 web servers a clustered file server and clustered SQL boxes. (The site does 17 million pages a month) We ran into some permissions issues with using the separate file server which houses all of the files needed to run DNN. See his post on dotnetnuke.com for the fix to this issue.

That's it folks - my subjective summary of events in the DotNetNuke universe the last month.

Regards,
Paul

What is on the DNN Radar?

paul.solheim@faktnet.com — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 17:55:00 GMT

A lot of people are waiting to check out the new DotNetNuke Store Module, and a blog post led us to believe it was on the way, but alas not yet!

From the Project homepage at DotNetNuke:

"The DNN Store out of the box allows you to sell products using either Authorize.Net or PayPal.

Features include categories, products (list and details), mini cart (with integrated controls), full shopping cart (including multiple ship/bill to addresses/recipients), reviews (including a review admin for approving reviews), order history (customer and admin viewable), and provider based gateways."

The Repository Project is working on what they are calling a January version. Features I am really looking forward to in this version is:

Customize of upload dialog. Remove some field if not used and be able to force attributes single choice (ideally mix/match on attributtes but not this version).

The ability to show attribute values on each item in the repository list. This means that the DNN Websites Directory will be able to show DNN version, Which modules etc. for each website in the directory. Today filtering on attributes is possible (which is also great).

ErikVB at Appollo is working on Multi-language. This week we bought his new module "Apollo

MLAdvAnnouncements" which will give us multi-language for Links, Image, FAQ and Announcements. We will use this module and give feedback here within the week as to how it's working.

From earlier we have the Multi-language HTML and the Pagelocalization.

This is what erik says about further work on his forum:
"I am already workin on a new version of pageLocalization that lets you localize all page properties, and I am now thinking about adding a way to make modules on a page hide and display based on language.... as you can see... its still a just an idea, i can make no promises about when this will be ready."

I understand it will be ready when its ready...but are we talking weeks or months?

"Well, like i said, i am working on PageLocalization now, so it will defenitely not be months ...."

Will be interesting to see, Erik always comes up with great stuff.

Scott McCulloch is currently working on Subscription Tools which is good news if you are offering subcription, but your users find it a bit harsh with automatically recurring billing. This is from Scott's forum:

17th jan. "Users with active subscriptions may have received a cancellation message from paypal tonight, the reason for this is that I have cancelled the auto-recurring nature of these subscriptions. (You will have access to the site until your expiry date).

The new subscription tools will not be auto-recurring and you will be able to optionally renew (similar to the system in use at www.clipart.com)"

I am also hoping he will do some work on the SimpleGallery module to make User uploads of Photos workable.

That's all for today folks.

- Paul "Radar"

Introduction to the DotNetNuke Blog

paul.solheim@faktnet.com — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 16:31:00 GMT

FaktNet has today released an article on the DotNetNuke Blog module. The article is the first in a series of introduction articles on DNN modules from FaktNet - DotNetNuke in Norway. The list of articles planned for the series includes:

DotNetNuke Blog
smcculloch SimpleGallery
DotNetNuke Repository
smcculloch NewsArticles
Orizonti NukeFeeds
Orizonti MediaGallery
DotNetNuke Forum
Bizmodules SiteAnalyzer
Sigmapro Draconis
PortalStore

The aim of the articles is to explain how to setup the modules, provide some links and resources and hopefully be a useful resource for the community. Click here to read the introduction to the Blog module.