I’ve been looking at the latest DotNetNuke build with DNN 6 just around the corner, and beta testing on http://www.dnnbeta.com it’s been interesting to see the changes.

I thought I’d take a quick look under the hood and found that there have been significant improvements to the UI and while still a little ‘clunky’ in it’s design, is in fact in keeping with trends these days.

Whether or not I’ll jump straight into the build and stop using the current DNN version, well that’s another story, but for now, I’m happy to be trialling it.

I like the way there is now clear definition between the sections when working in the admin area. Tabbed interfaces to identify where you are in the management section of the site, eg.. basic and advanced because even as a site administrator and being familiar with how things are setup, visually placing them was sometimes a challenge.

The dropdown menus in reference to content management have been replaced with the the more popular ‘mega menu’ styling, taking up less vertical space, which at times I found on some off the shelf skins, saw the drop down menu moving below the screen of the page. I found this more with the skins which have ‘never ending panes’. And by that I mean a bit of tongue in cheek with the designs we have seen sent to us for repair having over 30 panes for content to be displayed in.

This image below shows the module administration behaviour. I have read that there is some concern in reference to skinobjects which may no longer work but have not tested it to state whether this is noticeable for the standard skins.

I confess it took me a while to actually get some content onto the page. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t quickly see where to add a html module so I do need to familiarise myself with this a little more but upon adding a new page, edited the auto placed html module and found that like the login, the modal pop up provided a screen quite separate from the current method of adding content. By using this method, I was able to get the editing background to be white, unlike previous issues with the RADEditor, and the body background CSS class tended to show by default in the body of the editor. As you can see with this particular design, if the background image shows, it’s quite busy to work around.

I was not quite as keen with the modal window, as it felt like I had extra scrolling with the save button being just that bit lower than the default height, however, the full screen option on the top right hand corner was quick and responsive and provided a nice working space to edit content and I think anyone with a laptop or smaller screen would find this beneficial.

I confess it took me a while to actually get some content onto the page. I don’t know why but I just couldn’t quickly see where to add a html module so I do need to familiarise myself with this a little more but upon adding a new page, edited the auto placed html module and found that like the login, the modal pop up provided a screen quite separate from the current method of adding content. By using this method, I was able to get the editing background to be white, unlike previous issues with the RADEditor, and the body background CSS class tended to show by default in the body of the editor. As you can see with this particular design, if the background image shows, it’s quite busy to work around.

I was not quite as keen with the modal window, as it felt like I had extra scrolling with the save button being just that bit lower than the default height, however, the full screen option on the top right hand corner was quick and responsive and provided a nice working space to edit content and I think anyone with a laptop or smaller screen would find this beneficial.

So there you have a quick first glance of dnn 6 – http://www.dnnbeta.com – I’m happy to give you admin access if you want to explore further. I will be installing some modules to see how they fare. I installed the Oliver Hine Control Panel over the standard one as I found it was all just a bit too slow. Fortunately, you are able to turn the pop up modal on and off as required and I am sure that after some optimisation, it should be improved.

Overall, the new DotNetNuke 6 build seems good. Considering it’s been changed so much, this release is certainly one of the lesser problematic builds and the transition, hopefully from one version to the other should not be too painful.

Over the next couple of weeks I will test some upgrades. I think in the past the upgrade path was perhaps not quite as well tested, so we’ll put some of our existing sites to the test and see how they fare. We have many sites to choose from, some from DNN 4 and others back from DNN 3.0.13 which have had upgrades over the years and once you know the ‘gotchas’ are relatively easy to manage, maintain and upgrade.

I’m happy to have just a bit more time in work schedule to start sharing DotNetNuke information again.

Nina Meiers

It’s been a big year 2010 for XD with many changes and new clients coming on board, but what I’ve noticed more are the projects written in .NET and that’s where DotNetNuke comes into the picture.  We’re hooking up DotNetNuke public facing websites to cloud apps and even integrating PHP with DNN to get the best of both worlds.

The year went by so quickly and as I write, I see we’re into 2011.   My new years resolution was to enjoy life a bit more.  It’s so easy to get information overload and I thought to myself, that 2011 was going to be a year of fun, colour and happiness in general as we’re all seeing things that are quite saddening and disturbing coming to our mail boxes and links via colleagues and friends, far too often.

We started off this year pretty well with new skins on http://www.dnnskins.com – some of them are from the skinning competition held last year, with our own custom touches to them, and some are our own designs we’re just adding in every few days.  There are in fact over 30 new skins going online at the moment, so be sure to visit the site and download some if you’re looking for some new stock for your DNN 5.5+ sites.

We’ve decided that we’re going to offer community skins with the option of upgrading to a better version for just a few dollars.

So, just a short post to say I’m happy that my blogs have been upgraded and 2011 – I hope it’s a great year for you all!!  2010 was a tough one for many!

For those of you who create skins for customers and wonder about how to eliminate the problem with the RadEditor background image behaviour which occurs using the default setting for the Telerik RadEditor for DotNetNuke 5+ builds, have a look at this suggestion I’ve provided here that resolves the issue of having to change the core CSS files in the Providers/HtmlEditorProvidersTelerik folder.

