I was recently given an opportunity to review the Dynamic User Directory module created by the folks at DataSprings. This module is a a great module for creating a user directory from a standard DotNetNuke installation, and works great for individuals that are using the Dynamic Registration module from DataSprings as well. At the most basic level, this module might seem to be a fairly simple module, it displays a list of users on the portal. However, it is important to not over-simplify the task at hand. Due to the nature of DotNetNuke and the data structures used it is very common for a "user directory" module to be a very complex setup, especially if you are looking to work against a large user base, or to support searching on profile values. This review will take a look at the module and provide some insight to some of the key findings from my testing.
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, January 19, 2010
I have talked to many developers that have one common feature request that we would like to see for Visual Studio, Spell Check. As a developer one of the most troubling things can be minor typo's in code after it has been completed. Although simple to fix, it can be embarrassing to have a typo that goes out in a module that a client is reviewing or that you put up for sale on SnowCovered. Well, today I got an email from Chad Nash at DataSprings, and they have a set of tools that are going to help us out on this front from a DNN module perspective.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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
Well, it has been a very busy week, but we can now record another OpenForce event in the books. I'm sitting here still in Las Vegas going over various notes regarding various announcements that have occurred through the week and though it would be good to make a blog post with a few "highlights" as I see them from the week. So, without future delay, here are my favorite highlights from the week, in no particular order!
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Posted by Mitchel on Saturday, November 14, 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
Well we have reached that time of year again, the annual Packt Publishing CMS Awards. I encourage all of you that have not yet voted to go out and vote for DotNetNuke, there are a total of two categories that DotNetNuke can be nominated for.
Best Overall Open Source CMS - This category is for the best overall CMS solution, regardless of the programming language and backend technologies used.
Best Other Open Source CMS - This category is for the best CMS solution that is a NON-PHP solution.
In addition to the items where DotNetNuke can be nominated I would also encourage you to think about the Open Source CMS MVP award option as well. This is an option where you can nominate individual contributors to the Open Source platform of your choice for an individual MVP award.
Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, August 26, 2009
As everyone that is a regular reader of this blog is already aware of I am a big fan of the WAP development model for all DotNetNuke development projects. Now, one of the most common issues that individuals have reported to me is that "design-time" support is not there for common DotNetNuke user controls that are common to integrate with custom modules. The controls I'm discussing are the DNN Label, Text Editor, and Url Controls. Luckly though it is VERY simple to get full design time support for the controls and this article will show you how to accomplish this!
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, August 04, 2009
As many of you know I attended and presented at the Day of DotNetNuke event this past weekend in Tampa Florida. First and foremost I want to take a moment and thank Will Strohl and all others that put the effort forward to organize this great event. I was very impressed with how well organized everything was, and overall the sheer size of the event. With what I believe was close to 150 people there was a variety of interests and viewpoints expressed. The sessions were great and the conversations before, during, and after the event were even better.
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, June 15, 2009
When working with DotNetNuke I often find it necessary to do a redirection back to the current page, with additional querystring parameters. Not actually switching views, but just back to the same page so that some other action could be taken for a specific module. In the past most of the examples I found used this process.
DotNetNuke.Common.Globals.NavigateUrl(this.TabId) + "?mykey=myvalue"
Which would create a url such as
http://www.mysite.com/MyFolder/Default.aspx?mykey=myvalue
Although a fully functional URL that works 100%, it is not something that can be easily copied, and overall doesn't look all that fancy. Looking through the functionality of the various NavigateUrl overloads, it didn't seem apparent that there was something that could be used to re-write that type of URL. Well I missed something using the following code.
DotNetNuke.Common.Globals.NavigateUrl(this.TabId, "", "mykey=myvalue")
From this example we provide the tabId, a blank ControlKey, and then our added parameter value. We could add additional parameters as well.
This results in a URL similar to the following.
http://www.mysite.com/MyFolder/mykey/myvalue/Default.aspx
Now, this is a fully re-written URL, and something much easier for a person to remember. I hope this has been helpful!
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Posted by Mitchel on Monday, June 08, 2009
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