Finally the SunBlogNuke 6.0 is available to free upgrade today and it will be first version of next generation blog optimized for DNN6 & DNN7. In this building we fixed some critical issues, including daylight savings time issue with removing timezone option and Windows Azure Cloud Compatibility; plus implemented lots of enhancements, such as feature related posts with thumbnail and posts migration between blog instances in the same portal/website.

And next we will focus more attentions on mobile devices, including responsible theme and App to manage blog posts/comments. Now we are trying to find professional designer, if you are interested in our blogging/article module or familiar with DNN skin design, you can contact us and help us design better theme with HTML5.

Major Highlights in v6.0:
Min DotNetNuke version required: v6.0.0

• ENH - supported to feature related posts with thumbnails.
• ENH - implemented posts migration between blog instances in the same portal/website.
• ENH - compatible with Windows Azure Cloud.
• ENH - supported embed slideshow with optional extension "FancyGallery".
• ENH - supported "subscription management" panel and notification for blog owners/website admin about subscription changed, such as subscribed or unsubscribed.
• FIX - thumbnail issue with png transparent.
• FIX - daylight savings time issue with removing timezone option.
• FIX - always exception occurred when saving blog settings.
• FIX - meta description with html entities like '&amp ;' etc.
• FIX - trackback bug not based on blog settings.
• FIX - 'keywords' issue in the tag view and resolved it as "NOINDEX, FOLLOW".
• FIX - comments with HTML tags.
• FIX - resolved the upload button of post thumbnail not clickable.

NOTE: from v6.0 the SunBlogNuke will begin to not support DotNetNuke 5.x any more because it will utilize core APIs introduced from DNN6+, such as daylight savings time. If you are still using the dnn5, you don’t have to be worry about it because we will also maintain independent branch of the older version 5.8.x, which will always be compatible with dnn5 and may be updated with fixes without new features any more.

You can get it here. We hope that with this generation dnn blog module  you can enjoy the blog writing and it will make your life better; plus if you have any good advice about our products, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us.

The SunBlogNuke Team

1. Split the current post title with space and build the main keywords
2. Try to find out the title of other posts matched those keywords
3. Try to find out the description of other posts  matched those keywords
4. Try to find out the content of other posts matched those keywords
5. List the top [x] posts from those matched posts

You can specify [x] posts from settings panel, even you can uncheck the option [Show related posts which may talk about similar topics] in Reading Setting Panel to turn the "related posts" feature off.

But today I would like to show you a alternative way to feature related posts on your dnn blog. That is a external plugin [LinkWithin]. You should know most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors and is why I recommend it for you here.

The plugin is available with providing you with a code snippet that you can use on most blogging platform including SunBlogNuke. We assume that LinkWithin does some semantic analysis in the background in order to arrive at its list of related stories, though we weren't able to track down any details. Please take a look at how it action in the end of this post or the screenshot below:

Okey, now let me cover you how to make it work well in your dnn blog – SunBlogNuke. Actually it is so easy that there are some simple steps as follows:

1) Link to http://www.linkwithin.com/learn and fill in the form like the screenshot below:

2) Click "Get Widget" to get your code snippet for your blog.

3) Login your dnn website with blogger account and enter your template manage panel.

4) Switch the template type as "Footer in the Post Detail" and paste the code snippet into text area.

5) Click "Update", visit any post of your blog and you should see it works like a charm.

Note that the 4) and 5) are optional, you also insert the code snippet into your theme template (Themes/YourCustomizedTheme/DetailView.ascx) as follows:

Please get the more details from FAQs link about how to customize LinkWithin Widget and from the tutorial about Developing Your Customized Theme for DNN Blog Module.

That is all. Enjoy blogging via Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke :)

Min DotNetNuke version required: DNN6.0+

Built-in Subscription

Although the subscription feature have been introduced a while back, it only supported the registered users to subscribe blog update and marked as optional widget. In the 6.0 building, the subscription feature had been re-implemented with more enhancements, such as supported visitors to subscribe, and packaged into core installation. 

Go through the workflow of subscription as follows:

Subscribe

1) Fill in email and click to subscribe the current blog update.