This is what I mean -

Rad Editor Before Styling

Dark background when using any module that requires the Telerik RadEditor.

While this solution of changing the default files works for those who have access, if you’re not experienced or confident enough, you can get around this issue simply by making some changes to your skins you have done or bought or created, inherited.

For those of you who are happy enough to change the code in the provider folder, then that’s great but remember that updates could overwrite it, so you’ll have to have a copy of it for the next round of upgrades unless it’s written into the dotnetnuke builds. Either way – it’s easy to update.

You need to modify two files – one is to tell the editor to look at this file, the other is the file you are going to be changing.

In the ProvidersHtmlEditorProvidersTelerikConfig folder there is a file called ConfigDefault.xml. Download and open that in notepad. You’ll see quite a few entries here – well worth spending a bit of time trying them out and making changes to how the editor behaves.

You will need to add the following code in there – and it’s pretty easy to see where because the they are all prefixed the same -

~/Providers/HtmlEditorProviders/Telerik/Config/EditorCustom.css

Telerik RadEditor ConfigDefault.xml File

Save this file.
We then need to look at the CustomOverride.css file – and add the following code to the CSS file.

body{
color: #000000;
background-color: #ffffff;
padding:3px;
margin: 0px;
text-align: left;
}

We then need to save this file.
If you do that, no matter what background image you have on your skin, you’ll have no issues with the editor when using it.

If you want a work around to help you when packaging skins for customers and you don’t want the support issues, then this is a good work around and no matter if the site is upgraded, this won’t be. It will always look like this -

A bit of a 'hack' but it has worked nicely.

On the following page is how I created this nice workable light background editor…. and you can too.

Has my opinion become second best? Who knows. I’d like share more of my thoughts and ideas, as we spend alot of time helping many people with their DotNetNuke websites, skins and builds.

I’ll be honest, the gloss of DNN as a real community project has perhaps faded a little as you see the creep of  ‘commercialisation’  moving in.  I still today, really wonder why there is still a community based version of DotNetNuke and with the buy out of Snowcovered last year and one of my favourite modules – Document Library being swallowed up by the professional version, it seems that a few people with a vision to commercialise a product has come to fruition, so the direction and how I work with DNN has changed somewhat.

It would be fair to say that many people, like me, have become a little more closed in sharing our ideas and methods, because our goals to help a community with a community based project, meant just that.. not providing free information on a commercial project when we could be posting on our own sites these days. And for the record,  I don’t begrudge any person making money out of my advice or what I choose to make public, because if that was the case, you wouldn’t have so many long and detailed posts helping solve problems, free support sites and free skins.

I believe it is the right of everyone, technical or not to have access to the ‘opportunities’ that being online mean, and DotNetNuke for the time being, is my vehicle, it is for now, completely free, and I can return my thanks, in ways that I am able to do.  Not being a developer, I can’t return in kind by way of code updates or code enhancements.

Having said that, please understand, it is not about being mean or not caring, because I know many DotNetNuke developers I speak with from time to time, do care too, but we simply don’t see the intrinsic value of being community minded on a project that is no longer community based.

It is actually good to see that the DNN corp paying staff to monitor the ‘community forums’… It shows they are also willing to contribute something back to the community that helped get them their millions of dollars of funding. Lots of people in the past have helped push this project forward and do not get any rewards what so ever, as their motive is not driven by monetary goals, but a passion for the project itself.

But having said that, we’ve been very busy over the last few months, looking at different solutions that complement what we offer, and of course, now, like many other DNN developers, looking wider at other opportunities that may exist and it is interesting that while we get locked into a mindset that we will use DotNetNuke at any price, sort of like fitting a huge square block into a round hole.

Something has to give and unless you really know where to hit that huge square block, it ain’t fitting into the round hole!  We have some stellar projects we are working on, so beautiful and providing website visitors with a genuinely first class experience.  And it is the first time this year, I have decided to mix PHP into the DNN solution, rather than use DNN and module developers in a fully developed solution. I was at the time, disappointed in how DNN delivered a viable end to end online deliverable application.

We are busy for different reasons now – we have a much higher value of the work we offer.  I was gobsmacked when I was told that a developer in Australia charged $5,000.00 – that is FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS - to install the free blogs on someone’s website and the client actually paid it.  Was it worth it?? It was for the developer I’m sure, but who am I so say and who knows, the perceived value for their client established that it was perfectly ok to pay $5,000.00 to have a blogs module installed and configured.  That company had balls… that’s all I can say.

We are doing work that I know others on sell for sometimes 10 times more than what they paid me for it, well maybe not knowing before but finding out later, so I had a rethink and a very modest price increase and that has helped us build our infrastructure a little more.

We offer significantly more value for money based on our knowledge that far exceeds most of the companies in the same space. Everyone we work with, we passionately want them to get the absolute most out of what DNN can offer. But you do need experience, a very good developer environment and a good hosting infrastructure that allows you to build out efficient DotNetNuke websites.

