Posted by Tom on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN News, OpenForce 08

Earlier today, DotNetNuke Corporation announced OpenForce Connect, a planned series of one-day “mini conferences” organized and hosted by local DNN user groups.

First up is OpenForce Connect Orlando scheduled for Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at the Orange County Convention Center. This inaugural event was inspired by Microsoft’s Joe Healy and is organized by the Orlando DotNetNuke user group under the direction of Michael Webb. Expect a full day of nothing but DNN in the form of 7 sessions presented by local DNN evangelists and a closing panel discussion by the co-founders of DotNetNuke Corporation. While the event is free to attend, registration is required at OpenForce08.com.

I’m planning to take the Family down to the Sunshine State for a long weekend and hope to see you there!

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Posted by Tom on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 to DotNetNuke, SEO, Reviews

The DNN module developers and web application programmers that I work with can usually be categorized as follows: SEO unaware, SEO aware, and SEO proficient. Unfortunately and traditionally, the vast majority of them fall into the first two categories, meaning it either never or only rarely crosses their minds that their multi-page modules will be scrutinized by Google and company just like any other web page.

Now Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO by Cristian Darie and Jaimie Sirovich aims to change all that. This is the first book on search engine optimization that I’ve come across that “delves at all into the meaty technical details” of SEO and therefore speaks to developers as opposed to only marketers. But then again, SEO is a team effort and I believe tech-minded marketers will appreciate the book as well even without the need to fully grasp every code snippet or regular expression. The exposure to the technical side of SEO helps me as a marketer to effectively communicate with technical folks. Sounds like a “win win” for everyone.

The book starts off with “a primer in basic SEO” for web developers and touches on fundamental concepts such as link equity, Google Page Rank, usability and accessibility. The introduction also looks at search engine ranking factors and distinguishes between visible on-page factors, invisible on-page factors, time-based factors, and external or off-page factors. Search engine penalties such as Google’s supplemental index and duplicate content are also discussed. The intro closes with a listing of resources and tools including web analytics, market research, browser plugins as well as SEO forums and blogs. Concise and to the point – pretty much all developers need to know to start their journey into the uncharted waters of SEO.

Then the book spends 2 chapters on a favorite topic of mine: search engine-friendly URLs and content relocation, also known as 301 and 302 redirection. If you have full control over your web server, you will appreciate the numerous code samples for ISAPI_Rewrite. If you are “stuck” on a shared hosting environment without access to ISAPI filters, the coverage of URL rewriting with UrlRewriter.NET comes to the rescue. The main lesson that I’ve learned from these 2 chapters though is that no matter what method you deploy for URL rewriting, you won’t go very far without at least basic knowledge of regular expressions. No need to worry though as the book does a nice job of “regex hand-holding” whenever applicable and even provides an appendix teaching simple regular expressions. For seasoned ASP.NET developers this won’t be an issue anyway as regular expression are commonly used for string matching and parsing chores besides URL rewriting.

Next up is fairly detailed discussion of duplicate content, which is a common dilemma for database-driven web applications such as DotNetNuke. The authors touch on causes and effects of duplicate content and discuss utilizing the robots meta tag as well as robots.txt pattern exclusion. More interestingly, a code sample and walkthrough is provided for generating robots.txt files programmatically. That way, for instance, all DNN printer-friendly pages could be disallowed “automatically” and on-the-fly!

The remainder of the book devotes chapters to search engine-friendly HTML and JavaScript, web feeds and social bookmarking, sitemaps, link bait, and foreign language SEO among others. A basic case study on “building an e-commerce store” summarizes the main concepts covered in the book and offers a feel for how these SEO-related principles may be applied in the real world.

Without going into further detail, I wholeheartly recommend the book to any ASP.NET programmer and selfishly to any DotNetNuke module developer. I do realize that the more technically folks may never look at SEO as religiously as I do, but that’s not the point. The ultimate goal in my mind is to unite our efforts behind building websites and web applications that perform on the server as well as on the client.

