Seablick Consulting

DNN OpenForce 2009 Live from Vegas

Tom Kraak — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:43:00 GMT

Today the 3^rd annual DNN OpenForce conference kicks off in Las Vegas. If you have made the trip, you most likely have at least a general idea by now about which sessions and after-hour events to attend. But for all the poor souls like me who cannot make it this year, here are a few ways to stay as close to the action as possible without actually being in Vegas:

The always resourceful Will Strohl arranged for a live interview with DNN Corp members during the next ODUG meeting. If you live or happen to be in the Greater Orlando, FL area on Tuesday, November 10 you need to stop by.
Just as last year, R2integrated partners with DNN Corp to live stream video interviews, tweets, photos and more. Here is how to participate. To tune in visit openforce.r2ismash.com.
I imagine that the majority of these DNN Twitter folks are roaming OpenForce. Shove them into a list, TweedDeck column or filter by the #openforce hash tag to listen in.
You may also want to subscribe to the feeds at DotNetNukeBlogs.com as the site aggregates most DNN centric blogs. I’m almost certain that guys like Mitchel Sellers, Ian Robinson, Cuong Dang, Stuart Hilbert and others will post throughout the conference.
And finally, even though I don’t have confirmation yet, I’m hoping that my DNNVoice co-host Chris Hammond will upload nightly audio of the day’s happenings. Stay tuned on this one.

Did I miss anything? If you know of other sources reporting from OpenForce Vegas this week, please add to this list via the comments.

DNN Corp Takes Over Snowcovered

Tom Kraak — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:05:00 GMT

After an unsuccessful bid to compete with the most prolific marketplace for DotNetNuke modules and skins, DNN Corp announced yesterday that it acquired Snowcovered.com for an undisclosed sum. As part of the acquisition, Snowcovered’s founder Brice Snow will lead the transition and integration effort and join DNN Corp’s business advisory board. For more details on the takeover and what it means for customers, vendors, and the community, read this blog post by DNN’s Chief Architect Shaun Walker.

More DNN news from the last few weeks:

DNN Corp has completed it’s first major reshuffling of personal in years, which is now broken down into trustees, team members, and employees.
DNN Corp also announced its Fusion Partner Program, which initially did not fare so well with the community and was therefore quickly revised.
Almost drowning in all of the above, DNN Corp added the DotNetNuke Elite Edition to its product offerings. See how it compares to Professional Edition.
And the final news item on the Corp front is the launch of premium Developer Support Services. Unlike the product side, these services are competing directly with community-based system integrators and consultants, such as ourselves and many others, who have traditionally provides most of these services. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
Mitchel Sellers publishes his second “best practices” guide. This time around he focuses on module / extension development. He also paid a visit to the PowerDNN hosting facilities. Interesting read.
Mike van der Meulen thinks that the installer should present / force a back-up reminder before upgrading the database. Great idea.
After moving to Colorado, Chris Hammond founded the Denver DNN User Group with a first meeting scheduled for October.
And speaking of Chris, Joe Brinkman reviews DNN 5 User’s Guide, a new book authored by Chris Hammond and Patrick Renner and published by Wrox.
As a follow-up to his Multi-Factor Authentication Provider, Brandon Haynes publishes a whitepaper “detailing the high-level motivation and approach involved in the creation” of said provider.
Have you ever struggled to explain DNN and the concepts behind it to friends, colleagues or clients? Fret no longer as Nik Kalyani put together a neat presentation in story format introducing DNN in a non-technical way. Well done.

In the last few weeks we have seen the first bold moves from DNN Corp after its internal reorganization. As long-time community members, what’s your take on the recent developments? Do you welcome these changes, have your your doubts about DNN Corp’s direction, or it does not affect you at all?

DotNetNuke 5.1.1 Released

Tom Kraak — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:20:00 GMT

Earlier this week, DotNetNuke Corp released the first maintenance / stabilization release after declaring DNN 5 production-ready. For details on what bugs have been addressed, read Joe Brinkman’s official announcement.

Other noteworthy DNN news:

I finally got around to posting part 2 of the DNN SEO case study for Mitchel Seller’s IowaComputerGurus.com.
And speaking of Mitchel, he packaged his culumnative knowledge of DotNetNuke performance best practices into a handy PDF guide. Excellent paper.
Beyond the default forms authentication, DNN ships with LiveID and OpenID authentication providers. Joe Brinkman shows you how to create your own provider and Oliver Hine backs it up with a concrete example by writing a DNN authentication provider for Twitter.
Markus Pope doesn't take “no” for an answer and explores the use of recursion to find controls in the page hierarchy.
Paul Scarlett of Canada-based Tressleworks released IFrame64, a free module based on the IFrame project that “allows users to easily blur the parameters passed to other pages / documents / sites.”
Looking to ditch the DNN Menu / Solpart once and for all? Chad Voller reviews one alternative; the MarkIT XMenu skin object.
If you have enjoyed recent events like the Day of DNN and you live in the Missouri area, check out the DotNetNuke Sessions at the St. Louis Day of .NET.
Nina Meiers of Australia-based XD Design records a thorough,10 min video on Installing skins on DotNetNuke 4. Great intro for beginners.
Yoel Sommer is concerned about the ASP.NET viewstate’s impact on SEO and shows how to reduce the viewstate size in DNN 4.8 and up.
And finally, Will Strohl explores social networking on DNN and compares the 2 predominant module suites: SmartSocial and Active Social.

Until next time, happy upgrading to 5.1.1 and let me know if you run into any issues.

Paul Sterling on Umbraco vs. DNN

Tom Kraak — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:23:00 GMT

In my quest to explore alternative open source web application frameworks to DNN, I recently came across Paul Sterling’s blog, who is a core team member with the Umbraco project. Back in 2007, Paul briefly considered DotNetNuke as his web application framework of choice, but ultimately settled on Umbraco instead. In the following interview he shares his views on open source, Umbraco, and more. Thanks Paul!

For those in the .NET open source community who don't already know you, can you tell us who you are and what you do?

I am a long-time .NET developer (and VB before that) who has principally worked in the web application space. I am an ex-microsoftie and I now run Motus Connect where we collaborate with the best clients on interesting projects using Umbraco as our platform. I get to work with people that I respect, do what I love, and to contribute to Umbraco and related open-source projects. We offer official Umbraco training courses in the US and Canada, which is one of my favorite things to do as I love to meet and learn from people who are using Umbraco. I also speak about the platform at user groups, code camps, and similar gatherings.
What draws you to open source software and to Umbraco in particular?

I think that open source has proven to be one of the most sustainable models for software development in terms of usefulness, longevity, and community. Open source provides opportunity to interact with like-minded people, to develop commercial enterprises, and to challenge competitors (commercial and open source alike) to continue to better the available offerings.

Umbraco is an open source project with a very committed and active user community. The community has a well-deserved reputation of friendliness and is broadly international. The project’s structure is transparent – source code hosted on CodePlex since August 2006 with unfiltered discussions and work items – and quite democratic with the highest voted features being those included in new release. I’ve always liked that I can view all open issues for the project publically – anyone can see what the bugs are.
I learned from your blog that you switched your main focus from DNN to Umbraco in 2007. What was the main motivation behind that?

I attended the first DNN OpenForce conference in 2007 and right after enrolled in an Umbraco training course. It was an investment in time and money to help me make a choice between the two platforms. In the end, the two-things that pushed me to adopt Umbraco were the simple and straightforward way that Umbraco creates content and the ability to quickly integrate existing .NET apps quite seamlessly. I saw the potential with DNN, but I also saw that there always seemed to be a “work-around” to overcome a legacy feature. The current DNN version at that time was 4.5.5.

In adopting Umbraco as my platform, I realized I was trading some degree of community maturity (particularly in regard to commercial offerings) for a degree of flexibility. Two-years later the Umbraco community has come a long-way in terms of size and maturity, but the commercial offerings are still limited. Obviously, DNN has advantages in this regard. We are working to establish a commercial eco-system with the Umbraco Store by encouraging developers and firms to commercialize their products.
With your background in DNN and Umbraco, where do you see the main differences between the 2 open source projects?

