Blog

Are you going to OpenForce07 in Las Vegas November 5-8th 2007? I am! And I even have the badge displaying on http://chrishammond.com

Have you seen the agenda for the conference yet? If not take a look at it here.

There will be 3 days of DotNetNuke topics, two tracks each day. It looks like I'm up second, on the second day, of the second track. We're also lining up a vendor booth for Engage Software, I'm hoping to write a demo version of Engage: Publish...

Read More »

A few years back I was enlightened by Chris Paterra in the ways of using NANT scripts to aid in the packaging of DotNetNuke Modules. Using NANT to package your WAP (web application project) modules within Visual Studio 2005 is a snap, and can save you a LOT of time each time you have to come up with a new release.

Read More »

Welcome back to the DotNetNuke tips! I started doing this over a year ago, though with getting married last fall and working on my Datsun 240Z lately I haven't blogged near as much lately about DNN topics. So here we go, starting up again with my DotNetNuke Tips.

Today's tip follows:

When you're doing testing locally with a backup for a Production Database and Website one of the things you need to be sure to do is change your...

Read More »

I'm happy to announce that I've been selected to speak at the OpenForce07 DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas during this year's fall DevConnections. DevConnections looks to be one of the larger conferences this year now that the PDC has been cancelled for this year. I'll be presenting on "Portal Administration Best Practices".

I look forward to sharing what I've learned over the last 4+ years working with DNN in corporate and noncorporate environments, I've worked on some of the largest DNN implementations out there and hope to be able to share some of my experiences with those projects.

Being selected to present at the first DotNetNuke conference is a great honor. I know quite a few other guys from my company (www.engagesoftware.com) will be in attendance as well. My wife...

Read More »

Last week we were able to release the long awaited new release of Engage: Publish with all new bells and whistles.

Engage: Publish is an article management system / workflow engine for your DotNetNuke portal. It provides advanced content management capabilities with workflow - approval, content categorization and related articles.  With Engage: Publish you’ll never have to worry about clicking the update button in DotNetNuke.  Your content history is safe and sound.  Plus, if you have multiple authors of content, you’ll be secure knowing that the content created by your authors will not be “live” until an administrator approves.  All this plus several different ways of managing content categories and displays you'll wonder how you ever lived without Publish.

A demo of Engage: Publish...

Read More »

I'm proud to finally announce that the DotNetNuke Wiki Project has officially released the first "production" version of the Wiki module. This version is labeled 04.00.01 and can be downloaded from the Project downloads page. You can find out more information for the Wiki module on the Project Page, and some basic instructions, version history and release notes available on the Wiki Example page, which is running the released version of the Wiki module. Thanks to Josh Handel for helping to get this project rolling again by donating his Ktomics Wiki module to be converted and used for the official DotNetNuke Wiki module.

Requirements: DotNetNuke 4.4.1 or greater

Look...

Read More »

When Brian Schwartz left for his Honeymoon last week I know he wasn't expecting to find this when he came back!

 

We knew Brian was getting back from his honeymoon and coming into the office today, so yesterday we purchased 600 sq/ft of reynolds wrap from Sam's Club. After that we got to work. Throughout the afternoon we spent a few minutes here and there working on the office, wrapping everything that wasn't fastened down. After our company meeting last night three of us stayed late to finish up the office. We wrapped EVERYTHING. We wrapped every book, stack of papers, spare change, the desk, bookshelf, whiteboard, a paperclip, a tie, a pair of pants, the office door and we even layed the last of the foil on the floor to cover the carpet.

Check out some of the photos I uploaded over on Flickr.

...

Read More »

I've had too many clients come to me and ask how they can search through all of their Text/HTML modules on a portal to look for links that point to their development URL rather than their production URL. Instead of telling them they had to manually look at every page to find all instances of these invalid links I created a new module, available from www.engagemodules.com

Engage: F3 allows you to quickly and easily search through all Text/HTML modules installed on a site, generate a report of links found, and directly links to the edit control for each of those modules to allow you to correct the invalid links.

Above and beyond the use case where you are searching for a URL, you can use Engage: F3...

Read More »

Last week I got started on getting the DotNetNuke Wiki module into a 4.4.0 source solution, so that I could convert the module to ASP.NET 2.0 and debug it in Visual Studio. Normally this wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary, I setup DotNetNuke solutions for a living, I can do it in my sleep, but I decided I was going to do all of this on my main machine running Windows Vista Ultimate edition.

You would think this might not be too difficult, but it sure was. Here's what I was starting with.

DotNetNuke 4.4.0 Source package, available for download from www.dotnetnuke.com.

Visual Studio 2005 w/ SP1

IIS7 Installed

IIS6 compatibility partially installed.

After multiple failures, and quite a bit of head smashing (on the wall) I gave up for the weekend. I blogged about the troubles, and a little birdie came to the rescue (If you read this birdie and don't mind me mentioning your name let me know)!

The little birdie...

Read More »

I see this requested all the time, so I figured I'd blog how I proceed with upgrading a DNN Instance.

If you're upgrading your DotNetNuke instance, here is a list of simple steps to follow during the upgrade process.

First tip, test the upgrade on a staging site first, pull a copy of the database and files down, try the upgrade, make sure all your functionality is still there. Then upgrade production (backup everything first)

 

Here’s the steps to upgrade

 

1.       Backup the database.

2.       Backup the file system.

3.       Make sure you did 1 & 2

4.       Extract the latest DNN ZIP file somewhere, i usually use the installation package, not the upgrade package out of preference.

5.       Edit the web.config file from DNN package

a.       Modify the SQL connection strings, there are two places, you can get the string from your original web.config

b.      Be sure to copy the Machinekey ValidationKey and Decription key values...

Read More »