Oh, and in the unlikely event that you are a PHP developer reading a DNN blog, the same author team also published a PHP version of the book.

I have a number of DNN developers on my “blog to email” list and I’d love to get their input. Do you consider SEO at all during module development? If so, what challenges do you face by doing so?

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Posted by Tom on Monday, April 21, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN News, OpenForce 08

Today was originally marked as the deadline for for submitting speaker session proposals for DotNetNuke OpenForce 2008 to be held November 10 to 14 in Las Vegas, but I just got word from DNN Corporation, that "due to some issues with the original session submission forms we have decided to extend the call for speaker's submission date." You now have an additional week, more specifically until 5 pm PST on Friday April 25 to submit your proposals.

I had a chance to talk to Joe Brinkman of DNN Corporation last week and he confirmed that excitement for the 2nd annual DNN conference is building. He also mentioned that a passion for DNN and a desire to share that passion are traits that he personally is looking for in a speaker.

I've submitted 4 sessions so far with DNN SEO at the top of my list followed by sessions on DotNetNuke & Ecommerce, Productivity Features & Techniques, and a business-focused session on "How to Attract and Service the SMB Market." If you have ideas or suggestions for topics that you would like to see covered at OpenForce 2008, I would love to hear about them ...  let me know in the comments below.

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Posted by Heidi on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN Tips and Tricks

FCKeditor has been the default rich-text editor for DotNetNuke for quite a while now. I find it mostly intuitive and easy-to-use right out of the box. It provides more functionality than most website administrators will ever need and behaves much like any familiar Microsoft office application. There are times, however, when you’ll want to trim back some of that capability to avoid confusing your website users.

For example, we use Active Forums on liftkettlebells.com. We intended to give our users some limited text formatting ability, but the default FCKeditor includes a whopping 48 toolbar buttons! Frankly, it looks too busy and no one uses all those buttons when drafting a forum post. We just wanted to offer our visitors a few obvious options to pretty up their posts: bold, italics, bullets, lists, and hyperlinks.

One approach is to make modifications to your toolbars in the fckconfig.js file located in \Providers\HtmlEditorProviders\Fck\Custom, but those changes are then applied globally. I suggest using this method if you want to add/delete single buttons on the toolbars themselves. Let’s save those details for a future blog post.

For now, let’s focus on "hiding" toolbars using the FCKeditor's custom options page. If you are logged in as a host or admin, you will see a Show Custom Editor Options link below the compose window of any FCKeditor instance.

In Active Forums, for example, pick any forum and click the Add New Topic button. Then click Show Custom Editor Options.

Notice the three Settings Type options: Instance, Module, and Portal. These options are meant to confine your custom settings to a single instance of FCKeditor, to every instance within the current module, or portal-wide to every module and instance on your website. Unfortunately, it often doesn’t quite work that way. You may need to experiment with your selection to get the intended results. In this case, I’ve found that Instance modifications actually push my changes out across the entire Active Forums module. A little counter-intuitive to say the least!

Select Editor Toolbar View Options to view your toolbar choices. This is where you "turn off" unwanted toolbars. Select the pencil icon to expand the selected toolbar. For example, DNNDefault. Note, you may need to scroll back down to the Editor toolbar view options section after clicking the pencil icon.

You can disable the toolbar for all users, or a selected subset of users based on role. For our forum, I checked Disabled for All Users. Attention, you must click on the check mark image to the left of the row for your changes to take affect. This is another quirky little detail that took me a few hours to figure out!

You will need to repeat these steps for each toolbar you want to disable. So, I also disabled the Default and NoGallery toolbars. That leaves only the desired Basic toolbar visible to our users.

Once you have disabled the unwanted toolbars, click Apply in the Apply Custom Settings To section with Instance selected in the dropdown box. You should then see a “Settings applied successfully to Instance” message as shown below.

Now close the dialog box. To see your changes, don’t forget to click Refresh Editor at the bottom of the compose window.