The main difference between the projects is that Umbraco is a true web content management system (CMS) while DNN is a portal system. Umbraco is very good at allowing users to create human-readable web content that is managed, versioned, and easily updated.

While both are frameworks in the sense that they can be used as a basis for extension, Umbraco has a more “native” .NET approach in that .NET controls (user controls, custom controls, and the like) can be used “as is” either via Umbraco macros or inline in your markup without any special consideration for the framework.

Umbraco also takes an unstructured approach to templates – whatever markup you put in is what you get out – no pre-defined structure at all, which means that creating (X)HTML strict compliant markup is simple.

Umbraco performs well, largely due to its cache architecture where the database is not accessed when serving web content. This is an advantage many users cite when comparing Umbraco to other CMS systems.

With Umbraco v5, scheduled for late 2010, we’ll see a native ASP.NET MVC approach to templates. We believe that this is the best approach for web content moving forward. ASP.NET Web Forms will continue to be supported with v4.1.
What advice would you give people who are considering Umbraco as an alternative to DotNetNuke?

Umbraco tends to have a steep, but short learning curve. Documentation used to be spotty, but in the past year we have seen high-quality guides aimed at the novice user emerge on the Umbraco Wiki, which is why I recommend people start there. In mid-2010 “The Umbraco User’s Guide” will be published by Wrox Press, authored by Niels Hartvig and myself, which will provide a “hands-on” guide in book form.

For developers looking to extend or integrate Umbraco, I’d recommend learning from existing projects as most of them are open source. There are many different levels of extension and integration, so getting a feel for where your app fits in the continuum will help you plan your approach. Most developers find that integrating an app with Umbraco is a relatively easy task.

For questions at any level – from creating content to complex integration – I’d steer users to the Umbraco forum, where the friendly community is generally able to help.
DNN is now venture capital funded corporation. Do you see Umbraco move into the same direction?

No. From the discussions I’ve had with the project’s founder, Niels Hartvig, I don’t believe Umbraco will go this way at any time. Obviously, as conditions change and opportunities present themselves nothing is set in stone, but I don’t believe we’ll ever see Umbraco as a VC funded entity.
Your company, Motus Connect, has been hard at work on Commerce for Umbraco. What can you tell us about this project?

Commerce for Umbraco was our original proof of concept integration of dashCommerce (v2.2) with Umbraco. As the project has matured (and has been used by clients and other developers) it has evolved into an feature-rich Umbraco ecommerce extension. At Motus Connect we do frequent customizations of the project for our clients and try to include these features into new releases. Many new Umbraco developers use the project’s source as reference for integrating their .NET app to Umbraco and we encourage that use. Our current focus is set on getting a stable version of the project wrapped up and released by October 1, 2009.

The DNN XML Sitemap Dilemma

Tom Kraak — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:03:00 GMT

A great deal has been said about DotNetNuke’s implementation of the XML sitemap standard, but as far as I am concerned, not much has been accomplished. Some community members lost sleep over minor shortcomings such as the priority bug, which is hailed as a new feature in DNN 5.1, even though Google could care less about it. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort that went into making the priority a page setting, but this should have been handled by a core admin module on a single page or automated altogether.

The real issue of not including dynamically created pages, however, remains a problem to this day. Take a look at seablick.com/sitemap.aspx for instance. As you can see, only “conventional” DNN pages such as Home, Blog, About and Contact are included. My entire blog on the other hand is not represented at all. I know of very few real-world DNN sites that manage their content entirely via a combination of pages and text / html modules. Who doesn’t run a blog, article repository or knowledge base these days? And it’s for those types of sites that DNN’s default sitemap.aspx is utterly useless.

Alternatives

iFinity Google Sitemap Provider

I believe iFinity’s free sitemap provider is the most widely used alternative to sitemap.aspx. Since it’s a provider rather than a full-fledged module, installation can be tricky for the uninitiated, but the feature-set shows the direction that the DNN core should be taking. Besides the base sitemap provider, the solution ships with extensions for the core Blog module, the core Forum module, Ventrian News Articles, and iFinity’s own Tagger module. This ensures that dynamically created pages by these modules are included in the XML sitemap generated by the provider. The source code is freely available and includes detailed instructions on how to create extensions for other CMS modules. On DNN 4.x installation, you’ll face the priority bug again, whereas on DNN 5.1, it picks up the priority specified in Page Settings. The provider also includes options for caching the sitemap output to maximize server resources and the ability to generate a sitemap index file for large websites.

Inspector IT DNN SiteMap

This “sitemap on steroids” module by Inspector IT acts as a traditional HTML sitemap, feature-rich DotNetNuke page (tab) manager, as well as XML sitemap generator. I like the fact that it calculates page priority based on menu structure and that it provides configuration options on whether to include optional tags such as <lastmod> and <changefreq> or not. According to Antonio Chagoury, the imminent 4.0 release of the module will generate “virtual Urls” for the DNN Blog and Ventrian News Articles. Well worth the $49.95.

Future

How would you like to see DNN’s XML sitemap implementation evolve? Should DNN Corp put more resources into this area or is it better handled by 3^rd party extensions? Are base modules / providers plus add-ons the answer or should the ultimate solution be crawler-based? I’m sure you have an opinion, so please chime in!

Quality DNN Skin Development

Tom Kraak — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:55:00 GMT

We approached Seablick for custom DNN skin development after an unsatisfactory experience with a low cost competitor. After extensive experience with technical vendors from 5 continents, I expected many rounds of reviews before agreeing on an acceptable release.

DNN 5.1 Community and Professional Edition Out Now

Tom Kraak — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:27:00 GMT

First announced way back at OpenForce 2007, the first “production-ready” version of DotNetNuke 5 is now available as 5.1 Community Edition and Professional Edition. After an extensive public beta program and painful last minute performance problems, DNN Corp’s Joe Brinkman, with a clear sight of relief, announced that “hundreds of bug fixes and dozens of enhancements and new features” finally saw the light with this 5.1 release. Highly anticipated for years, content versioning and workflow mark the top of the new functionality list. DNN 5.1 also debuts different features sets for Community Edition (CE) and Professional Edition (PE) as previously roadmaped.

Plenty more DotNetNuke news and happenings next:

Everybody I asked about the inaugural Day of DotNetNuke was beaming with excitement and praise. If you missed it like I did, check out the recap from head organizer Will Strohl himself. And if you have not already done so, listen to DNNVoice episode 9 and 10 for more Day of DNN coverage.
Speaking of DNN 5.1, the German language pack can be found here and ERD diagrams (Visio, VisioXML and PDF) as well as a SQL spec sheet here.
Snapsis’ CSS NavMenu and Telerik’s RadMenu are excellent DNN menu solutions for custom DNN skinning projects, but the restrictive license that these commercial providers employ makes it difficult if not impossible to take advantage of them for off-the-shelve or free skins. That void has now finally been filled by Mark Allan of DNNDoneRight.com. Mark has developed a feature-rich, flexible and search engine-friendly DNN menu that lacks nothing compared to its aforementioned rivals. Free download.
Dylan Barber shares his views on rebuilding a site in DotNetNuke. Good start on the topic.
Chris Cant blogs about DNN skin token support in a module. Interesting read for skinners and module developers alike.
Eoghan O’Neill looks at ranking of DNN core modules in terms of popularity. I never thought about it, but hey, why not?
Cuong Dang lists popular grid design resources for DotNetNuke skinning. No more excuses for table-based skins :)-
Bruce Chapman releases a DNN 5.1 compatible version of Url Master including some nifty new features and explains how to 301 Redirect .htm or .html pages to DotNetNuke .aspx pages.
Chris Hammond and Patrick Renner publish DotNetNuke 5 User’s Guide. Wrox just dropped a copy on my doorstep last week, so expect a closer look at the book soon.
And finally, Vasilis Terzopoulos breathes new life into his blog with a series of advanced skinning related posts. Learn how to target specific DNN pages with CSS selectors, make your skins respond to DNN security roles, and fast forward into the future of user configurable DNN skins.