My dream working environment would that we had someone on staff who was able to always help me update my sites and keep information fresh and updated on a regular basis.  I don’t think anyone reading this can imagine how many times I’ve wanted to sit down and share something online but don’t have the core resources to support the time needed to articulate the information in a way that is going to be understood by a wide audience.

My silence is due to work and often, general frustration on what DotNetNuke has become now when I wish it were so much more… so I lower my expectations, expect that off the shelf, second rate is the best you will get, and I need to work on making it …workable to the level I am expecting it to be for my clients.

We host DNN websites for LOTS of people – they love us, so we’re about helping our hosting clients more too – so they can take advantage of our years of experience and some of the cool things we do with DNN.  We also do alot more build and deploy – We build the whole site on our servers and deliver to you, a gorgeous new DNN website that you know works because you’ve been involved in the development of it on our servers.

Now I need to point out, and I know I am NOT alone in how I feel, simply a little more vocal and direct perhaps and it doesn’t sit well with those who would like us to think differently for their own reasons and motives.  Nowadays, there is so much more overhead in managing a DNN environment..  The impact now on just assuming that something will work like it used to has come back to bite, and it  reminds me the earlier days of DotNetNuke where there were some painful changes rings like a feeling of .. ‘uh oh this feels familiar’.  If you’re familiar with earlier versions of DotNetNuke, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

If you’ve ever seen a module package with several different iterations of a version, you can bet your bottom dollar that developer is working with elements of DotNetNuke that changed within different releases (its well known through the DotNetNuke community that in the past, not enough testing really went into releases and I felt were often ego driven for presentations or events rather than for the community well being, which caused significant pain for developers who have modules installed on builds that were subject to the upgrades.)

While the core of DNN has changed somewhat with paid staff supporting a community build, I can’t work out, for the life of me, why we don’t get really nice builds these days and why we suffer with upgrade paths with silly things missing that make management now quite an overhead and this makes it hard for me to take the professional build seriously.

I really have tried, badly wanted to take that step in upgrading to a shiny 2,000 per year build, but in my opinion, they aren’t there yet. I have not tried even a trial of Professional DNN but the fact it cannot be made into a community version again, once you have moved in that direction confirms that it’s not the same product.

One of my gripes is how I have to work with http://www.dnnskins.com – which by no means is perfect, but when I started working on the site, it was back in DNN2 days, where skinning was completely different to what it is now.  That was many years ago and over time, to even upgrade the website is almost a day – fixing up stupid things that just don’t upgrade as they should. Missing dlls in builds, error logs that show bits and pieces didn’t get carried through.

Then you go onto forums and see incredibly, many unanswered posts to similar issues you are having and yet you feel you can’t actually complain because … it’s the community version and the amount of genuine help as been sucked out like vortex because I honestly think some of the people on the forums are the people who don’t have all the answers, and many answers on the forums are now cleverly ‘advertorial’ type of posts, which again, doesn’t worry me personally but shows how the dynamics of the project has changed over the last two years.

BUT, you may say – the professional build developers will also be fixing up the bugs and putting them into the community version if we all contribute and keep the status quo….  It sounds like it could happen, but if that is the case, why on earth would I buy a professional version when the community version sadly suffers from the … ‘second rate is the best you’ll get I’m afraid’ syndrome and I don’t want it to be like that.

It’s like DotNetNuke – our beautiful cake is nearly there all the time, but never quite delivering that delicious morsel.  Sometime our cake might be missing only the smallest of thing, perhaps the cherry on top, or the icing, or perhaps trying to trick us saying it’s fresh delicious whipped cream and fresh strawberries used for the filling, when we know it’s that horrible, greasy fatty mock cream and canned fruit…. the ‘second rate is the best you can get’ … It’s often the hit and miss than leaves us somewhat skeptical.

So back to our DotNetNuke build, sure things can be fixed and there is no doubt that experience comes into it, but now, many of the experienced developers are becoming employees of DotNetNuke, so further shrinking of the strong experience community based environment that existed in the past.

I, as an incredibly active and experienced DotNetNuke implementer, QUEEN of forcing square into round, jigging and making things work, being creative in trying to ensure a consistent upgrade path for my clients, however realistically, have come to the conclusion we have been conditioned to settle for second best because if it were the best, I would not be feeling like this. Plain and simple.

For me to say it’s the best means I need to ‘lower my expectations‘ and I simply cannot do that.   I will work with it as it is the best of what I have knowledge of for the moment, but it has slipped to be second rate in the overall experience with it based on previous 8 years of experience in working with DotNetNuke.  I can’t understand how it can be so either.. I really can’t.

You would think that with millions of dollars thrown at something, recurring revenue from Snowcovered, taking experienced module developers into the fold to further enhance the project, it would be an incredibly hot, kick arse, lightning speed project.. but it’s…. *sigh*.. NOT.  And that my friends is the disappointing part.

And you might ask – why not look at other projects – and my answer is because I should not have to??  With the experience and knowledge I and many others have invested in the last eight years I know how DotNetNuke should work. I’m not just mouthing off because I have had one bad experience and what do I know… I’m just fed up at times and I’m telling anyone who cares to listen, what I think and why I think like this… and if you read to the end.. some suggestions on how to improve it.

