After talking with a number of clients since last week, I thought it would be worthwhile to make a post here with a formal warning regarding upgrades to DotNetNuke 5.2. As announced at OpenForce US, DotNetNuke 5.2 contains the Telerik Controls for ASP.NET, which is a very good thing for DotNetNuke as a whole, however, it can cause massive problems for individuals that are already using the Telerik Controls as a site upgrade can end up rendering portions, or the entire site unusable, until DLL versions are restored. In this post I will give a bit of information regarding the scenarios that I have encountered and some guidance on how to protect yourself from upgrade issues.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Back in May of 2008 I wrote an article “Selecting a DotNetNuke Hosting Provider Revisited”. Well, being almost a year-and-a-half later I thought it would be good to provide a 2009-2010 follow-up to the article to update based on new information, updates to hosting plans/offerings, as well as DotNetNuke performance in general. In this article I will talk though the thought process that I use when working with current and potential customers to select their hosting plan, environment and provider. This document has been updated based on current information, in addition, prior to going through the recommendations below I strongly recommend reading my article “Shared, Virtual Private Server, Dedicated of Cloud Hosting” to become familiar with the different levels of hosting.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, October 30, 2009
About two months ago, I responded to a DotNetNuke question on StackOverflow.com with regard to automating the installation of modules within the installation. This is a question that I have seen many times, but with different business requirements and end desires, but the trend is the same, installing extensions one-by-one is an inefficient process, and with a heavily used site can cause performance issues that would impact regular traffic for an extended period of time. This is simply because there is a delay between each install, and with each install and update to the /bin directory the application recycles. Thankfully there is a method built into DotNetNuke that easily allows you to bulk install extensions, the rest of this article will show you how.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, October 14, 2009
My recent postings regarding DotNetNuke have been very popular among the community and each of them have covered specific aspects of performance improvement. However, none of them have gone through the full collection of "performance optimizations" that are possible. This article is going to summarize the items from the existing articles and will try to explain some additional, bigger picture elements that come into play, and considerations that must be thought of during any site configuration.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, February 18, 2009
One of the most common questions I get regarding DotNetNuke performance is; "Why is the DotNetNuke login so slow?". Well there are a number of reasons, but one of the most common issues is that every time you visit the login page it has to determine which provider to show you. If you are using multiple providers, there is not much way around this. However, if you are running a site that is NOT using any other providers, you have some options to really help speed up the performance of your login page.
View the full article for details.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, February 06, 2009
One of the most common questions that I get via the forums on this site, or via e-mail is "How do you get your sites to run so fast". Although not perfect, my sites typically run a bit faster than your average DotNetNuke sites. Previously I have kept the exact specifics of my changes to myself, however, with a litle encouragement from the community I have decided to share the full context of the changes that I make to a default DotNetNuke installation to get better baseline performance, as well as extra items that I do to help when I really need that "boost".
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, January 05, 2009
As I mentioned in an earlier blog posting one of the big new items in DotNetNukr 4.9.1 is a Dashboad module. This module was created to help the DotNetNuke Corporation work with the DotNetNuke Professional Edition users, however, there are also big benefits to the rest of us that help support users on DotNetNuke. The following sections will discuss each of the views included in the Dashboard module, which can be accessed from "Host" -> "Dashboard".
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, December 25, 2008
Recently I have been responding to more and more forum posts and e-mails regarding DotNetNuke and selecting a hosting provider. Back in May I had a blog post Selecting a Hosting Provider Revisited, this article did a great job of outlining the basic consideration points when it comes to selecting a hosting environment for DotNetNuke. However, recent technology changes and other hosting options has created a few more items that need to be considered. This article is designed to specifically address the concerns and questions behind shared, virtual dedicated, dedicated, and cloud hosting options.
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, December 08, 2008
From Mitchel: I'm happy to announce that Tom Kraak of Seablick Consulting will lend his expertise in the area of DNN Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and DNN Ecommerce as a guest blogger on MitchelSellers.com. You may already know Tom from his own blog or have seen him lurking around the DNN forums, DNN conferences and community events … welcome Tom!
Mitchel recently relaunched his company website and while certainly functional and visually pleasing, there is room for improvement on the search engine optimization front. So let’s help out a good friend and business partner by applying my DNN SEO Quickstart Guide to IowaComputerGurus.com (ICG.)