That wraps it up for this installment of DNN Friday. As always, if you’ve got quality DNN content to share, just let me know. Or, if you simply want to stay in the loop of all things DotNetNuke, subscribe to the blog feed, sign up for email updates, and follow me on Twitter. So long and happy upgrading!

DNN SEO Webinar

Tom Kraak — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 09:54:00 GMT

DotNetNuke Corp. recently started to offer free webinars meant as a high-level introduction to the web application framework.

For more advanced DNN users and administrators, a new “DNN Spotlight” series is about to kick off. Join DNN Corp’s Nik Kalyani and myself on Wednesday, June 3, 2009 at 1 pm PDT for an introduction to DotNetNuke search engine optimization. In this hour-long presentation, we will cover on-page DNN SEO basics followed by a 30 minute Q&A session. Register now!

Update:

Download the Webinar (slides & audio)

Digicon Bets on DNN Ecommerce

Tom Kraak — Mon, 25 May 2009 18:36:00 GMT

Damien Wittmack, head of marketing at Digicon recently announced on Twitter the launch of an ecommerce site build on DotNetNuke. As DNN stores continue to be a controversial topic, I thought it would be great to get some input directly from the “trenches.”

Thanks for making time for this interview. First of all, please introduce yourself and Digicon.

Hi, I’m Nick Jaco, one of the founders of Digicon. I’m an expatriate Canadian, enjoying life in Australia. Digicon is a web design firm based in Brisbane, Australia. We’ve been around since 1996 and have seen a few changes in the Internet along the way. Digicon primarily services Australian clients, but have worked with overseas companies as well.
When and how did Digicon get involved with DotNetNuke and what specific DNN products and services does the company offer?

Digicon, like many other web design companies had built its own CMSs (.Net, ColdFusion, PERL & J2EE versions), but felt there must be a better way. It didn’t make sense that a million web companies globally should each be spending development resources on proprietary CMSs. Reviewing the open source CMS market at the time (about four years ago), DotNetNuke came up a winner. While there are more choices available today, we’re happy with DNN and just see the DNN story getting better and better. DotNetNuke has changed the way we solve customer problems. Frequently, it’s a matter of consulting and integration rather than application development. Even for standalone web applications, we’ll often start with a DNN base as it gives us a security model and CMS functionality out-of-the-box.

Digicon offers a variety of DotNetNuke services: consulting, design, application development and hosting.
Digicon just launched wallrocks.com.au. Please give us an overview of the project and your general thoughts about ecommerce on DotNetNuke.

The project went quite smoothly as Wallrocks Antiques was great to work with. One of the challenges was to display the details of the antiques in sufficient quality for potential customers to evaluate. Originally we looked at the Deep Zoom with Silverlight, but were concerned about the penetration of the Silverlight player. Then we came across this nice little Flash product by the name of Zoomify, which did the job quite well.

We believe that DotNetNuke is well suited for ecommerce. DNN has good user/roles functionality and is secure and robust.
The Wallrocks online store runs on DNN and the Catalook module suite. Why did you choose Catalook over other ecommerce modules?

Catalook is a very good DNN store – quite powerful and a rich feature set. However, Catalook can be intimidating at first, because it has so many features that require configuration. It handles real-time payment verification, downloadable products, booking for seminars, member subscriptions and the list goes on.
How did the Catalook installation and configuration go? Did you customize the Catalook and / or DNN core codebase in any way?

Catalook installation went fine. No significant customization of either the DNN or Catalook codebase was required. As mentioned above, we integrated in Zoomify to zoom in on product images. Most of the work came down to skinning.
I have to say that wallrocks.com.au is the best looking Catalook implementation I’ve seen in a long time. Please share your experience skinning the module.

Thanks very much! Wallrocks Antiques was great to work with from a design point of view, which really made our job much easier.

I guess Digicon takes a different approach for both DotNetNuke and Catalook skinning. We have a focus on design and SEO, though we’re not absolute purists. We always custom build skins to achieve the right look. Because we custom build, we avoid the SolPartMenu and instead use our own menu module. By starting fresh, it’s actually easier to build a useable site, instead of fighting against some of the standard components.
Where do you see the future for ecommerce and DotNetNuke?

I’m quite optimistic for DotNetNuke ecommerce. What was quite complicated years ago seems much easier now. The vendor community around DotNetNuke has matured and the product offerings have become more sophisticated. Prices have also gone up for modules, which is actually a good thing as there are skilled software developers making a living from their modules. And that in turn benefits us all. Catalook is a great example - for US $99 you get a fully functioning store. The future will bring us more options, more business and more DotNetNuke.

DNN Community Edition 4.9.4 Released

Tom Kraak — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:17:00 GMT

In a somewhat surprising move (at least for me), DNN Corp published yet another “minor stabilization release for the 4.x codebase.” According to Joe Brinkman, CE 4.9.4 fixes a module caching flaw and improves performance of the FormatRemoveSQL method. 2 low priority security issues were corrected as well. Besides maintaining 4.x, DNN Corp also released a public beta of DNN 5.1. Please contribute to the upcoming release by downloading, testing, and discussing the beta as well as logging bugs in the public issue tracker.

More DNN community news next:

Both Day of DNN and OpenForce North America announced speakers and sessions this week. The Day of DNN seems to provide a balanced program, while OpenForce guns for the more experienced DNN administrator and developer this year.
Shaun Walker is “back,” reflecting on the recent changes to the DotNetNuke project, the Corporation, and his involvement in it all.
Frauke Nonnenmacher blogs about module packaging for the terminally broke. Good read.
Sam MacDonald takes a first look at the new DNN admin console module shipping with the 5.1 beta.
Core team member Michael Washington releases aDefHelpDesk, a free and open source help desk module for DNN 4.4 and up.
Adding to his specialty of DNN SEO modules, Bruce Chapman releases Canonical Link Generator and Inline Link Master. For more about Bruce and iFinity Software, listen to an interview I did with him for the latest episode DNNVoice.
If you are a self-paced learner and feel most comfortable in your own 4 walls, then the new DNN DVD training series by Engage Software might be just what you are looking for.
Looks like I’m not the only fan of Ventrian News Articles for blogging on DNN. Core team alumni Patrick Santry wrote a script to help transition from the Blog module project to News Articles.
The Capital DNN user group continues to blaze the trail in regards to quality video capture of monthly meetings. Watch Will Morgenweck on DotNetNuke and social networking.
And speaking of user groups, my local CT DNN user group is hosting none other than Wrox author and Documents project lead Mitchel Sellers on advanced DNN 5 module development.

As you can see, there is lots going on in and around DotNetNuke. I’ve got a week of upgrades ahead of me while continuing to “push every button” of the 5.1 beta. What are you doing with DotNetNuke? Please share in the comments.

DNN OpenForce Season Kicks Off with Call for Speakers

Tom Kraak — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:26:00 GMT

In preparation for the 3^rd annual conference for DotNetNuke developers, designers, administrators or anybody else with an interested in the web application framework, Joe Brinkman reaches out to the community with a call for speakers.

I had the opportunity to speak and exhibit at the event last year and mingling with like-minded DNN folks was a great deal of fun. Remember, this is not meant to be a “geeks only” show, but rather a community gathering looking to pair known DNN veterans with fresh faces. Having said that, get your act together and submit your session ideas by May 8, 2009!

