About DotNetNuke

DNN (aka DotNetNuke) is an advanced content management system (CMS) specifically designed for websites, Intranet deployments, and web application development. Administrators are given complete control of their content, layout, security and membership and are provided with a powerful set of tools to maintain a dynamic and interactive site.

Through the combined efforts of the DNN community, we have created a software framework that is reliable, flexible, and most of all, a powerful solution for meeting the needs of many different types of organizations. Learn More...

DNN Consultants with years of Experience

Back in 2004, when Efficion was just starting up and open source Content Management Systems were a fairly new concept, Efficion performed an exhaustive evaluation of the most popular CMS's in order to choose the best to build our business around. We chose DotNetNuke.

Built on top of the wonderful ASP.NET framework, it was technically superior, had a great community, a growing ecosystem, excellent leadership, had a great, extensible architecture, and was a very solid product. To this day, I feel strongly we made the right choice.

Since then, we've built the majority of our websites, intranets, and web applications on top of DNN. We offer a full range of services. Visit our services page to learn more.

Efficion's Modules for DNN

Articles Module

This Module is a more advanced version of DNN's Annoucements module. Features include: categories, searching, paging, comments, filtering, archives, thumbnailed images, details, and much more.

Categories Module

The Categories module serves as a base for other modules and allows for the sorting and filtering of records by Category.

DotNetNuke Related Articles

Making Ventrian's Simple Gallery Responsive

Ventrian has been making great DNN modules for many years now. Some of the modules though are beginning to show their age a bit and are using markup heavy techniques that were at one time common but can now be replaced with much cleaner CSS for most browsers. In particular, the Ventrian Gallery module wraps each photo in a table that has a cell for every corner and every side so that fancy borders can be added around the photos. This technique results in lots of extra markup and causes issues if you're wanting the gallery to be responsive (adjust to the users viewable area). It is actually fairly easy to make a few changes to cleanup the rendered HTML to allow for more modern and lightweight techniques for styling. We'll go through the steps... Read More... Comments (1)

Updating CSS with Client Resource Management enabled and without having to "Clear Cache" constantly

I really like the idea of the Client Resource Management features added to DotNetNuke in version 6. But, it can make building a new skin or a new site on a live instance of DNN rather painful as any changes you make to the .CSS or .JS files won't be seen unless you clear the site's cache or put the site into DEBUG mode.

In theory, all skin development should probably happen on a development instance and the live site should only be updated once the skin updates are complete. But, in practice, we find lots of cases where we do need to be able to make CSS updates to a live instance (though not necessarily a live site) of DNN.

You can do this by updating the .css file and then clicking "Clear Cache" in the control panel. But, every time you do that, a new version of the combined files is created and users will need to download the file again. So, it's best to avoid that.

What I've found works better is to create a <style></style> section within your skin and for any changes you want to make, make those changes within that style section. Once you've got all your changes done, migrate them into the .css file and delete the <style></style> section from the skin, and clear the cache. That method allows us to quickly and painlessly make changes.

Also, for experimenting with minor updates, Firebug is a great tool as you can see what your changes will look like and then apply them when you're happy with them.

Happy coding! Comments (0)

Module Categories - Specifying Which Modules are Common

Image: Module Categories - Specifying Which Modules are Common Making adding modules easier for admins Since the new Ribbon control panel for DotNetNuke has been out, it has seriously bugged me that when you go to add a module, the default module Category is Common and the only module in that category was the HTML module. Because of that, the new Category just made things more confusing.

Today, an intern at one of my clients was trying to make a simple change to the home page of their site and added the Configuration Manager module to the home page. This caused the home page to force users to login and due to another issue caused an error for anyone going to the homepage. Bad.

Once I got that fixed up, I finally had the needed incentive to dig a bit further into the Module Categories piece to help avoid this in the future. As it turns out, it's quite easy to add modules to the Common category.

Just go to Host->Extensions and edit the module you want to add to Common. Then, select Common for the Module Category. That's it.

Now that the Common category actually includes the common modules, I really like that feature and hope it will make it much easier (and safer) for our clients to edit their content.

For our clients, we're doing this for all sites where clients edit there own content. Generally I include the following modules: Efficion's Articles, HTML, Documents, Links, and Ventrian Gallery.

Learn more from this post from Charles Nurse on Module Categories Comments (1)

PLM - Pallet Logistics Management

Image: PLM - Pallet Logistics Management This new DotNetNuke-based website for PLM features a new Efficion designed logo, a custom DNN skin, custom photography, extensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO), lots of new original content, custom job listings, an online employment application, and much more.

Technologies and Services: DNN, Responsive Grid, SEO, Custom Photography
Read More... Comments (0)

Setting up SmarterStats against a multi-portal DotNetNuke installation

Image: Setting up SmarterStats against a multi-portal DotNetNuke installation Log Based Analytics provide a new perspective

We use Google Analytics extensively for tracking and analyzing website statistics. It does a great job of providing really useful information in a way that anyone can understand. Plus, its very easy to setup and has the power to let advanced users segment and drill down through the data to get even more detailed information. But, we've found it's a good idea to get another view of your visitors and traffic using a tool that provides information based on Log Analysis. Log based analytics let your see things that simply can't be tracked by script-based analyzers like Google Analytics.

As a big fan of SmarterMail, we decided to give SmarterStats a try. We've been using SmarterStats for awhile on several of our bigger sites but we also wanted to be able to use it on a few of our portals where we have multiple sites installed on a single instance of DotNetNuke. Before we could do this, we needed to do several things first to get this to work right...

Read More... Comments (7)
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