For newcomers, you’ll never know because you only know what you have first hand experience of at any given point in time.

So, now I have a dilemma – do I continue to go against the grain of my fundamental beliefs that I want to provide my clients with what I think is the best solution for them and for me, or do I need to simply lower my expectations based on what I feel we experience now in the whole process.

Now interestingly, I can make DotNetNuke into a first class product..  I know what’s being served up, so I’m actually pretty safe when it comes to NOT having to settle for second best.  Can new users to DotNetNuke wanting to get involved in this whole  ‘self management’ revolution feel comfortable saying that… I do wonder about that sometimes.

So yes, at this stage DotNetNuke leaves many thinking that ‘second rate is the best you can expect’ – from how the builds are deployed, through to the module developers who have lost sales – some up to 50% of their module revenue since Snowcovered was bought and the emails changed, the genuine community feel of the project which is no longer existent and the fact some developers are now part of the corporation and no longer available for the community to access.

What would it take to make DotNetNuke first class again – less bloat… remove that mock cream, give me some light, delicious fresh cream… genuine competition – give me the icing.. instead of keeping it all for yourself, proper testing of the environment before releasing, including updgrades – that’s the cherry on top that makes me want to keep my sites upgraded and updated so I can take advantage of newer add ons, more discussion with developers about things that will most likely affect their business when changing things like… profile properties or membership areas, or scheduling, less cannibalism of the environment… that’s the ingredients, make me feel like I know what’s going into the mix,… engage me in the conversation instead of ‘telling me’ what you want me to hear.

I am not a fool .. if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck….. don’t tell me it’s a golden goose.

Long Live DNN – I love it but am sick of settling for second best.

I’m wearing the fireproof vest – have your say – but please, make it a constructive one, not one because you’ve got a pair of DNN pyjamas signed by your heroes!  Twitter is so full of these people and at times I find it hard to take seriously ..

I decided, after looking at how dasBlog had slowed down over the last few months, to move my blogs to WordPress.  It was a big decision for me to make and before anyone says – hey why didn’t you use DotNetNuke?   My answer is because I have always wanted to extend my blogs to thing that are not just work related. I really feel that if you have a business website, it should be kept business.

Originally I had my blogs on my website when the DNN blogs were not quite as polished as they are now, and did think about bringing them back into DNN, and then thought – why not just have some fun with other products… and that’s exactly what I did.

I’m glad I did, it solidifies my desire to maintain DNN as the best tool to build out websites with. I found the blog setup here was far to easy to break and fortunately I had support on hand to fix up my fauxpas.

Neverthless, you can see what can be done with an out of the box wordpress theme, with a few modifications and I’m still building up the link redirects.

I thought I’d share this random moment and thought and think that it’s a great way to go for 2010.

I have so many blogs and feeds I’m part of because it’s my research and way of getting the news to me where I can gleam over interesting topics and pick up some hints or two.

I subscribe to an RSS feed from a website called CMS watch. It covers all sorts of Content Management Systems and having gleamed over the ‘free’ information it’s amazing to see how many products there are on the market.  From their point of view there are 41 CMS products ranging from large scale solutions including Oracle & Open Text, Vignette, then to Upper Range solutions from products like Percussion and FatWire (never heard of them), Mid Range platforms, from Drupal through the Microsoft MOSS, Mid range Products from Ektron through to Magnolia and Simpler products where DotNetNuke and Joomla get mentioned.  Their ratings were based on their own criteria which seemed fair to average in interpretation to me, but I guess since I know DotnetNuke back to front in reference to implementation and management out of the box, and having been involved for so many years, and seeing that they had only mentioned DNN 3 times on their site, I didn’t feel it was totally unbiased.

I did feel that DotNetNuke was unrepresented there and I don’t know why. I sometimes find it very insular and single minded of groups and organisations who don’t give a fair and open view on things. They become what I feel are like Microsoft haters, although I am not suggesting this with the CMSWatch website. However, it is a culture that seems to be more visible on some sites than others.  And I try to be as objective as possible, even though I may criticise my DNN solution at times, I’m still using it.  Nothing wrong with having a whinge about a product. Nothing is perfect, each product has it’s own good points.

For some that know me for years, you’ll know that I’m an advocate of DNN and supported the project from the very moment I thought I had something to contribute.  It was around the world of skinning, where, just a few short years ago, it was fairly new.  I have and do work with Joomla, in fact we manage several sites for clients, and we have our own installs for testing and comparing.

We also install and test kentico, nopCommerce, WordPress, dasBlog, silverstripe and I discovered a commercial on yesterday called Pegboard CMS – I have a new client coming on board where they are not happy with the new current website and are concerned about being ‘locked in’ to company with a product they have to pay through the nose for to get updates.  over $2,500 to add ‘membership’ functionality I thought was excessive. And by that I mean – someone apart from a website administrator could log in and view content. So there are still some expensive CMS solutions around but I think their days are also numbered as companies move into offering different services.