What else is happening with and around DotNetNuke? Let’s see:

Speaking of speakers, as Will Strohl hinted on, the Day of DotNetNuke opens its call for speakers tomorrow, May 2, 2009. Events like this are a great way to hone your speaking skills.
Nik Kalyani, Director of Products and Strategy, aims to rectify DNN Corp’s recent communication blunders in regards to its business model and the project’s roadmap for the 5.1 release.
Not sure how I missed the DotNetNuke webinars, but I did. If you are new to the web application framework, these are worth your time.
Brandon Haynes releases a DNN Multi-Factor Authentication Provider, which “allows a host to configure enhanced authentication (including SMS, SMTP, YubiKey, and X.509 certificates) for any number and combination of portal roles.” Very interesting and a great exploitation of the provider model.
Engage, the official DotNetNuke training partner, introduces instructor-led, Virtual Classroom with a free webinar-style session entitled “Introduction to DotNetNuke.” I stuck my head into the webinar last week and was impressed. Grab your seat here.
The master of DNN Urls, Bruce Chapman, publishes the ultimate guide to Understanding DotNetNuke Friendly Urls and Url Rewriting for SEO. Great read.
Still struggling with CSS-based layouts in your DNN skinning efforts? Then you may want to give YAML or DNNGrid960 a try. And here is a detailed look at the 960 CSS framework.
Erik van Ballegoij releases and update to Apollo PageLocalization and blogs about caching in DNN 5.
The jQuery JavaScript library is all the rage these days. And in a timely manner, Will Strohl provides 7 jQuery tips for DotNetNuke Developers.
Working hard on new DNN skinning documentation, Timo Breumelhof posts a "Beta" of the skin objects tables. Help him out here.

That wraps up this week’s news. Again, I encourage you to “speak up” and submit your session to both the Day of DotNetNuke and OpenForce 09 North America. See you there!

7 Questions for “His Mightiness” Will Strohl

Tom Kraak — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:44:00 GMT

A few weeks after sitting down with Antonio Chagoury, I flew down to Florida to speak at the Orlando DNN user group. While there, I took the chance to pull the president of the UG, Will Strohl, aside for my somewhat standard “7 Questions for” interview. Enjoy.

For those in the DNN community who don’t already know you, can you tell us who you are and what you do?

I am a fellow DotNetNuke developer and designer that loves to figure out how DNN works under the hood. At one point, I began contributing to the community to help "give back," and it has led me to become the President of one of the most active DotNetNuke user groups, the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group (ODUG.)
These days, I promote DNN to the developer community on my blog, at code camps, user groups, SQL Saturdays, and similar other events. In my day job, I am the Technology Director for RezHub.com, an online travel website, which means I get to play with DNN all day long! :)
When and how did you get involved with DotNetNuke?

I built an Intranet portal while working as the only .Net developer in an AS/400 programming department. When I was tasked with the portal project, I looked at all of the options "out there" at the time and settled on the IBuySpy portal. I built all of the extra functionality into it that we needed, including: child portals, new pages, extra modules, a portal-wide "what's new" image designator, Active Directory integration, and more. Shortly after the launch I found DotNetNuke, which was "frustrating" to say the least. Consumed by the maintenance of my custom portal, I didn't have time to get involved with or use DNN until version 3. Once I did, there was no turning back.
What draws you to open source software and to DNN in particular?

I had tried many open source projects before DNN as their price tag and free source code was highly appealing. However, all of them seem to have one thing in common: their community was full of the know-it-all type of people that berate you if you missed a step, or didn't know something that they felt you should. As a result, I was immediately turned off by the community and eventually the product as a whole. I found the DNN community to be a breathe of fresh air, as newbies are not talked down upon. However, I have been seeing a rising number of rather negative community members in recent months and it really concerns me. For everyone reading this: please play nice!
Do you consider yourself a DotNetNuke evangelist?

Without coming across egotistical, I do indeed consider myself a DNN evangelist. I am regularly showing people the power of DNN. Whether they are fellow developers, my consulting and website clients, or non-technical folks who are interested in building their first website. DotNetNuke is always the first option I turn to when a new website project comes up, and it surprisingly has fit nearly every single project. Also, as new features are released, I find it to be lots of fun to show people how to use them. I think when you consider all of that, it would be difficult to not think of myself as a DNN evangelist.
What does it mean to be President of the Orlando DNN User Group (ODUG) and what is your experience with getting other people involved in the community.

Being the President of ODUG is an incredible honor, but at the same time carries huge responsibilities. Should the user group fail, I would consider it to be my fault. If attendance goes up or down, I am responsible. If we don't have new faces at the meetings, I have also failed. I am not one to accept defeat and I do love a challenge. Since I am so passionate about the DNN project, I am naturally driven to help it succeed through ODUG.
However, one of the most rewarding parts of being the ODUG President is meeting many interesting and smart people on a regular basis. I also get to match folks up with DNN "buddies" to help solve problems. This year I have also been incredibly lucky to consistently draw top DNN talent to our user group meetings to present to ODUG members. It has been an incredible ride and I hope it doesn't end anytime soon.
You and ODUG have recently announced The Day of DotNetNuke. Please tell us about the event and the effort behind it.

On June 4, 2008 we hosted the first and only OpenForce Connect event. It was an incredible day of learning and networking with fellow DNN community members. I have been getting requests regularly since then asking for a follow-up event.
Accepting the challenge once again, I began to email DNN Corp last November checking to see if they were interested in putting the event on again. Unfortunately, they were very busy with DNN Professional Edition, new staff, and stabilizing the latest DNN release. Needless to say, we eventually had to make a decision. Either we wait for DNN Corp to respond or we take the reigns and make it happen. We chose to latter.
The Day of DotNetNuke was originally the idea of Joe Healy, a Florida Microsoft Developer Evangelist and has grown tremendously ever since. Unfortunately, we have a cap of 200 people, which we nearly met last year.
This year's event is scheduled for Saturday, June 13 in Tampa, Florida and we already have 4 DotNetNuke book authors committed to presenting, as well as several other prominent DNN community members and vendors. Right now, we are officially accepting volunteers and sponsors and we should be opening up an official call for speakers next week.
We had people traveling from as far as Pakistan last year and I have no reason to believe that this year will be any different in terms of importance and interest. The first time around we had a single track of sessions and we did not have a sponsor area. This year, the event will still be free to attend, but we have grown to 5 tracks, a common sponsors area, lunch, and plenty of giveaways. It is definitely a must-attend event for anybody with an interest in DotNetNuke and its community.
If you could change 3 things in the DNN web application framework, the community, or anything else related to DNN, what would they be?
1. Currently, most of the negativity in the DNN community is directly and indirectly related to the changes in the DNN Corporation. Mostly, it is not really the Corp itself, but the lack of information coming from them. It has taken them several months to finally provide the community with the details it has been thirsting for. I would want the speed and frequency of community related communications to be better, faster, and more accurate, which will have a big impact on community morale.
2. It is no secret that the community extension development effort has been slow going lately. I therefore wish someone would sponsor 2 clones for Scott Willhite to share his workload :)
3. I think the community side of the DNN project needs to get back to its roots and regenerate the excitement it once possessed. I know that DNN Corp is aware of this and has plans to address this in various ways. We need to bring back the imagination, excitement, and creativity of the community with its start-up and viral kind-of-feel.

Understanding DNN User Registration

Tom Kraak — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:39:00 GMT

Most modern websites and web applications require some form of user authentication in order to “unlock” their entire feature set. Social networking sites and message boards are perfect examples: you are asked to register before making your first contribution.

In DotNetNuke, a valid user profile forms the basis for the role-based permission model.

It starts with the [USER] or <dnn:User runat="server" id="dnnUser" /> skin object deceleration, which generates a “Register” link for unauthentic users to the registration form. The procedure of collecting user profiles is implemented via Private, Public, or Verified user registration types. The only real difference between the 3 of them is the degree of human intervention in the authorization process:

Private - ensures that the DNN Admin manually screens all website registrations and grants or denies portal access accordingly.
Public – there is no manual intervention or screening whatsoever, meaning the user is granted access to the portal environment immediately after registration.
Verified – located somewhere in between Private and Public, DNN emails a verification code to the registering user to “verify” her / his identity. The user then has to take the code back to the website to complete the registration process.

The following is a walkthrough of configuring and customizing Private DNN registrations. However, with slight modifications, it’s just as applicable to Public and Verified registration.