2) You will be received one confirm email to active your subscription.

Unsubscribe

1) Click the unsubscribe link in the confirm email when you subscribed it

2) You will be directed to the unsubscribe form to complete your action.

Additionally blog admin can check out how many subscribers in their blog, toggle the active status if clients requested to do it and receive notification about subscription changed, such as subscribed or unsubscribed. Please feel free to try it out on our demo blog.

Windows Azure Cloud Compatibility

Starting DotNetNuke 6.0, all the editions of DotNetNuke Platform (Community, Professional, Enterprise) had natively support Windows Azure Cloud. And more and more clients will host their DNN websites in the cloud, our modules should work well in the Windows Azure Cloud, too. The compatibility of SQL scripts of our modules is one key to be resolved in this process. After explore and testing, we fixed all the script compatible issues in v6.0 and now SunBlogNuke can run well in Windows Azure. Take a look at the demo blog here – http://x86.azurewebsites.net/DevBlog.aspx.

Embed Slideshow in the Content

In common, embedding a slideshow is common requirement to the presentation/gallery blogs. Our clients also requested the same feature a while back. With GalleryPlus module integration, it is so easy to build slideshow in your blog content – only few shortcode like that:

[SLIDESHOW:album_id:xx_width:xx_height]

(album_id is for the album id built by GalleryPlus module, xx_width is the width value of slideshow and xx_height is the height value of slideshow).

Take a look at how it actions - Wish SunBlogNuke had a slideshow function

Daylight Savings Time

In this building we supported daylight savings time based on DotNetNuke 6.0 framework API and the time zone option of blog settings is marked as obsolete. Now the registered users will see the blog date consistent with their time zone and anonymous users get the blog date based on the Portal’s time zone.

What If I Find a Problem?

If you happen to have issues with the alpha version or have found a bug that you can reproduce, please post it in our community forum. If you aren’t sure how to use, just use what is most convenient for you, such as email or contact us directly here. We’ll be looking for feedback everywhere!

We’d like to thank the community, sponsors and most of all the amazing feedback that have supported and guided this unique #dnn #blogging #module. We encourage you to participate wherever you can, you input and help are always appreciated. Thanks a lot for your trust on our dnn products.

Major Highlights in v5.8:
Min dnn version required: dnn 5.3.1

• ENH - added optional 'Subscription' widget into core package and supported visitors to subscribe.
• ENH - removed those outdated icons in social widget. such as MySpace.
• ENH - supported core 'Simplicity' theme with post thumbnail.
• ENH - supported 'PubSubHubbub' protocol in rss feed.
• ENH - supported social bookmark with any external customized code/script, including addthis service.
• ENH - moved "show all archives link" option into archives widget settings.
• ENH - optimized export content and fixed issues in the import process.
• FIX - tag archives view with security problem and "itemsmax" option in rss feed.
• FIX - invalid author ids caused lots of ThreadAbortExceptions.
• FIX - failure to delete blog authors.
• FIX - email notification not show html format correctly.
• FIX - shortcut link to approve comment not work.

The complete details for all of the changes can be found in the Release Notes.

You can get it here. Blog your way and enjoy life. :)

The SunBlogNuke Team

I know blogs and generally love just how much Google love they get. As a general rule blogs gets indexed more than websites simply because the content is updated more regularly.

Moving to DotNetNuke met me with a big problem, I wanted the capabilities of DotNetNuke and the ability to blog in a manner that I was used to. With wordpress I had the option to move my plugins around on the page, DotNetNuke allows this however I did have to hunt long and hard before I found a module that did exactly what I wanted to.

First lets talk about the problems that I faced with the other modules, given that there are only about three modules worth speaking about on the snowcovered marketplace it won't take long to cover :)

My first option looked ok and being the cheapest I knew that it wasn't going to be great, however it did allow for modules to separated up into different containers. However one thing it lacked was a search function that allowed the user to search the blog without having to leave the page. I was used to this function and wanted the results to be on the same page that I was searching from. The demo seemed "ok" but the lack of response from the developer didn't go down well with me. That was called the Post It Blog module and is priced at $40.