It made me think back to how I will work with DotNetNuke throughout 2010. Has it gone past it’s use by date? Will it have a future? Should I be looking at other solutions? I think the era of making lots of money from skinning has gone.  Well, to be honest, I never made much on skinning because I focused mainly on higher end work and implementation. Although I have http://www.dnnskins.com – it’s for the community at large to ensure that the project has something to offer newcomers to DNN.

DotNetNuke is lacking a bit in fancy pants widgets to plug in and enjoy like wordpress has. I love some of these cool features that wordpress has, but I cannot write here honestly that I can compare DotNetNuke to WordPress – they are completely different applications and their purpose is different.

I thought I’d upgrade skincovered.com – mainly because I’m going to switch it to a place to buy skins, and flip dnnskins.com to be for free skins only I think as I’ve had an epiphany a couple of things.

Anyway, upgrading DNN websites is something I have done for years, after deciding that no matter how much I think exporting a website to a brand new build would be the ideal thing to do rather than upgrade, because you don’t have to deal with many of the issues that once plagued the unsuspecting DNN website owner. I initially had that approach when I tried for a LONG time to upgrade xd.com.au and it was a mess for months… still is a bit of a mess but that’s due to time constraints and that is another story.

What happened was that I had a dodgy 3.2.2 dnn build and think that was one of the worst builds around. Honestly, I know not why but I do know that out of all the dnn builds I’ve had to upgrade from, something was screwed there. So I took this philosophy of getting good at exporting and doing brand new builds of DNN.  Initially it worked well, but over time, like anything else, it gets harder to manage all these things. Modules that don’t export data, users that have to be imported, settings that need to be changed in so many pages made it impractical, so I thought I’d check out how the upgrade process with DNN had come along and over time it’s vastly improved.

Problems aside, I want to share with you how I did this upgrade yesterday. I’m getting more ruthless as I get older, never ever forgetting the ‘backup everything first’ theory, when I have a little more time on my hands, it then allows me to experiment a little more in what I can get away with when upgrading.

There have been and will always be issues when upgrading any build that is 4.5.3 & 4.5.5 > 4.6.2 and those problems initially saw make take a ‘version by version’ upgrade because I found that if you didn’t take the time to try and log in to the site between versions, for some obscure reason you may get yourself locked out or have other errors that would present themselves and if you didn’t have a sequential upgrade method and test each time, then it was hard to work out which build had the problem.

Now, I know I know the developers and people involved in the project would most likely testify on a stack of bibles that everything works as expected, but I have learnt from personal experience that it seems no matter how much you think you can be well prepared, everyone has a build that is slightly different from their server environment, IIS environment, permissions environment, and sql environment, all of which combined can make like a rubiks cube of choices to work out why something didn’t work as expected.

After many many upgrades I did observe that the biggest of upgrading was in fact the build between 4.5.5 > 4.6.2.  I have posted a blog on this before – it’s here and is the same procedure I use on every single version of DNN even when upgrading from DNN 3, but I only have very limited DNN 3 sites running now, so thought I would experiment on bypassing and going from DNN 3.3.7 > 4.3.7 > 4.6.2 to see if I could short cut the procedure.

When I do the upgrades, I will, at a point when I want to take a chance, take another snapshot of the www root folder AND the db and that will be my second backup through the process so my initial upgrade efforts are not wasted.

What I have found is that if you do not have a local environment, you can use the control panels some hosting providers set you up with but one thing I hate about them with a passion, is their time stamping, so that every single file, when you initially back it up, is timestamped exactly the same.  It’s very sloppy and annoying. That stops me from using my own control panel – DotNetPanel and backing up data because I actually use dates on folders and dll files and modules files as reference points, and there is nothing inspiring about having to look through thousands of files that EXACTLY the same.  However, if that is your only option, unless you want to ftp the files down to your local machine and zip them up, that’s what you’ve got to work with.

Also, I found, when working on other people’s upgrades, stupid plesk, at the time of writing this, has some sort of bug that doesn’t allow you to ‘attach’ a backup. How DUMB is that? If you make a mistake, you can’t attach the db and you have to raise a support ticket. .. I really don’t like Plesk, cumbersome and ugly and confusing, but again, if that is what you have to work with, then so be it, but at least knowing these couple of things will help you when you spend days trying to work out why you can’t attach a dang db because the control panel doesn’t let you do it.

Sure there are also modules you can purchase that allow you to do magical backup and restores from the host environment, but there is no point for me to have something like that because we log onto the servers and RDP to eliminate problems, but I do feel that if you don’t have some form of quicker access like RDP to UPGRADE your DotNetNuke builds, then you are doing it a bit tough.

Now, I want to tell you that I’ve also got a couple of builds of DNN 5.1.4 that for the life of me, I could never log into again when I upgraded to DNN 5.2 – I don’t know why, but I had to ditch a couple of builds that we got locked out of for reasons that still elude me, but I accept that these things happen.

So, armed with this information, and having to upgrade skincovered from 4.3.5 I thought I would use the approach of using the methods from my June 06 2008 post and then bit the bullet and did the upgrade from 4.8.3 right through to 5.2.0 in one hit.