Enable Private Registration

log in with either DNN Admin or Host (SuperUser) privileges
navigate to Admin > Site Settings > Advanced Settings > Security Settings >User Registration and tick Private

Customize Notification Emails & Register Page

navigate to Admin > Languages > Language Editor in DNN 4 and Host > Languages > Edit Default Language > Edit Language Files in DNN 5
use your browser (Ctrl+F) to search GlobalResources.resx for email_user_registration_administrator_body.text and email_user_registration_administrator_subject.text to customize the notification email that gets send to the DNN Administrator
use your browser (Ctrl+F) to search GlobalResources.resx for email_user_registration_private_body.text and email_user_registration_private_subject.text to customize the notification email that gets send to the registering user
use your browser (Ctrl+F) to search SharedResources.resx for PrivateMembership.Text to customize the default copy of the registration control / page

Manage Users

DNN Admin (or any other user with the proper permissions in DNN 5): navigate to Admin > User Accounts to authorize portal access and to manage security role membership

Manage Profile Properties and User Settings

by default, the DNN registration form asks for User Name, First Name, Last Name, Display Name, Email Address, and Password
to edit the default fields or to collect additional information during registration, navigate to Admin > User Accounts > Manage Profile Properties
to manage general user settings such as min password length, password aging, redirect after login, redirect after logout, captcha, etc, navigate to Admin > User Accounts > User Settings

Further Considerations

Lately, as part of my DNN consulting work, I've noticed an uptick in client requests for greater flexibility and additional features for the user registration that go beyond what DotNetNuke provides out of the box. Simplifying the signup / login forms and firing more complex events during and after registration come to mind. Fortunately, the DNN ecosystem has filled the void with feature-rich extensions such as Data Springs’ Dynamic Registration, which has become a de facto standard for customizing the entire DNN registration process.

What has your experience with the DotNetNuke user registration been? Do you find it intuitive or overly verbose? Does it satisfy your needs or do you find yourself longing for more?

Introducing Guest Blogger Chuck Self

Tom Kraak — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:13:00 GMT

As part of my quest to recruit guest bloggers, I’m happy to announce that Chuck Self of Narrow Gate Solutions has signed on and will start off with a multi-part series on “DNN house keeping” as early as next week. Here is a bit more about Chuck in his own words.

Chuck Self has worked in the technology field for over ten years. Most of that time was spent in the insurance and financial industry where he supported and managed many different technologies and platforms from desktop / Internet development to data warehousing in Fortune 500 companies. Chuck has always been able to bridge the gap between the business needs and the technology capabilities and thus has overseen many system and Internet implementations through the years.

In 2006, Chuck left the corporate world and started Narrow Gate Solutions. Narrow Gate provides web technology and marketing solutions to nonprofits and faith based groups. Chuck believes that these organizations are many times overlooked and felt called to help them reach people with their services and message.

Over the last few years Narrow Gate has begun to rely heavily on the DotNetNuke web application framework in order to achieve the best value and flexibility for their clients. In 2009, Narrow Gate launched a unique DotNetNuke (DNN) division, which focuses primarily on developing websites, products, and consulting on DotNetNuke while promoting the use of DNN as a reliable platform.

Once again, from the entire Seablick Consulting team, welcome Chuck!

DNN 4.9.3 Released

Tom Kraak — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 02:14:00 GMT

DotNetNuke Corp does not seem ready to place all Easter eggs into the version 5 basket just yet. Earlier this week it released another “stabilization release” for the 4.x code branch even after hinting several times in the last few months at the end of the road for version 4 of the web application framework. It’s probably save to assume that DNN Professional Edition is the driving force behind this prolonged life support, which should calm the part of the community who have perceived PE as the end of CE. Either way, you can find details on the 4.9.3 release in this blog post by Shaun Walker and download the latest release here.

More DNN news and happenings next.

DotNetNuke made it into the final round of Microsoft Canada’s Ignite IT Awards 2009. The grand prize winner will be chosen on April 15. Keep your fingers crossed!
The follow-up to last year’s DNN Connect is slowing taking shape. Renamed to The Day of DotNetNuke and organized by the Orlando DNN Users Group, the event is scheduled for June 13, 2009 in Tampa Florida. Stay tuned to this blog as I’ll report on additional details as they become available.
A few weeks ago I wrote about blogging on DotNetNuke and here is a utility module written by Dario Rossa that “allows import / export between the core DotNetNuke Blog module and the BlogML format.”
In number 10 of his series on DNN tips and tricks, Joe Brinkman sheds significant light on the Reports module and explains why it truly deserves the title of “Swiss Army knife of the DotNetNuke module world.”
First introduced at OpenForce 2008, Engage Software announces the release of Engage: Campus, an eLearning Management System for DotNetNuke. Demo the LMS here.
Form and List team lead Stefan Cullmann put up a dedicated website for the module featuring a blog, documentation, and a template gallery.
Declan Ward provides an overview of CodeSmith templates for DotNetNuke module development by pulling together resources from around the web and building on them to create a DNN module in C#.

If you find these DNN news roundups useful, consider subscribing to our blog feed via RSS or email. And to contribute, please comment below or contact us directly.

Vote for DotNetNuke

Tom Kraak — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:58:00 GMT

Now that Obama has settled into the White House, it’s time to pledge your allegiance to DotNetNuke. First up, Microsoft Canada’s Ignite IT Awards, which according to Shaun Walker “are designed to recognize and reward the efforts of Canadian IT Professionals and Software Developers who have a great story and have made a difference in the software industry using Microsoft technology.” You may vote once a day through the end of March.

Next up is the 2009 asp.netPRO Readers Choice Award, the annual polling of asp.netPRO Magazine readers. DNN “qualified” for the content management system and community resource categories for the first time this year due to the release of DNN Professional Edition. Voting is open until April 25, 2009.

And here are other notable DNN community news items from the last few weeks.

Last week at Mix 09, Microsoft announced the latest version of the Web Platform Installer (WPI) which is meant to ease the pain of installing popular web apps such as DotNetNuke. Here is a quick walkthrough from Charles Nurse on how to install DNN via the WPI.
The 2009 South Florida Code Camp featured a good size DNN track this year and thanks to Will Strohl, mot sessions have been captured on video.
Speaking of Will Strohl, here he literally stumbles across the DNN 5 fix for the dreaded lockout issue. I love the way he found out :}-
Buck Anderson, aka the DNN Professor, shows you one way to correct an annoying issue with the FCKeditor background color.
Stefan Cullman and his team released Form and List 5.0 (formerly User Defined Table) for DNN 5. This is a feature-rich and powerful module for the majority of your web form needs.
Engage Software further contributes the community with Engage: Tell a Friend, a free module (including source) that simply sends the link of the current page by email. Besides giving away the module, this project is meant as a best practices guide for new DNN module developers as Engage programmer Ian Robinson explains.
Hooked on Twitter? Stuart Hilbert compiled a growing list of DNN twitteraties. Great link bait.
Chuck Self of Narrow Gate Solutions published a detailed, 30-page manual on the do’s and don’ts of hosting DNN with Network Solutions. Great effort!
DNN 4.9.2 and 5.0.1 added a “Permanent Redirect” option to Page Settings. Understand why it was added and learn how to properly take advantage of it by reading Bruce Chapman’s blog post.
Jeff Pruitt, application architect at F5 DevCentral, provides rare insights into enterprise level architecture build around DNN and other open source ASP.NET web applications.
And lastly, DNNVoice, the weekly DotNetNuke podcast, show number 4 is out. Download now and let us know what you think!

Did I miss anything important? Think you have DNN-related content worth linking too? Get in touch to be included in future DNN news roundups.

Co-hosting DNNVoice

Tom Kraak — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:15:00 GMT

Chris Hammond started DNNVoice, a DotNetNuke podcast, back in February. And while the first 2 shows were well received by the DNN community, a number of people suggested bringing on a co-host to liven up the podcast. Taking listener feedback to heart, Chris invited me to co-host show number 3, which I gladly accepted. I’ve dabbled with audio content in the past, mainly as a way to compliment my blogging, and had a great deal of fun working in the medium.