Next on my list and at a much higher $130 I found a module called Live Blog. Although I found a demo and it was easy to download, the thing that put me off the module right away was that the entire module was built into one and made it extremely difficult to work into my theme and customise. Instant Uninstall!

Finally I found a module called SunBlogNuke. Instantly impressed.

Installation starts with the usual "Install as an extension" type of install and the current version works with all instances of DotNetNuke.

Once installation is complete you then add the SunBlog module to a page, this populates the page with a number of related modules that you can drop into any container you choose. This type of setup is extremely flexible and allows you to customise your blog to your liking.

The first thing I wanted to know before even digging into the backend, was just how pretty I could make the front end. For the novice there is a small selection of themes that styles the blog in a minimalistic kind of way, and in my case fixed a few alignment errors that came when I first dropped the module onto the page.

The good thing about the built in themes is that they do not take over the site with design, but rather add to the current theme. The more experienced designer can go to the desktop modules folder and have a play with the theme css or create their own, something that the developer encourages.

You can check out our demo blog here.

I liked that fact that the code was well written, it was very easy for me just to plant my own code in all the right places to get the look and feel I wanted.

The SunBlogNuke blog module is a multi blog module that allows you to create multiple blogs under multiple authors, this is perfect if you have a big organization and have different departments where information shared is quite varied. As a result of this the different parts of the module come with many options for you to play with.

The categories module lets you pick from which blog the categories are being selected via the options, for me this was never a big deal as i only have one blog but it's very useful to have!

The search was a huge selling point for me. I am used to seeing the blog search results on the blog page.

The meta section is where all the backend action happens, and allows you to create and edit posts as well as organize your blog.

The backend of the blog is very organized with a place for everything. Statistics are prominent and allow you to see how many page views you have on each post. Also on the main page you can find your most recent comments and any draft posts you may have to finish as well as a section to make a "quick post".

Along the top we have a navigation section to allow us to create, edit or delete blogs, change blog settings which includes general, writing and reading settings, adding a new entry (although you can do this on the blog home page), change comments settings, manage blog users, edit categories, manage tags, customization settings and migration settings.

Each of these settings allow you to do everything you would expect with a normal blog and if you are a seasoned blogger you will feel right at home.

To be honest I have really only touched on the elements of the SunBlogNuke Blog module, however I can say with honesty (I have tested them all) that SunBlogNuke is the most flexible and user friendly module of the bunch.

Priced at a very reasonable $99.95, you can get this module fitted to your skin like a glove in no time.

The SunBlogNuke website also come with a huge variety of downloadable guides and videos to help you along the way. I will also be posting some tutorials to get you started with this awesome module.

By Hayden Tomas

Why social bookmark/sharing so important?

If you ever read anything about getting traffic to blogs you will be told thousands of times that you need to get your blog in as many social networks as possible. Indeed, social bookmark buttons on blog are very important for the growth of the blog and has some critical benefits for any blog or any website.

1) Get your blog indexed quicker by the search engines, for example, if your blog post shared with Google+ circle, it will be crawled and indexed quickly by Google.

2) It builds an audience of visitors which find your content useful in your niche, which provide target traffic to your website. Then targeted traffic will lead to returning visitors, RSS subscribers and more followers on social networking sites.

How to build bookmark widget in DNN Blog - SunBlogNuke?

As the most popular #dnn #blog #module, SunBlogNuke would like to build better user experience for your blog writing & shared actions. Also clients ever raised issue that the bookmark configure looks little difficulty and no idea how to make it work. Fortunately, the SunBlogNuke v5.0 simplify the settings configure without losing flexibility. Here let us go through this process step by step:

1) Switch to "Reading" tab of settings control panel of your blog.

2) Find out "Social Bookmarking" option, where you find it out like that:

3) Configure above as follows:

• [Active] - specify whether you would like to show social bookmark widget in your post detail view; in common, it is placed in the bottom of the post content but you can customize with the theme view. For example, you can build your own customized social bookmark in the theme level as covered in the this tutorial.
• [1st textbox] - it is optional and if you don’t like the default social buttons system provided, you can build your own html tags for social bookmark widget, for example, you can create your own custom sharing widget with following 3 simple steps in ShareThis service(the default option - 'Website'). In the last step, you should get the some codes there and copy the html span tags into 1st text here.
• [2nd textbox] - like the 1st textbox, just fill in script code here. It is optional and let it blank means that there is not any external scripts with your own social sharing widget.