And that’s it! These changes are only applicable to Active Forums. So, when I’m editing content using any other modules, I still have access to the full suite of toolbars. But, my forum members get to see a simpler, smaller set of formatting choices:

We would love to hear from you. What have you learned while customizing the FCKeditor for your needs? Please share in the comments below.

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Posted by Jenny on Monday, April 07, 2008 to DotNetNuke, Reviews

Engage Software was recently named DotNetNuke Corporation's official DNN training partner. Late last year I had inquired about DNN classes and when the opportunity finally came up, I was very excited to participate.

The training facility in downtown St. Louis, Missouri was easy to reach. Furthermore, the atmosphere was very comfortable and the material and equipment provided for student use was up to date and well organized. Instructors Chris Hammond and Cuong Dang were extremely knowledgeable and presented the material in an easy to follow manner.

I was only able to attend the DNN and Skinning Essentials, so I cannot comment on module development and other classes offered.

DotNetNuke Essentials was presented by Chris Hammond. I really didn’t think it would be possible to do a complete overview of DNN in 8 hours, but Chris managed to do just that. We covered DNN’s history, the installation process, possible applications, available modules, and had very good Q & A sessions as well. With so much information presented, I feared to get overwhelmed quickly, but that never materialized as Chris went over the topics in an easy to follow manner. The session was attended by a variety of people with different backgrounds, which made for some interesting questions. The day really energized me to do more with DNN and generated a lot more questions. It also opened up new possibilities for utilizing DNN in our organization.

The Skinning Essentials class was also well attended by a variety of individuals. Instruction was directed by Cuong Dang. He was an excellent presenter with a quick paced style – at times too quick for my lack of HTML knowledge. But Cuong worked with me got me up to speed and was very nice about it. We went through the procedures associated with creating a skin and necessary file structures. He also covered layouts, adding tokens and controls, editors to use to create skin files, and how it all fits together to create the final skin. We also touched on skin installation and configuration. Each section was followed by hands on exercises, which did require at least a working knowledge of HTML. Then we stepped through acsx files and also looked at the various CSS files and their order of precedence. We went on to cover containers and learned how they are very similar to skins in the creation process.

Overall, I definitely recommend Engage lead DNN training for those who want to take their DotNetNuke-based websites beyond the mere fundamentals. Since I am a DNN novice and have only delved into the basics so far, I found the sessions well worth my time. The classes helped me gain a better understanding of DotNetNuke and inspired me to learn more.

Jennifer Hilliard has been with working for Fluidraulics, Inc for over 20 years in a wide variety of roles. Her primary duties include IT management and various administrative functions for 2 offices. She started the company website 10+years ago with no experience in web development or design. The site has steadily grown ever since and Jennifer’s current goals include expansion into ecommerce and back-office integration. Jennifer is married and has 2 young teenagers who enjoy the “outdoorsy” lifestyle of rural northwestern Pennsylvania. Two loveable basset hounds round out the family.

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Posted by Tom on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 to Seablick News

I’m pleased to announce the addition of Heidi Waters to the Seablick Consulting family of DNN enthusiasts and bloggers.

Heidi earned an Industrial Engineering degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1994. She first applied these studies with the Boothroyd Dewhurst software company. After graduation, she moved into the automotive world as an Industrial Engineer at General Motor’s Detroit Tech Center and Spring Hill, Tennessee Saturn plant.

Along the way, Heidi shifted her focus to supporting the IT needs of design and manufacturing customers. Later, she moved completely into business development with EDS to support large scale IT sales and implementations in the government, manufacturing, and financial sectors.

During her 15 years in the IT world, Heidi became proficient in a dozen programming, web development, and database systems. As a relative newcomer to DNN, Heidi looks forward to contributing short DNN tutorials covering beginner level administration, CSS, and XHML as she masters this new platform.

Welcome!