Feedback to the new lineup was overwhelmingly positive and Chris and I felt we worked well together after only one show and therefore decided to stick to the format as we carry on the podcast. But of course, DNNVoice is not about us. It’s about the DotNetNuke community and meant for anybody interested in keeping abreast with the latest developments in and around the largest open source web application framework on the Microsoft platform. Every week we strive to bring you the latest DNN Corp and community news and events, answer a listener question, and discuss a featured topic in greater detail.

You may download past and future shows from DNNVoice.com or subscribe via iTunes or Zune and follow us on Twitter for latest show announcements. We are the first ones to admit that we still have a lot to learn and therefore urge you to keep comments and constructive criticism coming as it helps us to bring you a better podcast.

Life of a Newly Minted MVP: 7 Questions for Antonio Chagoury

Tom Kraak — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:27:00 GMT

As part of my recent talk on DNN SEO at the Capital DNN User Group, I took the chance to sit down with Antonio Chagoury for a short interview.

For those in the DNN community who don’t already know you, can you tell us who you are and what you do?

I'm the CEO and Chief Software Architect of Inspector IT Inc, a .net and DotNetNuke solutions provider based in the Washington DC Metro Area. Inspector IT’s primary core competencies range from large scale e-commerce applications architecture and development to mash-ups, social networking components and Web 2.0 solutions.

Furthermore, I am co-founder and president of the Capital DotNetNuke User Group, which brings Washington metro area DotNetNuke enthusiasts together once a month to discuss a wide range of topics as well share ideas, knowledge and experience on the platform. I am a member of the DotNetNuke Core team of developers and lead the development of the Blog module.

I lived and traveled extensively in Europe, Africa and the Middle-East prior to settling in the Washington DC area in 1999. Besides English, I’m proficient in Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. I blog at cto20.com and have been known to frequent Twitter a little more than I'd like to admit.
When and how did you get involved with DotNetNuke?

My involvement with DotNetNuke began in the IBuySpy days. As Microsoft announced the .net Framework, it released a few sample applications to be used as learning blocks for those old classic ASP developers such as myself. IBuySpy was the app I chose to learn ASP.NET. Shortly thereafter, I came across a fellow developer by the name of Shawn Walker who had taken IBuySpy, a C# based application, and along with a few other brave men, re-wrote it in VB.NET, which ultimately gave birth to DotNetNuke. VB was my "first language" at the time, and therefore, my gravitation to DNN was quite natural.
What draws you to open source software and to DNN in particular?

The reason I became involved with DotNetNuke was not necessarily because it was open source, but more so because it gave me a head start while getting up to speed with .net. In many ways DNN has helped me grow as a professional, something that wouldn’t have been possible had it not been open source software. Along the way I embraced open source in the more traditional sense by contributing to the development and supporting the community at large by leading the development effort of the Blog module for DNN as well as initiating other small open source projects.
How did you become the DNN blog project lead and what can we expect from the module in the future?

In 2006 Nik Kalyani and I co-founded the Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG). Shortly thereafter the Blog module lost its project lead and Nik asked if I would take over the management and development of the module as well as build a solid support team for the project and its users. I accepted. Today, we have a team of 6 committed members, including myself, who maintain the product and shape its roadmap.

Although the Blog module has evolved by leaps and bounds in recent months, we still have lots of room for improvement in order to me considered a competitor to other blog engines, such as Wordpress, BlogEngine.net, SubText etc. To give you a hint, key features of the next major version (4.0) include taxonomy/categorization, tagging, tag cloud, multi-author capability, full templating capabilities, smarter data caching, and a few other enhancements that will surely please the community.
Tell us about the Capital DNN User Group (CDUG) and your experience with getting other people involved in the community.

As I mentioned, Nik and I co-founded the group almost 3 years ago. Since then, Nik has moved to the west coast and there have been times when I felt I was way in over my head, but we pulled through and persisted until we reached a critical mass. This experience has definitely made me appreciate the hard work that other community organizers put forth month in and month out to help educate their fellow professionals.

>Like most user groups, CDUG had to overcome many challenges such as recruiting speakers. Since there weren't many DotNetNuke "experts" in the area, and those who were interested in presenting were out-of-state and could not always afford the costs of the travel, I found myself being a "serial" speaker, in addition to organizing the event. This required that I not only perform my duties as organizer, such as recruiting meetings sponsors etc, but also that I prepare (almost monthly) new material for my presentations.

Thankfully, CDUG was able to gain INETA's attention, and through several rounds of negotiations, as well as help by the DotNetNuke core team leadership, we were the first "product-specific" user group to become an INETA member. The INETA membership enables CDUG to request speakers from their bureau, helping diversify the offerings of the group and bring new ideas to our members.

The DotNetNuke commercial ecosystem has also grown exponentially since we first started. DNN ISVs now see user group speaking engagements as a marketing vehicle for their business and therefore are willing to make the investment to come and speak at our events.

The next challenge was acquiring sponsorship. I am pleased to say that since inviting Hal Hayes to become CDUG's VP for Marketing, we have been able to attract and acquire sponsors who provide full product licenses as raffle give-aways to our members. Our sponsors include Red Gate, Infragistics, Telerik, Nevron, and of course CodeZone.com, which supplies user groups packages that include books, software and even hardware. Give-aways are a great way to grow membership and improve attendance, and it is always great to see people leave with a big smile on their faces.

Leading and cultivating CDUG has been one of the most difficult things I have done in my life and to this day it requires dedication, passion and of course sacrifices, but at the same time it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
You've recently been awarded Microsoft MVP. What does this recognition mean to you?

I have been privileged to serve the DotNetNuke community, to be a speaker at technical conferences, code camps and user groups. Receiving the Microsoft MVP award was the ultimate validation of my efforts. Even though I really enjoy everything I do within the DNN and .net community, it feels terrific to know that what I have done and continue to do for the community has not gone unnoticed, and that I have somehow been able to make a difference to others’ professional careers.
If you could change 3 things in the DNN web application framework, the community, or anything else related to DNN, what would they be?

This is an interesting question and much could be said here, but I rather give you sentiments expressed by real-life users, my customers:
1. Improve User Experience
  In recent releases, DotNetNuke's primary focus has been placed on building a solid underlying framework. Module developers are empowered with many out-of-box features that they can use to build powerful applications with little architectural knowledge and effort. Unfortunately, the user experience (not to be confused with user interface or UI) has paid a price. Other CMS' have overtaken DotNetNuke in this area by applying the now well known Web 2.0 concepts. It’s time to catch up!
2. Introduce Content Work-flow and Versioning
  DotNetNuke, like it or not, is a content management system (CMS). However, once again, the focus on improving the underlying framework has rendered its "edit-in-place" functionalities stagnant, stale, and out of date. Work-flow (although, admittedly, mostly needed in the enterprise) and content versioning are sore spots that, in my professional opinion, need to be mitigated sooner rather than later.
3. Develop Folksonomy APIs (Categories, Content Tagging, Ratings, Comments and Content Syndication)
  These functions lack or fail to meet expectations in both the framework, user interface and user experience. Categorization, tagging, rating, commenting, and sharing of content is now an expected feature of any content-centric web sites such as those built on top of DotNetNuke.

Blogging on DNN

Tom Kraak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 06:08:00 GMT

At least once a week I receive an email that reads something like this:

I have one quick question for you regarding your website. What DNN module are you using to run your blog?

Before getting into my actual blog implementation, I would like to reiterate what I said when this blog was born. I made the conscious decision to run my blog on DotNetNuke as I’m a firm believer in eating my own dog food. That does not mean that I don’t recognize the advantages of established blogging engines such as Wordpress, Subtext, and all the others, but I just can’t see myself practicing this and preaching that. So it was as much a business decision as it was a technical one, and overall, the choice of blogging on DNN has served me well over the last few years.

