Blog

The CodePlex Foundation enables the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities. That’s HOT. When CodePlex Foundation asked us to help enhance the features and design of their website we were giddy. Not only did this project allow us to do some exciting work, but we jumped at the chance to work with an organization whose mission we could get behind.

As the branding changed and the site grew, the foundation's website easily adapted. The skinning features of DNN allowed us to completely redesign the website without losing content. As more galleries and projects became a part of the foundation, the website easily welcomed the new content. Additionally, each gallery and project owner now has the ability to manage their information. The leadership at the foundation is frequently providing news, announcements, and blogs on their website.

I really wanted the title of this blog post to be “Customizing the Telerik Rad Editor with DNN to Reinforce Consistent Content Administration Practices for your Content Editors and Other Implications of using Telerik Rad Editor as your Default HTML Editor in DNN” but that may have been a tad too long.

In DotNetNuke 5.4.0, the community edition of the platform included the Telerik RAD Editor. This is an exciting new development for the community edition of DNN. The flexibility of the HTML editor in DNN is one of the most commonly overlooked features. For most content editors, the HTML editor might be their only interaction with the system. For this reason, customizing the HTML editor for your content administrators is crucial to user adoption and creating a friendly workspace for your editors.

This blog entry is going to apply some of the same concepts from a previous blog entry for the FCKEditor, Optimizing the FCKEditor for DNN, but as an evaluation of the Telerik RAD Editor for DNN. Chris Hammond introduced how to include these features on your site in a blog on DNN Daily. I’m going to build upon his implementation instruction with some opinionated configuration recommendations.

During the sales and pre-project kickoff process I find myself explaining a lot of the “things” we do here at Engage. From our website’s menu, you can recognize that we do a mix of products, services, training, design. In addition to all this we’re active members in the DotNetNuke community and other web development circles (StackOverflow, ASP.NET blogs, user groups).

Sometimes it feels like that long list of “things” is a lot to handle. I often think, “man, if we focused on just module development we could really rock a bunch of great modules,” or “if we did only training we could really offer every type of training needed.”

But at the end of our projects, doing all of those “things” really justifies why we do what we do. The ability to see...

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Joe Brinkman wrote a positive (and in my biased opinion fair) review of “DotNetNuke 5: User’s Guide,” the book co-authored by Chris and me. The thing I was most excited about in Joe’s review was that he understood one of our key goals in writing this book – keep it simple. DotNetNuke can be an extremely powerful and useful tool for building websites.

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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We take pride in trying to offer professional products and services to the DotNetNuke community. In providing commercial modules, two components of the module define professionalism - the quality of the product, and the quality of the support.

Recently we have done two things which we hope will continue to add to the overall quality of our modules (both the product and support).

We're making our issue tracking system more transparent. With each release going forward, our modules will have a public facing road map and issues list. We're also opening up the issue tracking system (Gemini) to our user community. By doing this, we hope to engage our user community more fully and communicate more clearly the direction of our product development cycle. Check out our issues tracking system at support.engagemodules.com The Support page on engagemodules.com has been revamped to better define our process and the tools available for support and feedback....

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