Title and Description Meta Tags
First, let’s change the home page title from "Welcome to IowaComputerGurus Inc." to "DotNetNuke Modules & Custom .NET Development | IowaComputerGurus." The title now contains important keywords and at the same time much better reflects the company and its mission. While branding is important, I do prefer to put keywords first and the brand name last especially for product and service oriented small businesses.
While it can be challenging to stick to the recommended limit of 65 characters including spaces for page titles, we do have slightly more freedom when it comes to the meta description (about 100 characters more to be exact.) With that in mind, let’s rewrite "Welcome to IowaComputerGurus Inc. a Des Moines Iowa based software consulting firm. Specializing in .NET and DotNetNuke solutions" to something more enticing such as "As a Microsoft Certified Partner, IowaComputerGurus provides information technology consulting services with a focus on .NET and DotNetNuke software development." Remember, as opposed to the page title, the meta description carries almost no weight as a ranking factor and therefore acts more like a pay-per-click ad with the main purpose of attracting clicks in search engine result pages (SERPs) by accurately describing the page content.
Here is one more suggestion of a meta title and description combination, this time for the Custom Module Development page:
Custom DotNetNuke (DNN) Module Development | IowaComputerGurus
IGC specializes in the development of custom DotNetNuke modules by following DNN programming best practices and a proven approach to software development.
Link Building
Yahoo! Site Explorer reports about 9,000 off-domain, incoming links to the ICG home page, which in part contributes to the healthy 5 Google toolbar PageRank. However, the majority of these incoming links are from Mitchel’s own blog as well as the dotnetnuke.com forums, where Mitchel is one of the most active participants. So I recommend diversifying by seeking links from relevant business partners, affiliates and organizations (such as the Microsoft Partner program, the local chamber of comments, etc) and reputable directories. Furthermore, it’s important to pay attention to the anchor text of any links to be acquired going forward. I do realize that this is not always possible, but if the opportunity does arise, Mitchel should request keyword-laden anchor text such as "DNN Module Development" and "Free DNN Modules" pointing to the appropriate pages.
Quality Copy & Content
In regards to website copy and other textual content, IowaComputerGurus.com is a bit too wordy for my taste. I would eliminating some of the corporate jargon and then rewrite the copy starting with the home page by injection keywords and key phrases gathered from free tools such as this one, that one or even Google itself (search for "DotNetNuke" and scroll to the bottom of the search engine result page to find the "searches related to" section.) Also, short of combining MitchelSellers.com with IowaComputerGurus.com, I would reserve case-study type articles for ICG to satisfy the hunger of search bots for fresh and original content.
XML Sitemap
I usually shun DNN’s native xml sitemap implementation and use a 3rd party tool such as this one instead, but for a site mainly build around traditional DNN pages it works quite well as all relevant pages are indeed present in sitemap.aspx. While that’s a good start, I still don’t like the idea of having the lastmod, changefreq, and priority nodes read all the same for every single page. Call me picky, but that takes me straight back to my Notepad "drawing board." And lastly, to get the most of an xml sitemap, I suggest submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Live Search Webmaster Center.
Robots.txt Exclusion Protocol
Mitchel currently has no robots.txt file in the root directory of IowaComputerGurus.com (server returns a 404 HTTP status code), which signals to the search engines that access is allowed to all resources served by the website. That’s not an ideal situation as some of DNN’s supporting directories and files have no business being indexed and subsequently appearing in SERPs. To remedy that, I usually recommend using dotnetnuke.com’s robots.txt implementation as a base and then adding exclusions specific to your website. In the case of ICG, I would at least additionally disallow /home/ctl/privacy.aspx, /home/ctl/terms.aspx, and /forums/afv/ to restrict access to the privacy statement, terms of use, and certain areas of Active Forum.
That wraps up part one of my SEO overhaul of IowaComputerGurus.com. Check back in a week or two as I conclude this series with a closer look at local search, search engine friendly skins and menu systems as well as Url rewriting and canonicalization.
And as always, comments and questions are appreciated.
Posted by Tom on Friday, September 19, 2008
DotNetNuke site administrators often are tasked with maintaining their sites as well as ensuring that a proper backup/recovery plan is in place. An important part of this is to have a proper site backup, therefore I am re-visiting my two previous versions of backup guides in this updated article. I will walk though the items needed for backup, and considerations when creating the backup, specifically if you are looking to migrate a site to a different server. I will then discuss the process to create a backup in both SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005, and lastly I will quickly touch on the third party options available for performing site backups.
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, September 15, 2008
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