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Blogging on DNN 

Posted on Wed Feb 25, 2009 by Tom Kraak
In: DotNetNuke, SEO, DNN Module Reviews, DNN Tips & Tricks | 26 Comments

At least once a week I receive an email that reads something like this:

I have one quick question for you regarding your website. What DNN module are you using to run your blog?

Before getting into my actual blog implementation, I would like to reiterate what I said when this blog was born. I made the conscious decision to run my blog on DotNetNuke as I’m a firm believer in eating my own dog food. That does not mean that I don’t recognize the advantages of established blogging engines such as Wordpress, Subtext, and all the others, but I just can’t see myself practicing this and preaching that. So it was as much a business decision as it was a technical one, and overall, the choice of blogging on DNN has served me well over the last few years.

Seablick.com is currently built on DotNetNuke Community Edition, Ventrian News Articles, iFinity Url Master, and presented by a ThinkOfDesign.com custom skin.

The heart of the site is the blog, which is entirely driven by the News Articles (NA) module suite. Don’t be fooled by the “News Articles” name though as the module is full fledged publishing solution for the DNN platform and is designed to handle much more than news items. Features include simple workflow capabilities, categorization and sub-categorization, as well as social features such as commenting, rating, and content syndication. What first attracted me to the module and what remains the “killer” feature for me to this day, however, is the generous use of HTML layout templates. I think it’s fair to say that Scott McCulloch pioneered the idea of module templating, which is now quite common among 3rd party as well as core DNN modules. The combination of layout templates and a rich set of tokens provide great flexibility not only to form, but also to function without having to mess with the actual module source code. Furthermore, Scott subscribes to the philosophy of “release very often” and the majority of bug fixes and enhancements are completely customer driven. Mitchel Seller’s popular blog runs on News Articles as well and I know of other sites where most content lives in NA with very little use of DNN’s text/html module.

SEO-wise News Articles stacks up pretty well too except for unnecessarily long Urls. That’s where Url Master comes in, which by default strips DNN Urls of of /tabid/xxx/, but leaves articleType/ArticleView/articleId/xxx/ untouched. However, Url Master’s rewrite engine is fully aware of regular expression and therefore any Url can be manipulated/rewritten/redirected via a file called FriendlyUrlParams.config located in the website root. If you are familiar with mod_rewrite on Apache or ISAPI_rewrite on IIS, you’ll feel right at home. And that’s precisely how I achieved much cleaner blog Urls in the form of /blog/141/blogging-on-dnn.aspx. I hope to convince Bruce Chapman of iFinity Software to write another guest post very soon to shed more light on advanced rewriting with Url Master.

I introduced this post by stressing my commitment to dogfooding, which in turn begs the question why I’m betting my money on Ventrian News Articles instead of the DNN Blog module project. And every so often my good friend and Blog module lead Antonio Chagoury hits me over the head trying to get me to switch. However, even Antonio will admit that back in the beginning of 2007 as I actively started blogging, the Blog project wasn’t nearly as mature a module as it is today. So while I’m deeply vested in NA on my own site, I’ve definitely been considering the Blog module for client projects ever since the 3.05 release.

What’s your take on blogging on DotNetNuke? Do you care about the underlying technology of your favorite blogs or is the actual content all that really matters?




Comments

Bruce Chapman Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 1:52 AM Bruce Chapman says:

Well I'm sticking with the Blog module, but I do agree it needs further features. And after such a public request, how can I possibly refuse another post? The tough part will be working out how to explain the concepts in a way that doesn't have people searching for the 'back' button after the first paragraph.

If regular readers want to know more about the custom rewriting, then post your areas of interest and questions and I'll try to answer them. I'm sure nobody want's me to write about regex.

Tom Kraak Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 8:22 AM Tom Kraak says:

Thanks Bruce. And yes, will be tough to talk about custom rewriting without delving too deep into regex.

So folks, you heard the man, post your questions for some free consulting time from one of the brightest in the business!