I was incredibly impressed.  If you look at the results now, from the screen shot below, you can see that it upgraded without error, from 4.8.3 > 5.2.2, and alongside that, switched over the 3.5 framework without issue and I was able to log in without a problem.

Nice to see and here’s another interesting thing – most of the modules seem to be ok without having to update to use them. The users online and the dnnstuff tabbed aggregator on a couple of pages. I think it could have been a CSS thing, I’m not sure but we’ll fix that up in time.

I noticed the Inventua shadow module has issues, as did the store module which was for dnn 4, 5.3.9 and now I upgraded the CATALook store to 6.0.6 and there are still some issues but I think they are related to the store skin files needing updating.

The skin needs updating as it’s throwing quite a few errors, but again, we can work on that and the overall integrity of the site still remains intact.

What surprised me the most was the forums module – Active Forums on 3.7 still appears to be working without error on 5.2 so for me I don’t have to dig in the pockets to upgrade the module which would have cost me a couple of hundred dollars I didn’t really want to spend.

I did have located, but not particularly handy, upgraded modules and in fact, on some of my other dnn 3 sites which have been upgraded to DNN 5, the modules work exactly the same. Not all, and perhaps you’re using fancier modules than I am, but I have found that the ‘keep it simple’ approach works for me when it comes to stacking your DNN build with modules that are bloated and an overkill. I hate that.

So, for anyone who thinks that they might like to move to DNN 5, and not sure about how difficult it is, if you run a standard version of DNN then it might be worth considering.

What DNN 5 has to offer over DNN 4?? I’m not 100% sure. We are still deploying sub 5 builds since I’m not overly sold on it, but it would be irresponsible for me to not venture forward and do some exploration.

In summary – earlier versions of dnn – eg. Pre dnn 4.5.5 need that extra care to bring over to DNN 4.7 and beyond.  I feel comfortable in telling you that upgrading from DNN 4.8.3 > 5.2.2 in one go is doable and possible.

Cheers and looking forward to a fun 2010.

Nina Meiers

I did want to meet up with Oliver Hine, but alas his car needed some work on it and unlike travelling as one person, when travelling with two, we can’t just jump into any car – we have luggage to cart around.  So Oliver – next time we’re in New York New York, well definitely catch up.

So we’re currently sitting at terminal 35, waiting for plane, and looking forward to our next stop in Las Vegas where we’ll be catching up with John Mitchell (from Snapsis) and his family, and hope to be there for part of the Open Force time, so if anyone wants to catch up, send a message to my mobile – which is +61410 517 652 and we can organise a time.

I’m not a gambler but my darling husband doesn’t mind a bit of casino time, so he thinks there’s a bit of good free time around for him to do what most people do in Las Vegas.  We have a couple of days booked already, and will be taking some time out to drive around the Grand Canyon and visit Moab, and do some mountain bike riding.

FOr those who might be thinking about visiting open force, then it would be great to know if you’ll be around a day or so before, and perhaps even if you’re close to Las Vegas or thinking that perhaps you’d like to make the trip to meet up with others  too, then it’s a good time to catch up because there aren’t many other locations where we can really all get together. (having said that – anyone coming to Australia really should let me know too, especially if you’re coming to melbourne)

I am quite pleased to be able to make this step of going away and having a great team back home to run the office. It’s really good to know that the work continues and our customers have the confidence dealing with Sidney & Paul.

So this short and sweet blog is simply to keep people updated on what I’m doing and if they are in Las Vegas for Open Force 09, and would like to catch up, send me an SMS and we’ll see how things go.

It’s also interesting to see that there is life outside dnn – which for so long has been the main focus of my work and I am catching up with a las vegas based software company as well in reference to some future interests I have in other things.

I am really looking forward to meeting with as many of my DNN colleagues as possible, as there are quite a few who have been in involved DNN as I have and although we know each other online, we have never met.

Nina Meiers

Most Informative – DNNSKINS

DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards

XD Design Most Informative Website Finalist  – DNNSKINS

Well, can you imagine my feelings when my own project DNNSKINS.com was nominated as a finalist in this competition. I was quite excited and honoured because there are quite a few sites around built on the DNN platform that offer information the public, so it was good to see that our very busy website made the cut.

I will share some information about this website for those who may not know and help you understand how and why we manage things in this fashion because it is slightly different to many of the download sites that are around, and there was a balance between actually being able to manage things without needing a large team of authors and editors and technical people. To a certain point, perhaps the actual structure doens’t make it as easy to engage other participants, but as DNN changes, we are now able to look at other methods of providing community information that is able to suit our style of site management.

I used to have lots of free skins on http://www.xd.com.au, but I found that it was somewhat confusing for people coming to my website who were not DNN savvy and had no idea what to expect, and the domain name XD didn’t have any relationship with the product when you think about it. I didn’t own dnnskins.com at the time, it was owned by Josh Weinstein who was a part of the core team and was started back in 2003 with great gusto. And it was at the time, fairly self sustaining where people could upload skins, write about them and people could download and comment on them.