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Posted by Mary on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN Module Review

For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a project that is data management and reporting in nature. Targeting a DNN-based solution, but not being familiar with all the various modules that are on the market today, I really wasn’t sure which direction to go; purchase a module or write one myself. As I searched, I stumbled upon the IndooGrid from IndooLab in a weekly Snowcovered email newsletter.

What is IndooGrid?

IndooGrid can be used in a wide variety of ways: everything from reporting to data management, photo galleries, forms, and questionnaires, just to name a few. Pulling from your database of choice, the module displays data and allows editing according to your specifications. Here are some of the main options:

• in-line editing
• data import and export
• properties on individual columns such as read-only, visible, format, and custom validations on edit fields
• join database tables for dropdown lists
• execute script on insert, update, and page load
• create tables or views from within the grid or use existing tables and views
• hyperlink ability from within the grid to another page or grid
• customizable sorting, paging, filtering, and record counts
• support of remote connection strings

The above list is far from complete as this module has too many features and options spell out here. A main advantage of IndooGrid is that no stored procedures need to be written as they are built right into the grid.

Installing IndooGrid

This module installs as most other DNN modules via Host > Module Definitions > Install New Module. What’s great about Indoogrid is that you can download a free trial version, which works locally without restrictions. I downloaded the trial, tested the module and participated in the IndooLab forum all before making a purchase decision. Once you are ready to use the module on a “live” site, you simply purchase via a mouse-click and receive a license key.

Documentation

A 157-page manual comes with the module and is also available as a separate pre-purchase download. The manual provides detailed directions for specific tasks. On a down-note, the IndooGrid documentation assumes at least some basic understanding and knowledge of relational databases, HTML and CSS. I come from a SQL/ASP.NET programming background and had no problems with tables, views, joins, and “pulling” the data out the way I wanted, but I had trouble with “little things” in regards to HTML or CSS-related changes. The more you know about these subjects, the easier IndooGrid will be to implement. To balance that statement, if you are setting up a module of this nature, then knowledge of relational databases and HTML and CSS is a certain prerequisite.

Support

Up until recently, support has been a dream and I’ve been receiving answers in the forum within 24 hours. During the past few weeks however, IndooGrid went through some major re-vamping and support has temporarily slowed. Even during this time though, IndooLab kept an open communication channel, which I appreciate very much. Primoz, one of the folks at IndooLab, strikes me as extremely professional in every way. I would also like to note that since my module purchase, I have requested a few additional features, which have all been accounted for in the 2.00.26 release.

Wrap Up

All in all, it’s been a very pleasant experience with IndooGrid and the folks at IndooLab. I highly recommend you take a look at the demos and download the fully functional trial version for further evaluation and testing.

Have you used IndooGrid or other "grid-style" modules? If so, please share in the comments below.

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Posted by Tom on Sunday, March 09, 2008 to DotNetNuke, SEO

SEOmoz mastermind Rand Fishkin recently voiced his opinion on "choosing the right CMS platform for your Website from an SEO perspective" and sparked a healthy discussion mostly driven by people familiar with PHP-based frameworks and content management systems.

The big question that comes to mind for us obviously is how DNN stacks up when it comes to features and capabilities in support of SEO. So let's look at the "12 basic SEO issues that frequently plague content management systems" according to Rand Fishkin.

1. Title Tag Customization & Rules
   DotNetNuke makes it straightforward and easy to specify title tags on a "page-specific level" as long as the page is a traditional DNN page, meaning it's listed under Admin > Pages. Beyond that, things get a little more dicey as the responsibility shifts to the module that's driving the page. Multi-page modules such as Ventrian's News Articles provide some control over page titles while others such as Active Module's Active Forum allow no control over title tags at all.


2. Static, Keyword-Rich URLs
   Even though DNN now features "human friendly" URLs, that's not nearly enough. Basic requirements such as hyphen separated words are still not met out of the box let alone custom URL creation. Luckily, the community has stepped up in the form of custom URL rewriting providers.


