We've just put a new site for Mount Pleasant Winery live. Mount Pleasant is a world class winery located an hour from St. Louis. The primary feature of the new site is the online wine shop. Online sales is a significant part of Mt. Pleasant's business and the new shop gives them a great new look along with lots of features and flexiblity to maximize their sales. Additional features are still in the works.   Read More...

Efficion is in charge of designing and creating all new sites for The Pyramid Companies, a developer of lofts and housing here in St. Louis. We've been putting out a new site every month for their various developments along with a variety of enhancements to their existing sites. All solutions are built using PHP, HTML, and CSS.

Some of the new sites we've created:
PyramidStl.com | Leather Trades Lofts | Sullivan Place |
Charleston Square | Covenant Place   

Efficion created SpiritBreak.com, a site the provides spiritually oriented videos, for FaithStreams.com. The site was built using DotNetNuke to make it easy for the FaithStreams folks to add and update content and videos and we used Flash Video to provide a consistent and seamless experience for all users.   

Efficion is hoping to release a beta version of version 3.3 of the Articles module sometime next week. We continue to add some great and highly requested features including: ability to play Flash Videos (same as Google and YouTube use), new detail display options, Detail Page templates, ability to specify a file for the Detail Type, support for URLTracking, Sorting by Article Title, improved Category integration, ability to specify roles that can view Article Details, and FriendlyURL support.

  

Check out my new page on adding video streaming in DotNetNuke... or any page where you can use add HTML.   Read More...

A sample video playing within DNN.   Read More...

An alpha of version 3.3 of the Articles module is now available. This version is not yet recommended for live sites as it hasn't yet received sufficient community testing. Features may change and additional features may be added.

New Features include:
-Option to display Detail on Same Page as listing so the other module will still display.
-Option to display Detail on a completely different page
-Detail Page templates- Allows for modifying the look of the details page.   Read More...

*** Updated: Added method for DNN versions 3.3 and 4.3 and greater ***
DNN 3.0 - 3.2
In DNN 3.0-3.2 and 4.0-4.1, the membership / profile stuff made heavy use of Microsoft's Membership provider module which stores most of the information in a hash table. While this is fine for getting a single user, it's a complete nightmare if you want to show a grid or list of many users or to do something with the data in SQL.

There's a good write up on how to get at this info through SQL at DNN Stuff.

DNN 3.3+ and 4.3+
The core team did a complete and much needed overhaul of the User Profile system for DNN 3.3 and 4.3. The grid on the User Accounts page is now a lot more flexible but it still won't help you if you want non-admin users to view user data or if you want to utilize profile data in SQL... Click on the Read More link to learn how to get at DNN 3.3+ profile data in SQL. This data could then be displayed using the Advanced Data Grid   Read More...

Something I've learned several times and have subsequently forgotten several times is that skinpath only works when your image does not specify runat="server".

When creating a skin, you often want to include images. This can be a bit tricky as DNN's friendly URLs makes it so that your path may be very different for the same page, i.e. www.efficionconsulting.com/default.aspx is the same as http://www.efficionconsulting.com/Home/tabid/1/Default.aspx. This means that most relative paths just won't work, i.e. /images/spacer.gif, image/spacer.gif, ... You can use more hard coded paths such as ~/Portals/0/_default/efficion/images/spacer.gif but that really limits flexibility as if you want to install the same skin as a site specific skin on a different DNN instance.

SkinPath is a great new feature where DNN will figure it out for you. Though I don't know why it won't work when runat="server is used"... Scott Wilhite has a nice write-up on this in this post.   

For one of my clients, I needed to take their logo, shrink it down and place it against a dark brown background... easy enough it seemed. Since their main logo was dark in color, I had them send me a light colored version. It was an Adobo Illustrator file with a transparent background and I thought, "great, I'll just shrink it down as a gif with a transparent background and voila!".

But it was not to be... no matter what I did, the logo came out jagged and the text was unreadable... I talk to a Graphic Designer friend and he mentions anti-aliasing so I do my research and all becomes clear...

In order for an image to be anti-aliased, it needs to have a background color in order to blend it together with the other colors for the smoothing effect. With transparent GIFs, that can't happen as the software doesn't have a background color to blend.

And that's why most designers don't use transparent gifs much, they just don't look as good as a properly anti-aliased image... if you know the background color for the image, it's best to set that as the background in your image editing program and resize the image with that background.

Seems like opacity should be able to help out here... still more to learn...   

Please post any bug reports in the Comments section of this Article. I will compile and organize submissions in the details section.   Read More...

Please post any feature requests in the comments section of this Article. I will compile and organize feature requests in the details section.   Read More...

After almost 7 months of development, version 3.2 of the Articles module is finally released. We've added lots of new features along with lots of bug fixes and other improvements. Key new features include Comments, Paging, and List Templates. Note: This version will only work on DNN version 3.1.1 and greater.   Read More...

Version 3.2 adds Templates to the Articles module. Templates enable an extremely flexible method of displaying Articles. An unlimited number of templates can be created to display article listings by anyone with basic asp.net skills.   Read More...

President of BCI

“Many people have good ideas about what they want in a web presence, but it takes a professional to polish the concept. I have found David of Efficion Consulting to be one of those people. We plan to deploy their services in the future on different projects and would suggest them to any of our colleagues.”   

There is now a sample project for showing how to implement and install the Custom Edit Page capabilities...   Read More...

I'm now actively using the editing tie-ins of ADG 3.2 on two client sites and it's working great. I'm still working on making it easier for others to do the same by improving usability and including clear instructions.   Read More...

I've now successfully implemented Editing capabilities for the ADG using a separate Editing page. Basically in the settings page, you specify an editpage, i.e. EditBooks.ascx. Then, Grid displays an edit icon on each row, clicking on the icon takes you to a container page that then loads the Edit control... The beauty of this approach is its fully extensible, there's no limits to the complexity of the edited data. The downside is that you have to create the edit page on your own (I'll be providing a sample for use as a basis and perhaps templates for auto-code generation). I also plan on adding a DetailDisplay page to display complete details using the same system...   Read More...

To all those patiently waiting for Inline Editing, I'd like to apologize for the extensive delay and the complete lack of communication... unfortunately, client work takes precedence and I've had a consistently full plate for several months now... I do want to give you a brief update on where things are...   Read More...

Efficion has been doing a variety of DotNetNuke work for Business Clean Inc., the most obvious of which is a new logo and skin for their website. In addition we've begun reworking their content and creating several backend tools to help them work more efficiently. More improvements coming soon.   Read More...