Seablick.com is currently built on DotNetNuke Community Edition, Ventrian News Articles, iFinity Url Master, and presented by a ThinkOfDesign.com custom skin.

The heart of the site is the blog, which is entirely driven by the News Articles (NA) module suite. Don’t be fooled by the “News Articles” name though as the module is full fledged publishing solution for the DNN platform and is designed to handle much more than news items. Features include simple workflow capabilities, categorization and sub-categorization, as well as social features such as commenting, rating, and content syndication. What first attracted me to the module and what remains the “killer” feature for me to this day, however, is the generous use of HTML layout templates. I think it’s fair to say that Scott McCulloch pioneered the idea of module templating, which is now quite common among 3rd party as well as core DNN modules. The combination of layout templates and a rich set of tokens provide great flexibility not only to form, but also to function without having to mess with the actual module source code. Furthermore, Scott subscribes to the philosophy of “release very often” and the majority of bug fixes and enhancements are completely customer driven. Mitchel Seller’s popular blog runs on News Articles as well and I know of other sites where most content lives in NA with very little use of DNN’s text/html module.

SEO-wise News Articles stacks up pretty well too except for unnecessarily long Urls. That’s where Url Master comes in, which by default strips DNN Urls of of /tabid/xxx/, but leaves articleType/ArticleView/articleId/xxx/ untouched. However, Url Master’s rewrite engine is fully aware of regular expression and therefore any Url can be manipulated/rewritten/redirected via a file called FriendlyUrlParams.config located in the website root. If you are familiar with mod_rewrite on Apache or ISAPI_rewrite on IIS, you’ll feel right at home. And that’s precisely how I achieved much cleaner blog Urls in the form of /blog/141/blogging-on-dnn.aspx. I hope to convince Bruce Chapman of iFinity Software to write another guest post very soon to shed more light on advanced rewriting with Url Master.

I introduced this post by stressing my commitment to dogfooding, which in turn begs the question why I’m betting my money on Ventrian News Articles instead of the DNN Blog module project. And every so often my good friend and Blog module lead Antonio Chagoury hits me over the head trying to get me to switch. However, even Antonio will admit that back in the beginning of 2007 as I actively started blogging, the Blog project wasn’t nearly as mature a module as it is today. So while I’m deeply vested in NA on my own site, I’ve definitely been considering the Blog module for client projects ever since the 3.05 release.

What’s your take on blogging on DotNetNuke? Do you care about the underlying technology of your favorite blogs or is the actual content all that really matters?

Proven DNN SEO Guru

Tom Kraak — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:37:00 GMT

I have not shared any client testimonials lately, so here is one that I received just this week. Thanks Mark!

I consider myself to be very tech savvy, but recently came across something very troubling that I found no answer to. I had moved one of my classic ASP websites as a parent portal into an existing DotNetNuke installation. While that was easy to do, it came with its own little surprise. I had been at the top of the search results for this domain for a long time, but after the port to DNN it seemed to have vanished from the Google index entirely!

Troubled in regards to what was causing this, I contacted Tom Kraak who was quickly able to identify the problem and provide me with step by step instructions on how to fix it. The end result? I'm back at the top of the search results and couldn't be happier! Tom has proven to be the DNN SEO guru in my eyes. I have worked with other consultants before, but Tom is light years ahead of the competition when it comes to DotNetNuke and especially DNN search engine optimization.

Mark Gordon
Webmaster
Prince William County Park Authority
pwcparks.org

Using the Canonical Link Tag in DNN

Tom Kraak — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:51:00 GMT

As announced at SMX West last week, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have united behind a new standard to fight duplicated content created by multiple Urls calling on one and the same page. The idea is to designate a single “canonical” Url that then gets indexed by search engines. Up until now, 301 redirects were the preferred way to minimize duplicate content through canonicalization. However, redirection is not always practical, so the following new syntax has been agreed upon:

According to W3C specifications, the link tag resides in the <head> section of the HTML document and defines the relationship between a document and an external resource.

I won’t go into further details on the inner workings of the canonical link tag, but instead show you how easy it is to take advantage of it in DotNetNuke.

As you can see from the screenshot above, all you need to do is paste the entire link tag into the Page Header Tags field fount under Page Settings > Advanced Settings. There are no modules or other kinds of extensions required. What do you do with module-driven pages though, which are not associated with conventional Page Settings in any way? Well, the responsibility to add support for the canonical link tag goes back to the module developer. Programmatically speaking, it’s not a big effort to dynamically inject header tags as demonstrated by the core framework. Go bug your module vendor now :)-

SEO Pitfalls of Crossposting

Tom Kraak — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:33:00 GMT

When doing research for DNN Friday, our weekly DotNetNuke news roundup, I often come across content that is duplicated across multiple blogs, a practice also known as crossposting. DNN core team members are a perfect example as most of them maintain personal blogs in addition to posting on dotnetnuke.com.

While I understand the motivation behind this type of content sharing, for most smaller sites and organizations, it will quite often have a negative effect on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. First and foremost, you are producing duplicate content, which is widely frowned upon by search engines. Furthermore, you are creating yourself unnecessary “competition” as shown in the screenshot below.

This in turn diminishes your blog’s effectiveness to drive traffic as searchers ultimately have to make a choice on what to click on when scanning search engine results pages (SERPs.)

But even if you can live with the 2 points made above, what you can’t afford is wasting “link juice.” Incoming links are deemed as votes for your content and for your site as whole and are the primary force behind search engine rankings. By serving up multiple copies of your content across domains, however, you are essentially spreading yourself thin. I consider myself a responsible linkerati, meaning that I will make a concerted effort to link to the most appropriate source, but why take even the slightest chance when every link counts?

Do you maintain a personal site, but also write for your employer’s blog? Do you find yourself crossposting every so often or even on a regular basis? I would love to hear your side of the story.

DotNetNuke.com Relaunched as DNN 5.01 Nears

Tom Kraak — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 03:52:00 GMT

As part of its ongoing internal reorganization, DotNetNuke Corp. relaunched dotnetnuke.com for the first time in years. Clearly the most important hub for the DNN community, the site sports a refreshing new look based on the new default skin introduced with DNN 5. The home page has been vastly simplified giving priority to DotNetNuke Professional Edition. To better accommodate the growing page count, the main menu has been reorganized and a left-hand vertical menu was added to most interior pages. While the site is now better structured, I have not found any major new content as of yet. Even details on DNN PE are still limited to a one page intro and a dull contact form. Overall though, the visual improvements are pleasing to the eyes and a welcome change the the gray-red combination of the last few years. Hats off to anybody involved in the relaunch.

Now on to more DNN community news.

According to Joe Brinkman, 2 new core releases are coming our way with DNN 4.9.2 scheduled for Feb 16 and 5.0.1 scheduled for Feb 23. I’m wondering what prompted an additional 4.x.x release as 4.9.1 was supposed to mark the end of the DNN 4 code branch.
A number of new Wrox DNN titles have seen the light of bookstores this week. The highly anticipated Professional DNN Module Programming by Mitchel Sellers has finally gone on sale and so has Professional DNN 5: Open Source Web Application Framework for ASP.NET by by Shaun Walker, Brian Scarbeau, Darrell Hardy, and Stan Schultes. For some lighter fare, check out DNN and Web Standards by Cuong Dang and DNN Custom Membership Provider by Antonio Chagoury.
Speaking of Mitchel Sellers, he posted a great overview on how to tune your DNN site for performance.
I had the pleasure of helping Bruce Chapman of iFinity Software test Url Master for DNN 5, which has now been released. Besides being fully compatible with the latest DNN version, Bruce has enhanced the module so that DNN upgrades are now possible without having to disable Url Master first.
And sticking with Urls for a minute, Bruce Chapman blogs about why you should have long Urls. Interesting read, especially the part on lazy programmers :)
I’m often asked about alternatives to the core Events module. Take a look at Engage Events 1.1 as it might be just what you were looking for.
Ever wondered how to add your own JavaScript to 3rd party modules? Read the Eguana Solutions blog to learn how.
DNN core team member Erik van Ballegoij shares a few valuable lessons learned while getting comfortable with the the new DNN 5 extension manifest and Charles Nurse covers the subject in more detail in a 4-part series on the new extension installer manifest.
Uploading a restricted file type to DNN is simply a matter of enabling it, right? Well maybe, but there is more to the story as Will Strohl explains.
And to wrap up for this week, a quick reminder that I will be speaking on the topic of DNN SEO at the Capital DNN User Group on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009. If you call the nation’s capital your home or happen to be in the are, I hope you swing by and say hi.