3. Meta Tag Customization
   Along the lines of the title tag, DNN won't make you sweat over meta description tags or robots tags for conventional DNN pages, but I've only come a across very few modules that allow you to control descriptions and other meta tags in their page hierarchies. Bottom line, choose your modules wisely or build your own.


4. Enabling Custom HTML Tags
   This is a no-brainer, as it's fairly safe to say that all DNN rich-text editors in use today allow manual editing of HTML simply by switching into "Source" view. You may even go a step further by customizing a variety of drop-down boxes found on editor toolbars.


5. Internal Anchor Text Flexibility
   You are safe with DNN on this one as well, as there are a plethora of ways to optimize internal linking. Everything from the rich-text editor just mentioned to the good old, very flexible Links module comes to mind (just stay away from link tracking and logging.)


6. Intelligent Categorization Structure
   While fairly limited out of the DNN box, "customizable navigation panels" as Rand calls them, are well covered by component vendors such as Telerik who've turned their navigational controls into DNN providers. DNN module developers such Snapsis Software and others have stepped up as well to offer flexible menu and navigation systems.


7. Pagination Controls
   DNN does not concern itself with pagination controls as all content is managed by modules. So again, take SEO into account when researching modules. For instance, while I consider News Articles templates to be the module's best feature, there is currently no easy way to nofollow the pagination links.


8. 301-Redirect Functionality
   You are on your own when it comes to redirects as there is currently nothing build into the DNN core to manage content redirection. I've come across modules that claim to handle proper redirection, but I have not tested any of them. Instead, I prefer the approaches described here. However you implement your redirects, make sure to test for the 301 http status code.


9. XML/RSS Pinging
   While most modules these days (including the "core modules") provide some form of content syndication, "accurate pinging" is not as widely supported. In fact, I've only seen it in commercial modules, but then again, I have not investigated much in the is area. Please educate me on this topic.


10. Image-Handling & Alt Tags
    Alt tags are handled well by the rich-text editor. If you use other, more elaborate modules or components to manage images or image galleries, make sure alt tags have been considered during module or component design.


11. CSS Exceptions
    Most DNN rich-text editors easily allow for "manual exceptions" to the styles defined in skin.css or any other style sheet. This is definitely a boon to educated users and content editors, but in my experience, most average users are not aware of "proper semantic markup" nor do they care.


12. Static Caching Options
    With the 4.0 release, DNN has been optimized for performance and we now have multi-level caching as well as compression to our disposal. However, "extraneous database connections" are still a concern, especially when using features such as the DNN Site Log, which in my eyes is much better handled by 3rd party analytics providers.

Considering that there is still no member on the DNN core team dedicated to SEO, I think the framework fares fairly well. I hope Cambrian will further address XHTML compliance as well as URL rewriting and content redirection. Everything beyond that is pretty much the responsibility of modules.

What do you think? Do you consider DNN a SEO-friendly CMS? Please share in the comments below.

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Posted by Jeff on Sunday, February 24, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN Module Review

This is part 2 of my Ultra Video Gallery review. If you missed part 1, you can catch up on it here. To recap, UVG is an extremely well written, intelligently crafted module suite for presenting video content within DotNetNuke. It offers nearly every online video feature seen on sites like YouTube and will help you quickly add an interactive, modern, social element to your DNN website with very little effort.

Ultra Video Gallery as a Business

If you haven’t included video content on your site, you are missing an element that has come to be expected by your visiting public. UVG offers an easy way for you to integrate a couple dozen or a couple thousand videos. The question that you’ll ultimately ask is “What videos should I include, and for what purpose?”

I’m sure many developers have had an initial “Hey, I can build my own YouTube now!” reaction to UVG. While that may be true, a site open to all categories of videos is almost sure to fail. YouTube is the 400 pound gorilla in the general video search game. You aren’t going to beat it head on. I think the real opportunity here is for DNN site owners to quickly and inexpensively craft a niche portal filled with multiple forms of multimedia devoted to a single, refined topic.