This all sounds great, but as it grew, and DNN grew, it got very difficult to manage, and updating, intial interest by those who put skins online waned a little, and what happened was as DNN grew and changed, the skins didn’t. There was the challenge of getting an online store working within DNN – which didn’t ever eventuate on DNNSkins because to be honest, DNN wasn’t as stable and robust as it is now, and we had a period of very difficult times over the years, in particular – DNN 1 >DNN 2 – where skinning became a reality, then, the horror years where DNN 2 became DNN 3. I think that was the most painful time because while it wasn’t a rewrite of DNN, it might as well been with the problems of moving the project forward and when I acquired DNNSkins a few years ago, it was built on the DNN 1 framework. Most of the skins were for DNN 2, and we were already on DNN 3 and the skins weren’t compatible, no one was supporting them because they were busy, not interested, not there any more, different focus, whatever… the point is I needed to review how to move forward with something that was very close to my heart.

I’ve been an advocate of providing a level of free information and products to the community because I love the project and since I can’t write code, I turned my skills to skinning. And while I am not by any means a javscript or css guru, it’s the understanding of DNN as well as a very good knowledge of skinning that I feel sets XD Design apart from others when it comes to offering skinning solutions. We dont’ take short cuts, no matter how much I would love to, I feel it would simply come back and bite us with support issues which we don’t have the infrastructure or desire in handling. EG.. do it once, do it right so, so while we’re not the cheapest, we certainly give exceptional value for money by way of advice along the way and really beautiful skins that our clients never seem to have problems with.

So, having said that, let’s look at why dnnskins.com is like it is… XD Design is a very lightweight boutique style business, we don’t employ staff we don’t need when we can contract out to the best developers in the world, quality projects and work with them on delivering solutions. But the downside to that is we don’t have lots of staff on hand to ‘manage’ sites and most of it is done by me. I personally manage too many sites and have found that it has come back to haunt me when I can’t be in 5 places at once, so last year, after getting a new accountant, some good advice and a couple of the ‘right staff’ set about making changes to how we handle things.

It meant that I had to do things differently in the handling of our free skins and while for some it seems a bit odd, we use a shopping cart by Catalook, setup as a gallery where people can browse, pick and choose their skins, add to cart, then check out and download. I did this because it meant I could manage the products online through importing rather than individually managing each product and, if someone wants to put a skin online, they can, as we have the setup to allow others to upload skins and put them online for free.

We also had to redo every single skin we had in the upgrade path between dnn 2, dnn 3 & 4, and earlier this year, redid every single skin we had to dnn 5 and are at the stage of not doing any more skins for dnn 4 to be able to extend what we can do because managing these skins and uploading them is quite a challenge. We have over 300 files online of both free and commercial skins and have segmented them where possible to make finding them easy.

I wasn’t sure of what people wanted or if people really cared about what they downloaded, in as much as how much was the community growing and was finding that it was a very one sided website as it seemed that all people would do is log in and download a skin, without me knowing much about what it was people were looking for.

It was then I thought – how do I ask and interact with people and find out what they’re after, and then decided that I would provide an incentive, not by way of money, but effort to see if people really were around wanting to download skins or should I perhaps be looking at scaling this back and just leaving it, as so many other sites end up going. DNNSKINS.com has more users than any other project out side the dotnetnuke.com website. I would love to talk my subscribers more, but have really struggled with finding robust and affordable email solutions. For me to email users on a regular basis, if I had a paid product like constant contact or exacta or mailchip would cost me literally thousands each month and for a free site it just isn’t feasible and this mail problem is the main reason we dont’ send out mail on a more regular basis. Having said that, we have a new client coming on board where we will be sending close to 1 million email per month so we have built a new server, and when that has been rolled out, then I expect that to be our next change – more regular updates. I think sometimes people are not aware of the logistics of managing sites and data and information like this. At XD Design we handle alot of data and alas, on our beautiful dnnskins site which is my pet love and project, it can be frustrating sometimes for me to simply have to put things on the back burner to manage the ‘paying’ projects. So I digressed a littled but you have more insight now as to some of the innerworkings of our sites.

Anyway- I thought – how about a facebook page.. what is the purpose of it? Well, I thought – if you want something, talk to me, show me if you’re interested, so I know. I don’t want a site filled with google ads and things not relevant to the audience.. but I need to know what you want .. The facebook fans page really worked out well. I said for every 20 fans we get, we’ll put on a free skin, and the fans have come, voiced their opinions, we listened and now, we have over 500 fans and interesting interation .. and I’m sure alot of ‘lurkers’ who watch and see what Nina comes up with next. It’s not orthodox in how we do things, and I do not apologise for that, and our next step is to send out a simple email to our users and ask them about put in a vote for our site, and what their feelings are if the next lot of free skins we put online are only dnn 5. We have 6 new skins to put online to keep up with our fans page, but need to streamline the work involved and rather than change it to be 1 free skin for every 50 users, which we package for dnn 4 & dnn 5, can we move to keeping 1 free skin for every 20 fans and only for dnn 5. That would really assist us in the skinning, packaging and deployment. We would also like to start working with some of the cool widgets that dnn 5 can offer, but as you can imagine, we have to draw a line somewhere.