Interested in having your content featured on the Seablick blog? Simply let us know.

Beware of Automated SEO

Bruce Chapman — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:25:00 GMT

Picture this; you've got a problem with your ISP. You know you need to ring the helpdesk, so with trepidation you pick up the phone and call them. Soon enough you're speaking to one of those horrid voice recognition boxes:

It: Hello, please state the name of the department you'd like to speak to.
You: Support.
It: I'm sorry, we don't have a “sports” department.
You: Support, I said support!
It: I'm sorry, we don't have an “iced sports” section.
You: Ahhh! I hate automated voice systems!
It: Thank you, connecting you to 'automated voice systems' now.

The point I'm trying to make through humor here is that an automated solution is generally an always inferior way to handle interpersonal communications. Granted, machines such as vending machines and teller machines greatly increase the efficiency of an interaction, but in those cases it isn't interpersonal: you just want to purchase a refreshment or get some money from the bank - any conversation is outside the primary goal.

When you think about what a search engine query is, it's more person-to-person than person-to-machine. The person typing in the keywords is often asking an open ended question about what is on the Internet - and by inclusion - what is on your site. The best way to answer that is to ensure that the content is written with the intention of a person reading it one day. Nobody would ever think of automatically generating AdWords text ads, instead, you would obsessively test and refine the language until your visitors are clicking through in good numbers. The exact same principles apply to organic SEO activities.

This brings me to the topic of automated SEO solutions. These generally take one of these forms:

Automatic generation of meta information
Automatic site submission
Automatic link generation
Automatic link requests

It's my belief that there are no free lunches in the SEO world, so forget the automation. And here's why I believe each of the above are of no use, or worse, have a negative effect.

Automatic Generation of Meta Information

The promise: The concept is attractive. Just let a program loose on your site content, and it will pick the keywords and stuff your meta tags with great content.

The problem: Apart from the fact that meta keywords simply don't matter anymore, keyword rich doesn't mean readable. Stuffing your title tag full of random keywords in a scattered pattern just makes your site look unprofessional, or worse, like one of those automatically generated AdSense arbitrage sites.

The fix: Just write good content, and carefully edit your page meta information to match the content. You want a branded, keyword-rich title, and a meaningful description. And page content that matches the promise of the title and description.

Automatic Site Submission

The promise: Use our software, and we'll automatically submit your site to a trillion* directories and search engines.

The problem: Mass site submission is not the key. A carefully selected and executed linking strategy is. There's really only about 3 or 4 sites and/or directories that everyone should be going for, and after that, you should be carefully choosing where to aim your link building efforts.

The fix: You're far better off with a small number of good, relevant, inbound links than 1,000 low value automated links to sites you've never heard of. Devise a link building strategy and work through it.

* OK, I made that up. But it's always a big number in the promises.

Automatic Link Generation

The promise: Just put your site Url into our software, and we'll have large numbers of links pointing to your site in no time.

The problem: Also known as bots: whether they be wiki-bots, comment-bots, forum-bots; any sort of software that is going to plaster a link all over the Internet is likely breaking all sorts of terms of service agreements.

The fix: Just don't do it. If you want to generate links for your site on wikis, forums and blogs, then go and add thoughtful and useful additions to the discussion. They won't get deleted and you won't get reported.

Automatic Link Requests

The promise: Using this software, you can automatically build up a large number of reciprocal links. We'll contact partner sites and set up reciprocal links with them and therefore improve your ranking.

The problem: Search engines wised up to reciprocal linking a while back, and now it's not nearly as beneficial as it once was. You don't need (and shouldn't have) a “links” page on your site with about 50 unrelated websites on it. And, to put it simply, you're spamming people using automated software.

The fix: If you want to attract quality inbound links to your site, then I recommend you do it with some old-fashioned person-to-person communication. You don't always need to email the webmaster, you could try posting a blog entry about the other site, and then hoping they'll return the favor. Or you could offer to write some content for them. There are many ways to do it: spamming by automated email rarely works.

What can you automate?

Not all automation is bad. Anything that is human-to-machine or machine-to-machine is a good candidate for automation. I often build automatic 301 redirect logic into software that I build, so that search engines can automatically update their search indexes. You can also automatically generate your xml sitemaps (although Tom would argue you should manually set all the priorities.)

There are also great SEO tools for checking rankings and generating keyword ideas. These are good to use for generating starting points to feed into your strategy. It's only when you are beginning to automate your entire strategy that you're unlikely to get good results.

What’s better done manually?

That's easy: everything else. All of your page content. All of your page meta information. All of your directory and search engine submissions (yes, all 4 or 5 of them.) All of your link building strategies. Even the internal links in your site’s html, code them up by hand so that they're formed properly. These should all be done by thinking about what will work best to achieve your goals, and then executing on a strategy. You're a person, and you're speaking directly to other people. Leave the bots to automated voice response systems and concentrate on delivering value.

Have you found yourself wondering about these “too good to be true” automated SEO offers or even fallen for some of them? Please add to the discussion by leaving comments below.

Keep Search Engine Bots at Bay During Development

Tom Kraak — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:49:00 GMT

The Internet brought a whole new level to the idea of remote collaboration, especially for Web design itself and broader software development. We commonly share custom DNN skins and modules at certain stages of the development cycle with clients and partners at demo.domain.com or similar.

However, if done carelessly, exposing work-in-progress sites to the Internet may cause SEO nightmares before you know it. The trouble starts when Google and company decide to pay you a visit and start indexing your staging site. Granted this usually does not occur from one day to the next, but give it enough time and search engine bots will eventually come across a “misplaced link” or other means to reach your development playground. Due to the time involved to get the job done, the chances of this happening are more pronounced for larger projects such as moving an existing (static) site with a good number of pages to DNN or other CMS, which ultimately will become the new “live” website as opposed to setting up demo.domain.com for skin or module demonstration / testing only.

Adding more fuel to the fire, you most likely won’t notice the damage until you are actually trying to get your shiny new site indexed or the index updated. At this point you are SEO-back paddling and therefore wasting precious time dealing with duplicated content hell and a spammy index.

So how do you avoid such rude awakening? You take advantage of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) by placing a robot.txt file into the root of your development website right before it sees the light of the public Internet. At a minimum, your robots.txt will contain 2 lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The first line addresses all search engines bots / spiders /crawlers across the board (even though nothing forces them to obey the REP standard, but the majority of them do.) And the second line shuts the door in their faces by “disallowing” crawling and indexing of the site in question. Now, and this is important, you do need to remember to update your robots.txt file once you are ready to release your live site, because from this moment on forward you certainly want it to be found, indexed, and ranked by search engines.

Ever had a spider wreak havoc in any of your development or test beds? Please share in the comments.

Seablick Consulting

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Paul Sterling on Umbraco vs. DNN

For those in the .NET open source community who don't already know you, can you tell us who you are and what you do?

What draws you to open source software and to Umbraco in particular?

I learned from your blog that you switched your main focus from DNN to Umbraco in 2007. What was the main motivation behind that?

With your background in DNN and Umbraco, where do you see the main differences between the 2 open source projects?

What advice would you give people who are considering Umbraco as an alternative to DotNetNuke?

DNN is now venture capital funded corporation. Do you see Umbraco move into the same direction?

Your company, Motus Connect, has been hard at work on Commerce for Umbraco. What can you tell us about this project?