YouTube features a plethora of videos covering every topic imaginable. The problem is finding the best content on a specific subject. Yes, you can search and surf related videos. And yes, there are ratings that can help guide you. But, let’s get real … you will have to sift through a lot of garbage to uncover the diamonds.

If you wanted to try Catfish Noodling, you could certainly search YouTube and find some interesting videos. However, I contend that a website totally devoted to the art of grabbing fish with your bare hands offers a far more compelling visitor experience. You won’t get millions of hands typing in your website address, but you are likely to get thousands that will actually follow through and reach for a wallet. Now throw in a little quality control on the videos, editorial comments, additional text content, a community discussion forum, and targeted advertising. Then go find the next extremely tiny niche activity that captures your passion and repeat! The opportunities are endless.

The Legal Issues

Now that you’ve decide to craft the world’s foremost online community devoted to Pig Racing, it’s time to collect the best online video content in one place. Here’s where your ethics can get a little muddy.

You can easily search YouTube for a hundreds of videos in this niche. You’ll want to do some quality control and only pick the best of the best to feature on your site. With UVG, you don’t even have to upload these videos onto your own hosting account. You can simply enter the YouTube video URL and UVG will automatically play the video on your website just like the videos that you do own and host.

Wow … sounds great! I thought so too, at first. But when I dug a little deeper, I realized that UVG is pointing directly to the underlying Flash video file hosted on YouTube’s servers while completely bypassing the actual YouTube video player wrapper. That means none of YouTube’s advertising overlays will show up on these videos. Also, the all important YouTube “view count” won’t increase for videos played on your UVG site. If you choose to go this route, you are blatantly stealing bandwidth and ad revenue from YouTube. You are also doing quite a disservice to the folks who originally uploaded the videos.

Your niche site won’t require massive amounts of traffic to be successful, so I doubt YouTube would bother to take legal action. But, that doesn’t make it right. From a pragmatic point of view, it’s also just plain stupid. YouTube is more likely to find a way to encrypt direct access to its videos … thus, you’d be left with a worthless collection of nothing anyway.

The better approach is more time consuming, but in the end safer and more productive. Simply contact the video owners directly through YouTube’s “send message” feature. Explain the concept of your new site and ask if they would like to be featured. In most cases, not only will they be thrilled by the request, but they will likely begin to frequent your website, participate in forum discussions, and offer valuable articles and blog posts. Can you think of a better way to start a thriving, niche community?

Handling Video Hosting Costs

Once you have your videos and explicit permission, host them yourself. Wait, isn’t that going to cost a fortune? Isn’t that going to bring my web server to its knees?

Not if you use Amazon’s S3 file hosting service.

Amazon offers a pay-as-you-use hosting model built on the same scalable platform used to run its own mega-business. It is dirt cheap at pennies on the gigabyte and is already powering a wild new array of innovative online businesses, websites, and services. The good news? It’s simple to use and manage. Your grandmother could probably figure it out. The better news? I have it on good authority that a future release of Ultra Video Gallery will offer built in support for Amazon S3. Until then, you can manually point UVG to videos hosted on Amazon S3.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start your online niche community today!

How have you put Ultra Video Gallery to work? Please share your comments and/or questions below. And if you have enjoyed this review, consider subscribing to our RSS feeds or signing up to get blog updates by email.

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Posted by Mary on Friday, February 22, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN User Group

It's been a while since I've posted.

There are a lot of things happening in the New Year and with DotNetNuke. To kick off 2008, Tom and I started a DNN user group for the New Haven, CT area.

We look forward to getting together to discuss the platform, share knowledge, and collaborate on business opportunities. User groups offer members the chance to meet other local Web professionals and DotNetNuke enthusiasts, get questions answered, and have some fun along the way.

Don’t be shy though as these meetings are for everyone - from first-time computer users to experts from every profession, background, and age.

Want technology to do more for you? Join the club! We hope to see you at our first meeting (more details coming soon.)

Oh, and the best way to "stay in the loop" is to subscribe to our RSS feeds or get blog updates by email.

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