4) Click "Save settings" to make those options work.

PS: from v5.7 building, this 'social bookmarking' option also supports well with AddThis service and you can configure it similarly like ShareThis mentioned above.

That is all and if you configure all well, the social sharing widget should work like a charm. Take a look at how it actions in the bottom of this current post.

If you have any good advice about our #dnn module products, please feel free to leave a comment or contact us via email.

Blog your way and enjoy life. :)

Our Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke can be integrated with third-party services via the MetaWeblog API and RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), like Flickr and Posterous. Recently our client Tyler just completed integration with Flickr and also contribute a awesome tutorial for us, in which you will learn how to add blog posts directly from your Flickr account and share a Photo Slideshow into your dnn blog. Now we would like to share it for our community, which you can access from the download page, and hope it makes sense when you are trying to do the same thing but not any clues. In a word, I though that it is awesome gift for us. With the contributed guideline, we would be happy to thank him with a two month extension on his license's access to support and updates. We encourage any sharing for our module because they will be helpful in our community.  If you have more tricks and tips about SunBlogNuke, please share it here or contribute it to us. If necessary, you can get the same prize. :)

PS: we just released one new Flickr feed widget for DNN blog page and you may be interested in it. Please feel free to download it and have a try if you are our license account.

Why to build gallery in blog content?

In common, you can build the awesome blog post with some media files, and sometimes you would like to share lots of images with your friends. Yes, you want to build an album with those images in the blog post content. But it looks difficulty to incorporate display for larger images, which under normal situations would break the layout of this site. It will save lots of our time if there is some way to automatically organized images with clean & elegant layout and we just copy/insert images into Rich-Editor or WLW.

Congratulations. The "Fancy Gallery" extension is the exact tool for your dnn blog. And it is another extension for Ultimate DNN Blog Module – SunBlogNuke. You just feel free to add your images and this extension will do the rest for you – automatically convert them into one fancy gallery with lightbox effect.

How this blog gallery extension works?

To apply the blog extension, it is so easy and just follows up the simple steps below:

1) Make sure that you have installed SunBlogNuke v4.8.+ for your DNN blog page.

2) Download it from the extensions directory.

3) Unzip it and upload the extension assembly file SunBlogNuke.Extensions.FancyGallery.dll into the folder $ROOT/bin. Then upload another folder into blog extensions folder $ROOT/DesktopModules/SunBlog/Extensions.

Until now it has been deployed. Next I walk you through the process to add images when writing post:

1) Enter "Edit Post" panel (Or connect WLW) and focus on the Rich Editor.

2) Add images with tool button "Insert Image" of editor. Don’t worry about the layout and just make them sequence placed there.

3) Add token in the end of all the images. Note that it is the key step and make sure that all the images for album is closed in the middle section of those two tokens. It looks like that: (Red circle is your images section)

4) Complete other configurations of current post and click "update" to save it into db.

That is all. It should work like a charm - when visiting the post detail, you will see the auto-built gallery with your images in your blog post.

Summary

With a little bit of setup, it is possible to quickly add lightbox image effects to a DotNetNuke site with specific desires to implement it in the Blogging/Articles module for blog/other content.

As always, feel free to post comments/suggestions below or if you are having difficulties implementing this on your site you may post to the community forums!

Download    View Demo

Actually everyone was looking forwards to DotNetNuke7, which should be equal to the so-called milestone, however, more expectations more disappointed. Let us take a look at the votes in codeplex – until today only average 2.8 rating with lots of lowest 1 star:

Was updating from v.5.5.1. When updating all files I get the following error when updating (Install page) DotNetNuke Error An unhandled error occurred. < Back to website Can I look at my error logs somewhere? Regards, Ely

Having major problems adding new modules - when adding a module with multiple definitions only the first control is output. It's also annoying when adding/updating module definitions (or modifying settings in general) - the section of the page keeps collapsing every time a change is saved.