Antonio Chagoury Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 9:14 AM Antonio Chagoury says:

Hey Tom,

I would really be thrilled to see you move to the DNN Blog.

I agree, when I took the project over back in 2006, it was seriously lagging behind the other blogging platforms. At first I was the only person in the development team, and it was not until 3.5.0 that we added some serious man power to really get the project making progress and faster than I alone could handle.

We have a lot of work to do, but 3.5.1 represents great improvements that make a compelling case for anyone using anything other than this module for blogging to make the switch.

So join us, and be cool! ;-)

Scott Allender Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 9:51 AM Scott Allender says:

Great post Tom! My company is investigating the best way to run a corporate blog, and I knowing how I can clean up URLs on Ventrian's News Article module will be a tremendous help. Thanks for the information!

Tom Kraak Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 11:02 AM Tom Kraak says:

@ Antonio - your team has done a great job lately, that's for sure. And layout templates are on the roadmap, right?

@ Scott - I'm glad it was helpful. Keep us posted on your corporate blog.

Mitchel Sellers Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 11:12 AM Mitchel Sellers says:

Tom,

I have to say that I agee, I'm still with News Articles, mainly for the way the categories and multiple users per blog functionality.

I was in the same boat as you, I actually started on the core blog module, but back in 2006 when I started, it was just not good enough thus my migration to NA.

I get questions about this at least 3-4 times a week, and even more often in the past month or so. it will be great to have a nice article to point people to!

Charles Self Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 6:20 PM Charles Self says:

Tom,

Thanks for answering my email yesterday with this Blog! It sounds like you and Mitchel Sellers get this question often, so at least I wasn't alone in my thinking.

As I begin to rollout DNN on some projects, I'm definitely finding that I need some good third-party modules to compliment the core.

The categories functionality in News Articles is really appealing and I'm leaning that route on a few blogs for clients and my organization.

At this point I’m using the UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite, but plan to go with the iFinity Url Master in the near future. Has anyone seen any issue with the UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite when implementing either the DNN Blog Module or News Articles?

Thanks for blog post and all the responses.

Rob Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 7:20 PM Rob says:

There's really only one absolutely vital distinction between the two modules when used as a blog. The core blog places the author at the top of the content hairarchy, whilst News Articles places the categories at the top.

Bill Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 9:07 PM Bill says:

Would anyone have an ETA for when the core module will allow the categories to be placed at the top of the hierarchy?

Antonio Chagoury Friday, February 27, 2009 at 8:44 AM Antonio Chagoury says:

Hi Guys... good discussion here...

Categories and Tagging are at the top of the priority at the moment and they will be included in the next "dot" release.

Historically, the child blogs were treated as categories, but I agree, it is hardly an adequate format.

Also, you should all take a look at blog 3.5.1 as the URL is now being generated in a friendly manner using the blog title. Take a look at my blog www.cto20.com for an example of the blog's friendly URLs.

One thing that the Blog has natively out-of-the-box that News Articles does not support is the MetaWebLog API. Since 3.5.1 blogging has never been so easy. (BTW, there are products you can purchase to make News Articles MetaWebLog ready, such as MetaPost)

Cheers!

Antony Friday, February 27, 2009 at 9:10 AM Antony says:

If you have ISAPI reWrite on the server would that be better than implementing a dnn based version. e.g. would it be quicker?
From what you say both appear similar in functionality.
Antony

Bruce Chapman Friday, February 27, 2009 at 9:22 AM Bruce Chapman says:

@antony

I can answer that one for you : no. The advantage a DNN based rewriting solution brings is that it can do not only the rewriting but also generate the correct urls in the first place, without having to change the module code. You could use an asp.net rewriter, but you'd have to change the module code to generate the short urls. Using a DNN based Friendly Url Provider / Url Rewriter combination fixes the urls on the way 'out' (generating the pages) as well as on the way 'in' (rewriting the urls)

Chris Hammond Friday, February 27, 2009 at 10:29 AM Chris Hammond says:

While I agree that both the News Articles module and the Blog module provide good solutions, I find that Engage: Publish provides me all the tools necessary for blogging, and excellent SEO results.

