Articles from May 2008
I just wanted to publicly announce here that this week I have launched a new website for my company IowaComputerGurus Inc. It is now a DotNetNuke based site running a skin created by ThinkOfDesign.com.
This new company website is full of new information, including updated references and a portfolio.
Also coming soon is a new design for this site, to resolve some issues with the current site and to provide a more lightweight, functional display.
Posted by Mitchel on Friday, May 30, 2008
Well after following a similar practice for upgrading my DotNetNuke sites since
pre DNN 4.4.1 days I have just learned of a very helpful new feature for those upgrading
from 4.6.2 or later versions. Starting with 4.6.2 a new function was added
to the DotNetNuke core known as
XML Merge, which removes the need for you to manually update the web.config
file on each and every upgrade. This takes the complicated manual merge process
and reduces an upgrade to two simple steps. I will detail these steps below.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Three months ago I created an article discussing my thought process on selecting a hosting provider for DotNetNuke installations. I recently modified that article due to a recent change in opinion. I have sense decided to re-visit the article entirely as I wanted to expand a bit on a few items that were referenced by others in the comments with the older article. As most people are aware my hosting provider of choice is 3Essentials, being with them for almost a year and a half now I have only good things to say about them, however, I'll be the first to admit that they might not be for everyone. In this article I will look at the various items that lead me to select and retain 3Essentials as my hosting provider. These statements in no way are considered offical, and you MUST take the time to do your own research to form your own conclusions before making a decision. Moving hosting providers is not all that complicated, but it is a somewhat complex and time consuming actiivity and something that you don't want to do unless you have to. If you are having problems finding a hosting provider that meets your needs, please feel free to e-mail me at msellers@iowacomputergurus.com and I'll try to help you out with the decision. Please click the link below to read the full article!
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Installing DotNetNuke can be somewhat difficult at times, therefore I am writing this article to give you a full step by step guide to installing DotNetNuke on a Windows XP Pro system. The instructions are similar for Windows 2000 but might vary slightly, I have tried to note as many differences as possible. Windows Vista installation is similar but requires a few different steps relating to IIS. I will be publishing
a text version of this guide for Windows Vista users within the next 2-3 days.
This guide is my seventh revision and includes additional steps and information based on feedback from previous users. Additionally a few new instructions and notes have been provided for users installing on Windows 2003 Server to address a few common "stumbling blocks" that have prevented successful installations.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
This is my fourth revision of a DotNetNuke remote hosting provider installation
tutorial. This tutorial will provide you the basic overview of how to perform a clean installation of DotNetNuke 4.8.3 on a remote web hosting provider. In the article I will try to point out the most common differences between different hosting providers, I will also be providing specific examples regarding the use of the Plesk control panel which is what my hosting provider (3Essentials) uses. All steps within this tutorial are promised to work with 3Essentials
hosting, others are most likely possible, but have not been fully confirmed with
the provider. Additionally this guide is geared towards a manual instlalation
at the root of the site, which is not supported by all hosting providers.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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This is my eighth revision DNN Upgrade guide. This version includes an important
notice regarding the need to upgrade to take advantage of the most recent security
inprovements provided in DNN 4.8.3. Many portions of this upgrade guide are the same as previous versions, however, there are some new items and many minor changes/clarifications. This is simply due to the LIMITED changes that have truly occured in the area of DotNetNuke upgrades. This should be the final
version of these guides for the 4.x DNN platform, keep an eye our for 5.x guides
shortly before the public launch of DNN 5.x.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, May 27, 2008
After all of the commotion of the PowerDNN security scare last week I wanted to take a quick moment to make a post about the upcoming 4.8.3 release. Regardless of all of the other drama that went on with the issues reported last week by PowerDNN and the one additional item that is being addressed in 4.8.3, the only thing that matters anymore is that there were real security issues identified and fixed in the 4.8.3 release of DotNetNuke.
Given the identified security issues fixed in 4.8.3 I STRONGLY recommend that anyone with a public facing DotNetNuke site upgrade as soon as possible to ensure that your site is protected. I will be working quickly to update installation and upgrade guides over the next 24 hours, however, for those of you looking to do the upgrade right after it is released, you may simply use the older versions of my tutorials as most of them are the same.
If anyone has questions or concerns regarding upgrading etc, please do not hesitate to post questions in my forum or to drop me an e-mail at msellers@iowacomputergurus.com. I do also offer upgrade services if you would like to delegate the upgrade to an outside vendor.