Some good ideas, and as always we encourage the had work of those who have put into this release. Well done... but for those who are thinking of running this version. Forget it! Significant bugs that are show stoppers that no doubt will be fixed fast!

'Fixed issue in the Journal that made image thumbnails not clickable' NO YOU DIDN'T!!! This makes the Journal module useless unfortunately.. Everything else looks good, thank you for the great release and all the hard work you put in.

You can find more similar comments there. In this scenery we may have some questions. Is it the stable version with so many issues? When will the next fixed version be available? Why introduce so many bugs?…  This buildings indeed included tons of enhancements, especially in the look and feel, but meanwhile we still need to provide workable product to community, right? Not only we need small iteration development but also require quick response. In the end, I want to express my real feelings that we like DotNetNuke much and hope it run better and better but hope that it will be more stable & lightweight again; plus, it will better if some key features may be included in community version. :)

BTW, you can fix the second issue mentioned above by switching to the original control panel "RIBBONBAR" in the host settings but not the new one, which looks nice but not useless. I ever mentioned this workaround in another post - SunBlogNuke v5.6.2 works well with DNN7.

From 2002 DotNetNuke built from scratch, until now there are indeed LOTS of DotNetNuke versions, which had made everyone headache with DNN modules/skins maintenance. :(

Luckily, there still are more or less benefits to play with DNN because it exposed a few flexible APIs to make our life better, such as IPortable interface makes data migration easily and quickly between different dnn environments. Today I would like to show how to migrate blog data of SunBlogNuke, for example, from older version to latest fresh installation.

Export Blog Content

To get started the migration process, firstly we need to export old blog data from the source dnn website. Just follow up the steps below:

1) Go to blog page SunBlogNuke installed there. Find out the Meta widget  - the sub module with "Admin Panel" link to enter Dashboard.

2) Mouse over module actions menu, in common it should be in the left-top. Expand it and click the link "Export Content". Like that:

3) Enter export panel. Choose folder to place the export data file(we recommend that you choose the folder called 'Templates') and fill in the file name, such as YOUR-BLOG-TITLE.

4) Click button "Export" to make this action complete. If not any error happened, your blog data(may like that $ROOT/Portals/XX/Templates/content.SunBlog.YOUR-BLOG-TITLE.xml) have been exported into here.

5) Enter Admin/File Manager page and navigate to the source folder, here is the folder called "Templates", where you should find out the exported xml file "content.SunBlog.YOUR-BLOG-TITLE.xml".

6) Click to download it in your local computer.

That is all and the data source is ready now.

Import Blog Content

Actually the import process is similar with the export one but in opposite way and completed in the target dnn website. Simply as follows:

1) Enter Admin/File Manager page and navigate to the target folder, here is we choose the folder called "Templates".

2) Upload the source file – our exported xml file in local computer – into this folder.

3) Return your page with new fresh SunBlogNuke installed. Also find out the Meta widget - the sub module with "Admin Panel" link to enter Dashboard.

4) Also mouse over module actions menu, in common it should be in the left-top. Expand it and click the link "import Content". 

5) Enter import panel. Choose folder "Templates",  and select the source file like "content.SunBlog.YOUR-BLOG-TITLE.xml".

6) Click button "Export" to make this action complete.

If not any error happened, congratulations, your blog data should be migrated into your new dnn website. Just return to check it out whether it works like a charm.

Workaround for Blog Authors Issues

With built-in dnn import process, there is one known issue with blog authors. If the foreign key – userid of every post not exist in new website, it will apply current admin/host account as blog author. To fix it, please open up the imported file with any xml editor and modify the userid or createdby element with your new userid, which you find it easily in the profile page. For example,

    Original: <userID>3</userID>

    Modify: <userID>113</userID>

Actually you complete in one second with find & replace action. Then it will apply this new userid as blog author of your imported posts.

The last thing of migration process is to check out the permalinks of all the posts whether have been redirected to new website. If not, update your blog settings and regenerate all the links in the basic settings. And re-assign blog authors may be required, too.

If you have any questions please feel free to raise your question in our forum or contact us.