I wrote a hefty post on the conversion I made from CommunityServer back in January 2008, http://www.chrishammond.com/Blog/itemId/1045/Conversion-Process-from-CommunityServer-to-DotNetN.aspx

My main goal in switching was the retain all of the old URLs for community server, I believe I was able to handle the redirects for 99% of them with an ISAPI filter that was implemented. Lately though I've been running Ifinity's URL Master, I can't say enough about Ifinity.

Publish has built in MetaWeblog API support, allowing for the uploading of articles and media from Word 2007 and Windows Live Writer, making things extremely easy to post.

Antony Friday, March 13, 2009 at 12:26 PM Antony says:

Tom have you used any of the modules that make News articles MetaWebLog ready?
Any comments on functionality and how they work?

busse Wednesday, March 18, 2009 at 8:06 AM busse says:

I use NA on my site after asking the "what blog module are you using?" question to Jason Massie at http://www.statisticsio.com/

The ease of the HTML Templating in NA is a key feature for me. Also the way you can put the module on a page and filter out which articles appear on that page is pretty powerful, allowing you to customize what content appears across a site from a single posting screen.

However, the Core Blog module does seem to work well in instances where you have multiple blog authors that each want their own blog on a site, but also have the blogs presented together. Before I discovered NA, I implemented the Core Blog in this manner for a client and it worked quite well.

Tom Kraak Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 11:51 PM Tom Kraak says:

@ Antony - I'm aware of modules such as digMeta, but I have not used them myself yet.

@ busse - Good points. The NA category filtering has become quite powerful.

Judy Vedder Friday, March 20, 2009 at 11:53 AM Judy Vedder says:

Tom:
As always a very helpful BLOG post. It was very timely for me too as I begin to setup a BLOG for one of my customers.

Antonio - I was wondering when the next dot release of the DNN BLOG module is due to be released?

Keep up the good work Tom and Antonio!

Tom - I am a big fan of this BLOG!
Judy

Tom Kraak Friday, March 20, 2009 at 1:26 PM Tom Kraak says:

Thanks for the kind words Judy, much appreciated. If you would like us to cover certain topics on the blog, do let us know.

omri Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 10:58 AM omri says:

Hi,

Did anybody have problems with Enterprise Form module after installing the URL Master?
If so, how can you solve the problem?
Alternately – how can I exclude from the module influence all pages under a specific menu tab?

Thanks

Tom Kraak Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 11:31 AM Tom Kraak says:

pokies Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 9:01 PM pokies says:

I find that the DNN blog module is okay but doesn't seem to be as SEO friendly as other blogs software. Google still indexes it fine and it does the job. I'll look more into the News Article module you use. Thanks for sharing this.

Judy Vedder Monday, September 14, 2009 at 8:25 AM Judy Vedder says:

Where can I get information related to the update plans - if any - for the BLOG module?

Antonio Chagoury Monday, September 14, 2009 at 9:38 AM Antonio Chagoury says:

Judy, I blogged about the roadmap just the other day, here, http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2347/DotNetNuke-Blog-Module-Roadmap.aspx and on my blog here: http://www.cto20.com

xSean Monday, September 28, 2009 at 3:40 PM xSean says:

any other free 3rd party blog module just like Ventrian News Articles?

Tom Kraak Monday, September 28, 2009 at 3:46 PM Tom Kraak says:

Free module similar to Ventrian News Articles? Not that I know of.

Jeff Waters Thursday, December 24, 2009 at 10:06 AM Jeff Waters says:

I've been quite happy with Ventrian NA. I also own a Wordpress based blog and still feel that's an easier way to go for a simple, personal blog. I've just converted to www.disqus.com for handling comments-- and am totally impressed. Would love to see an option to do the same within DNN, Ventrian NA, etc.

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