The for profit wing of DotNetNuke, the DotNetNuke Corporation, announced an infusion of funding today from a couple venture captical firms. As someone who's livelihood is intricately tied to DNN, I've got mixed feelings about this news. While I fully appreciate that the new funding should help take DotNetNuke to the next level, both from a features and functionality as well as a marketing and penetration perspective, it also worries me that priorities may shift, revenue may trump the "common good", and everything may get more profit minded and expensive. So, we'll just have to wait and see...

eTailer from Emerald Solutions is a fairly new entry in the DNN e-commerce world. While there is a great deal of promise in the product, my brief attempt at using it seems to indicate it's not ready yet...

Purchasing, downloading, and installing it went smoothly. eTailer adds a reasonable 5 modules to your DNN install (much better than the 23+ modules Catalook adds). Initially getting things setup and going seemed quite intuitive.  I created a new page and added the "eTailer Store Front module". It had a nice obvious link that allowed me to Add/Modify Products. And so I was off and running, or so I thought...

UPDATE: The developer recently notified he was going to step away from DNN development for 6 months. To me, this means you need to stay clear of this product as there's no guaratee it will continue to be improved or supported.

 DotNetNuke 4.8 added Human Friendly urls, but unlike Friendly URLs, it can only be enabled through the web.config. To enable human friendly urls, replace:

<add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" includePageName="true" regexMatch="[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]" />

with:

<add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" includePageName="true" regexMatch="[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]" urlFormat="HumanFriendly" />

We need to start upgrading our skins from the older RAD Menu to the newer RAD Ajax Menu. This article will go through the steps involved.

Telerik Migration Guide

I'm so tired of people discounting HTML Tables. I'm a huge fan of CSS, I'm fully aware that it is possible to do columns using CSS, but in order to do so, you have to use a variety of hacks, and those hacks change based on a variety of circumstances.

With DNN, because we have skinning, we already have the needed separation between content and presentation. Tables are the best way to handle columns. They are rendered consistently across browsers, are clean, and easy to read and use, and provide capabilities that are very hard to get without Javascript hacks in CSS.

I've spent countless hours trying to work around problems with my CSS based columns due to one need or another. I've researched many approaches to the best way of handling them. None of the solutions I've seen have proven to be nearly as clean and easy as just using tables.

If you continue to feel compelled to build tableless designs, go for it, perhaps you'll have better luck than I, but when you have a complex need and you can't find a solution that works consistently in all browsers, I give you permission to just go ahead and use a Table.

There are hundreds of different functions and variables available through DotNetNuke, ASP.NET, and HTTP which can give you a variety of variations on your sites URL. I often find myself needing one variation or another as I'm building one application or another. The problem is, I have yet to find a clean and consistent way to get at the site's root or fully qualified URL regardless of whether the site is in a virtual directory (i.e. http://www.efficionconsulting.com or, for sites with virtual directories http://www.efficionconsulting.com/dotnetnuke). For DotNetNuke, I'm now using the following...

When the "Remember Me" feature of the DotNetNuke Login is enabled an encrypted authentication cookie is placed on the user's machine. By default, the web.config has a setting which causes to cookie to expire after one hour, which makes it almost useless.  However, the expiration of the cookie can be tweaked by editing a line in the web.config.

One thing I think it's important to do is to protect my clients from spam. Clients like to be able to put their email address on their sites. But, putting an unprotected email address on a site can soon result in a lot of spam as spambots search sites looking for email addresses to add to their lists, often referred to as "harvesting". There are multiple ways to prevent this...

Sometimes, you need (or want) to know which of the modules that are installed on your DNN site are and are not actually being used on your DotNetNuke site. This can be useful if you want to uninstall unused modules for performance improvements or if you're planning on upgrading your site and you need to know what modules you'll need to test or upgrade. Here's some sql that will help you answer these questions...

We've been doing a lot of DotNetNuke based E-Commerce projects lately. The projects we've done have really spanned a variety of store types (wine, audio files, church stuff, an automated shutoff system, resistors, printing products, and more), client types (wineries, churches, incentive programs, manufactures, master distributors) and feature requirements. So far, for all the DotNetNuke based E-Commerce sites we've built, we've used Catalook.

Catalook has a huge number of features, an immense number of configuration options, and is probably the worst implemented piece of software I've ever used. But it works. At times, though, I think it would be faster if I had just built the E-Commerce pieces of each of the sites from scratch.