We've been working on our first site that really makes heavy use of DotNetNuke's Banners module for displaying revenue generating ads. Today I was trying to get the banners module to work for a Newsletter piece (more on that later) of the site that has a very tight layout but the way Banners is implemented didn't allow me to do what I needed. Currently, the banners module renders banners in a table and the only way to add spacing between banners is by setting cellpadding and/or cellspacing. We needed a solution where we could ad space between the banners without adding space on the sides of the banners. This wasn't possible with the current implemenation (other than by adding whitespace to the banner images which we didn't feel was a good solution) so we needed another solution.

I could have gone in and made a couple quick changes to the banners module to get it to do what I needed but then, we would've have had to reapply the changes every time we upgraded the site.

Instead, I spent about 10 minutes creating a new module based on the existing banners module. Luckily, DNN makes this easy.

The change to the code is the easy part (though really it was all very easy). I just changed the RepeatLayout attribute for the DataList to "Flow" instead of the default "Table" and then added a class to the label within which the banner is implemented.

The more involved process was copying and renaming the files and class. In all though, it took less then 10 minutes to think up and implement this solution.   Read More...

Last week, we put a lot of effort into improvements to the search and RSS aspects of Efficion's Articles module. As part of that, we noticed that no matter how many times you hit the Re-Index content link on the Host->Search Admin page, the links never actually get updated. As we dug further, it became clear that to update the links used by DNN's search and RSS, you actually have to purge the search tables.

This has implications beyond our module so I thought I'd share the steps as a good practice to do every once in awhile on your DNN site to make sure you Search Results and RSS Feeds are linking properly.   Read More...

As most HTML aware folks know that when you paste content from Microsoft Word or Outlook for use as HTML, it includes all sorts of gobbledygook that clutters up your markup and overrides your CSS. Luckily, the fckEditor has a couple ways to handle this. If you're pasting from Word into the editor using IE, it pops up a dialog that gives you a chance to clean up the markup which is nice. If you're using Firefox you can achieve the same results by clicking on the special Paste from Word icon. But, there's an issue...   Read More...

Version 4.2.0 of Efficion's Articles Module for DotNetNuke is now available. This release adds lots of features and fixes and sets the ground work for new improvements.

Key amoung the features are the new Comment Moderation features that let selected roles moderate comments before they go live. Another key change was reworking the architecture so that list templates can use Repeaters instead of just DataLists which will enable us to better make use of jQuery effects and much more. Look for new templates coming soon to show off our new capabilities.   Read More...

Version 4.1.2 of Efficion's Articles module is now available. This release includes a variety of fixes, improvements, and new features.

View the complete list of changes