Blog

So it’s been way too long, 6 months to be pretty exact, since we had a new release for Engage: Publish. Well last Thursday it finally came! We released Publish 5.4 on our website, though without announcement because of everything else we have had going on. Well here’s the announcement!

At Engage we do a lot of cool work with websites, and when we hand-off the projects there is always a pang in my heart that I’m sure parents feel when they see their child off to summer camp for the first time. “Will the website survive all the bullies? I hope they don’t learn curse words (bad markup).” One of the major benefits to working with a content management system like DotNetNuke is that you can distribute content administration privileges to users who wouldn’t normally manage a website. The tools DNN provides help to make editing content easy. But this can also lead to a website that looks like it is managed by multiple people with various ideas on what looks good (font sizes, font styles…).

At Engage we utilize a number of tactics to help ensure that websites can be properly maintained after the hand-off from our implementation services to our customers ownership and management of their site. On my personal blog, I outlined some tricks...

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I had the privilege of presenting at the first annual DayfOfDNN event in beautiful Tampa, FL last week. Chris and I arrived in Tampa a few days before the event started to get situated for our pre-event training workshop. The weather was by far much better than the hot and humid summer days in St. Louis. We had a great time meeting new people and working with them at the pre-event workshop and the pre-event party.

So Dang and I headed off to Tampa Florida on Thursday to get ready for the Day of DNN event, as well as teach a few of our DotNetNuke Workshops. We flew down Thursday morning, picked up our rental car (after an upgrade to a full size that worked out well, more on that later). Once we made our way over to the hotel we checked in and began working on our presentations for Saturday, there’s nothing like leaving it to the last minute right? When we checked in we picked up two packages, one with the materials for our workshops on Friday/Sunday, and one from Wrox with three freshly printed copies of my new book, the first copies I’d actually seen in print so I was pretty excited about that.

 I just wrote up a guide on why and how to embed JavaScript (and other files) into your assemblies when making DotNetNuke modules.  If you're interested in a peek at some of our advanced development practices, take a look over on my personal blog.

In just under 24 hours I’ll be starting the first in our series of paid DotNetNuke Virtual Classroom sessions, our DotNetNuke Essentials class.  If you’re interested in signing up there is still time! $199 for 6 hours of instructor led DNN training, 2 hours each day.

We had a great turnout to our two DotNetNuke Intro session that we held over the past few weeks, and will be offering that class again on June 3rd.

http://www.engagesoftware.com/Training/Virtual_Classroom.aspx

I believe many DotNetNuke® fans out there are aware of the one-day event in Tampa, FL called Day of DotNetNuke®. Orlando DotNetNuke User Group President, Will Strohl, organizes this event and it seems to be a promising turnout.

I am just excited to see another major DotNetNuke® event happen in addition to OpenForce in the U.S. Day of DotNetNuke is organized to provide free education to all who are interested in learning about the platform. I see this event as an opportunity to evangelize DotNetNuke® project to many who are new to it.

Engage: Rotator is our content rotation module for DotNetNuke.  We just released the 2.0 update with full templatability and a huge number of new rotation and animation options.

We are now offering DotNetNuke Webinar training classes. We held our first class on April 22nd and had an excellent turnout and feedback for this first free session called “Introduction to DotNetNuke”. We are offering this free webinar again on May 6th, 2009, you can get signed up for the class by visiting our Virtual Classroom page. The Intro to DotNetNuke course is one hour long, and runs from 12pm CDT to 1PM CDT.

So we've been in the building for well over five years now, I've been with Engage 5yrs coming up in May. While we did move downstairs, from upstairs (obviously), in that time, we have never had a sign on the building with our name. Well today that changed, check out the new Engage signage out front, I must say, I think it looks great! But now, instead of people calling the landlord to see if the office space is available, they may call and ask "What's engage?"

Check out the picture of our new sign in the full blog post.