Sometimes, you need (or want) to know which of the modules that are installed on your DNN site are being used, which aren't, and where a module is being used. 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...   Read More...

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.   Read More...

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.   Read More...

Here's a compilation of tips and tricks for getting at more than just <%= SkinPath %> in your DNN skin.

To show the name of the Portal:
<%= PortalSettings.PortalName %>

To get the current portal's home directory (i.e. /portals/0 ) you would use:
<%= PortalSettings.HomeDirectory %>   Read More...

You may have noticed that when you edit text in DotNetNuke, what you see in the editor window may not look like what you see when you save your changes. This is because the fckEditor applies a different stylesheet in the editor window instead of any of the actual site css files. To change this, all you need to do is edit the web.config file for the site and set the proper value for the StaticCSSFile variable in the FckHtmlEditorProvider section.

So search your web.config for StaticCSSFile. And update it to point to your desired css file (e.g.  StaticCSSFile="~/Portals/0/Skins/MySkin/skin.css"). Save your changes and you should now see the proper styles when you edit content.

I initially tried making changes to the EditorAreaCSS variable in the fckconfig.js file as this is the standard place to make fckeditor changes but that proved to be a dead end. Not sure why the DNN folks implemented this in the web.config instead.