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DNN-Connect Blogs

The DNN Corp Reshuffle: What to make of it?

August 13th, 2014. I woke up in an alternate reality this morning. The reality where Shaun Walker was no longer with DNN Corp. It must have been all of 5 minutes between his resignation being made public and a message popping up on my iPad as I was preparing to go to bed. "It happened", it read. "It" being something the sender and I had discussed earlier as something that might happen in the near future. The third founder to leave the Corp and without doubt the most famous of all of them. And within an hour the interwebs were firing up with discussions about what this would mean for "us". Us, the DNN community that is. What do we make of this? At times like these I feel like we're Kremlin watchers. "Hey, so-and-so's now on the left instead of the right of the supreme leader at the parade. Did he get demoted?" So Shaun signs out with a short goodbye. And Joe posts a somewhat more elaborate post on how he intends to fill his shoes (Joe is now the o ...

Announcing DNN Connect 2015

I'm happy to announce we have found a location for next year's DNN Connect conference! The world's most convivial DNN event is returning to France. But instead of the bustling capital, we'll gather in the countryside in the town of Millau (world famous for the highest viaduct in the world). And just like last year we'll be introduced to the local flavours and ambience during our event, so get set for some of the local food and wine. These will be hand picked by our local team, the kind folks of Nevoweb. You know, the NBStore guys (and girls). They have booked the Domaine Saint Estève for us from the 28th to the 31st of May (the event itself being on the 29th and 30th). It's a luxurious resort in the heart of one of France's most beautiful natural regions (Parc des Grand-Causses/Cevennes national park).

Strong typing your settings

This is something of a pet peeve for me. And whenever I get myself involved in an open source project in DNN, it is one of the first things I’d tackle. The issue I’m referring to, here, is how to properly code settings that are serialized to storage (SQL). So settings are commonly retrieved as a hashtable or dictionary of key/value pairs that are both of a string type. These lists get stored in SQL typically in tables with the “Settings” suffix. I.e. ModuleSettings, PortalSettings, TabModuleSettings, etc. And often modules implement their own settings table because the framework hard wires ModuleSettings to … modules. So if you need portal-scoped settings for your module, you’ll need to create your own table. The old blog module (pre version 6) used to do this, for instance.

The DNN Connect Association

I’m thrilled to announce the birth of an association dedicated to the DNN Platform: DNN-Connect. You may already have heard of our website. We’re now taking things to a new level with the creation of an association. Why an association, you ask? Allow me to explain...

My DNN Road Movie. Part 1: The Early Years.

It’s been over 10 years that I’ve been “on DNN” and 7 years that I’m on the so-called Core Team of the platform. I’ve been awarded MVP (Most Valuable Person) by DNN Corp. Time to look back at our history together. Warning: I set out to write a paragraph or two about becoming DNN MVP, but it has grown into somewhat of a complete retrospective of the last decade. It was roughly 10 years ago I discovered DotNetNuke. In this first part I look at how I discovered DNN and my introduction into the community.

Contributing to the DNN Platform using Git and Github

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere the past few years chances are you will have heard of Git and Github. And how they are taking over the (developer) world. And if you’ve been in tune with recent developments around DNN, you will have heard that DNN, too, has a repository on Github and is currently managed using Git. So what’s the big deal?

Making DNN More Design-Centric

The roots of DNN are in Webforms. In the early days of asp.net this was Microsoft’s evolution of the Active Server Pages technology. Since then the world has moved on quite a bit. Various alternatives to Webforms have been introduced on the Winstack and by and large PHP has grown more explosively than any .net based technology. In part, because the php-based cms solutions have been kinder to web designers. How else to explain the vast amount of skins (themes) available to them and the general disdain of any web design firm for .net? OK. Maybe this is not entirely accurate, but the feeling I get is that we could make progress by making DNN more design-centric. And in my opinion that translates to: ensuring a designer has a better grip of where the HTML and CSS is coming from and where to change this.

DNN-Connect.org Officially Live

We’re thrilled to announce that we have launched a new DNN community website dedicated to the DNN platform. A number of DNN community veterans (some of them DNN MVPs) have joined forces under the banner DNN-Connect. And after a couple of months’ hard work we have gone live with http://dnn-connect.org. The motto of our work is “by the community, for the community”. As MVPs it is our role to take initiative and lead community efforts and we feel there is a void left for this site to fill.

DNN-Connect 431 6
Peter Donker 5150 30
Declan Ward 559 1