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, May 26, 2008
Recently I have answered a number of questions regarding an easy way to export datagrid contents to excel format. In this blog post I will share a static class that I have created called "ExportHelper" which I use quite often to generate quick Excel exports of datagrid data. I will outline the process and the code below. It should be noted that this solution is NOT a DotNetNuke specific solution, I use this for both DotNetNuke and standard ASP.NET solutions.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, May 22, 2008
Recently when browsing the forums on DotNetNuke.com I have noticed more and more
questions regarding Script Injection vulnerability in the core and third-party modules.
I have often found that at times it is hard for non-developers to truly understand
the concept of script injection and what makes a site vulnerable. So in this
article I will take a bit of time to discuss both types of injection that users
of DotNetNuke should be aware of, how to test for them, and also how to prevent
the vulnerability when creating modules.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, May 20, 2008
In continuing my writing series on hidden nuggets in the DotNetNuke core I will show you a handy method from the ClientAPI that allows you to add a Javascript delete confirmation in a much easier manner than normal. As with the previous articles of this nature please feel free to send in any suggestions on helpful, somewhat hidden features inside the DotNetNuke core. Click the link below to view the full detail
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, May 19, 2008
Recently I have been answering a large number of questions regarding the processes
to deploy an existing development site from localhost to a remote hosting provider.
Typically this has been something that I was not willing to publish a tutorial on
due to the complex nature of the matter and the major differences between hosting
providers. However, due to popular demand this article will be my first documentation
of the end to end process to move a localhost DotNetNuke installation to a production
environment on shared hosting. I will be basing this article on the proceses
that are needed to deploy to 3Essentials which is my hosting provider of choice,
the process is similar for other hosts, but there may be charges or other complications
introduced.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, May 19, 2008
Recently when working on modules for clients and enhancements for my own modules
I have been looking for better ways to utilize core DotNetNuke functionaltiy.
This article is the first in a long series of articles that I will be posting regarding
using DotNetNuke core functions and controls in custom modules. This first
article will walk you through the process to add a simple popup calendar as an option
for a user that is being prompted for a date. Many people do not know that
DotNetNuke provides a very nifty interface that handles all the hard work.
This article will walk you through this step by step, first with the .ascx code,
then the .cs or .vb code, the lastly with a screencapture of the component in action.
Read more...
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, May 12, 2008
A while back I received an e-mail from a user of my Expandable Text/HTML module that was reporting errors when trying to save the Header text value, which is input via the settings page of the module using the DNN Text Editor control. I could not recreate the issue on my DNN 4.5.5 or 4.6.0 installations as it was always saving the records, however for this user no header was ever saved. He was working with DNN 4.7.0 and could recreate the error on multiple pages. So I installed a local copy of 4.7.0 and 4.8.2 for testing and was able to recreate the issue.
Regardless of the text input, when saving records with 4.7.0 values from the DNN Text Editor were not saved. Looking into the issue a bit I found that by default starting in DNN 4.7.0 module settings controls are automatically wrapped in an update panel, which is something that doesn't work for the Text Editor control. Now the easy solution would be to disable AJAX but that has a big effect on the rest of the site. I looked around a bit and found the following snippet of code, this code MUST be executed on each page load and ONLY works for settings pages.
if (DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX.IsInstalled())
{
//Get the update button to register as a postback control
System.Web.UI.Control updateButton = this.Parent.TemplateControl.FindControl("cmdUpdate");
if (updateButton != null)
DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX.RegisterPostBackControl(updateButton);
}
The above code requires that your module be built against DNN 4.6.0 or later as that is the first version that the DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX items were included. However this is a simple check to see if AJAX is installed, if it is, it finds the update button from the parent and then registers it as a postback control. This MUST be done on every page load to ensure that it is always registered as a postback control.
I hope this helps someone out there as it helped me! A special thanks to the person that first posted this fix to the DotNetNuke.com forums!
Posted by Mitchel on Monday, May 12, 2008
I just thought I would update the regular readers of this blog that I was NOT selected to present at OpenForce in Las Vegas this November. Last year was a great opportunity to present even though presenting an incredibly shortened session. I was looking forward to the potential honor of presenting this year but none of my 9 session topics were selected for the conference.
Congrats to all individual that were selected to present, I'm sure that OpenForce 08 will be a huge success. I would also like to thank everyone here that provided me recommendations on topics for sessions and I hope that other speaker selections will meet the requested needs.
As always your support has been appreciated!
Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, May 06, 2008
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