We have found the catalook store is quite a nice solution for us, but have found that we have so many nice FREE dnn skins online that it’s not much incentive for people to buy them, because I’m hearing this … “Nina – it’s not that we dont’ like your work, but there are so many good quality skins for free we dont’ need to buy anything to solve a problem”… and.. Our free work is much better than over half the skins for sale on snowcovered… but in reality, our new free skins are just nice looking css skins that we have converted and are quite lightweight and minimal in size but give our members the ability to start with something.

We use the active forums module for forums, but dont’ get that many posts, and not sure why, except that I think dnnskins.com really is the premier location to download skins and pick up some tips and information. That also reflects the articles we have online.. they are focussed towards the audience we have and as much as I’d love to put more online, I get a terrible dose of… ‘what do people want to hear’ … and difficulty at times in how to explain how things are done without a combination of video and audio.

I hope you have enjoyed this overview on this project which I really do love working with, and if I had I never had to worry about paying my bills, I think I’d dedicate much more time to this site, but you know the old story- you do what you can do with the time you have. I am very grateful I have a wonderful husband who understands why I’m awake at 2am in the morning sometimes.

Thanks for reading this – I’ll have our ecommerce sites overview next and if you love this site as much as I do please support it by voting for it in the competition.

Nina Meiers

http://www.xd.com.au

XD Design Most Informative Website Finalist  – Oamps Insurance

This website was a pleasure to do. Most sites are, but this website in particular gave us the opportunity to work with a developer company who were still learning the ins and outs of building out a dnn portal. This particular project was created and built on the XD hosting environment, and then packaged for deployment on the developers staging server, and then to the live location where it currently resides and, is actively updated.

The purpose of this project was to provide a company the ability to self manage their sites and manage the many clubs and associations they support, and DotNetNuke with it’s incredibly robust portal replication, was the perfect choice. As I observe the progess of this company and how they have encompassed all the power DNN has to offer, I can’t help but be impressed. As you can see, either by these screen shots or visiting this site, they have maintained an element of the ‘global look and feel’ of their child sites, but given each a unique and tailored look. We setup a primary portal which contains all the day to day company information they require, but being active and supportive in many sporting associations throughout Australia,

This was one of few sites I’ve worked on where we were able to have complete say over the structure and implementation and our advice, after consultation and questions were taken on board, so that now, after handover, the site is update by their staff and remains elegant and consistent throughout. I have seen a couple of small glitches now and again, but they are quickly rectified once the site administrators have simply gone back and looked at the original setup to follow.

That’s what I love about DotNetNuke. It’s much more forgiving and flexible than people realise and XD Design offer very structured and tailored support on our projects, so, when we have a specific style or method of use of a particular module, we’re able to advise clients on how to manage it in relation to their site. By that I mean, adding images to DotNetNuke, sometimes we have specific classes assigned to them to allow them to be displayed in a specific way that meets the marketing team’s demands, but have to advise the web adminstrators on the techniques we have setup for them so they can comfortably update their website without the need to call us each time. There are quirks that are not always related to DNN in how imformation is displayed

So simply by providing this company with a professional tailored setup, the reseller was able to provide an incredibly slick solution. They used our expertiese and judgement on how best to deploy the project and the end result is a stunning solution that allows many sporting associations the ability to be represented online wherebye the have an overview of the type of insurance offered in relation to that particular association, the logo of the association to allow familiarity when a person visits that website, including primary contacts, phone numbers, claim forms and an overview of services / insurance that affects the particular association represented on that portal. A link to the club’s website is also provide, so with the logo, link and images of the sport/association, it gives further assurance and confidence to the site visitor they are in the right place.

All of this was made possible by XD Design providing the advice and portal build that would allow for consistent delivery of information, structured branding and look and feel, ease of maintenance and management, and, efficiency. At XD Design, we run lean and green installs and we have NEVER had an instance where our clients have complained about speed. We squeeze every bit of bloat and unrequired ‘stuff’ from the site to make the whole team love working on their websites. So if you’re DotNetNuke website is running slow, then perhaps you need to visit us..

Some of the modules we used were, once again, our favourite Ventrian News Articles module, html, a custom employment module, customised Inventua menu and of course the Snapsis CSS Menu, all of these module developers still supporting the DotNetNuke community with commercial products that make it possible for people like myself, who are not developers, to build great solutions.

At the completion of the job, we packaged the whole portal and database up, where the developers were simply able to attach and deploy a live site with very little handling on their side and we do many projects like this because we are setup and geared to handle DNN in the most efficient manner and turn solutions around quickly and we know when we deliver, the sites work, without error, and therefore it leaves the end user (client) with very little requirements to actually get the site to go live. And when there has been an issue, the deployment, go live date for the project is not hindered by unforseen technical issues as there have been several occasions where we have hosted the live sites until technical problems are resolved. This is another part of the incredible service and value for money we give clients and with XD Design, the problems stop here. We are known for solving problems, not being the cause of them.

So, here you have another insight to how we handle DotNetNuke and the end results and why our websites are Finalist worthy!! Please vote for us if you think this website really does meet your expections of what a good information site is about.

Nina Meiers
http://www.xd.com.au