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 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 Jeff on Saturday, February 16, 2008 to DotNetNuke, DNN Module Review
This is my first ever DNN module review. In fact, I’ve probably reviewed less than 5 products of any kind in my life. So before we get started, I just want to point out that I’m not a “review-y” kind of guy. A thing has to be pretty special before I’ll take the time to spout off about it.
Today, that thing is Ultra Video Gallery from Biz Modules Solutions. It is, in my mind, the best DNN multimedia module ever written and perhaps the best DNN module ever written ... period.
I felt compelled to write about UVG because it directly relates to my 3 previous blog posts. To gain a true appreciation for my attitudes and point of view, you may want to take a few minutes to catch up on them:
- In DNN Nation Needs to Wash its Walls, I spanked the DNN community for accepting atrocious standards of style and usability.
- In Become a DNN Video Star, I ranted at the DNN community for failing to use enough video in website design.
- In Are DNN Modules Underpriced?, I suggested that a pervasive "cheapness" in the DNN ecosystem is choking the growth of module developers and limiting DNN’s acceptance in the enterprise market.
Ultra Video Gallery is one of the few modules to rise above my tendency for sharp criticism. It is elegant in design, style, and functionality. UVG provides a much needed, native video solution for DotNetNuke. Finally, it brings all that to the table while being (in my eyes) grossly underpriced at $85.
So, what does it do? UVG essentially turns your DNN website into a mini-YouTube with an astonishingly deep feature-set built on a whopping 13 sub-modules! Rather than detail each and every feature, I suggest you take a moment to scroll through the feature highlights.
Module Installation
You DNN experts out there are going to laugh, but this is the first module I've ever attempted to install. I had to call my friends at Seablick Consulting for a little lesson on where and how that's even done! It is remarkably simple. Just look under Host > Module Definitions > Install New Module, upload a single .zip file, and all 13 submodules are immediately available for use. I even managed to upgrade UVG to a new build with the exact same process. No need to un-install and re-install. Simple.
Setup & Documentation
I was a little overwhelmed with the 13 submodules at first, but the superb UVG documentation made configuration and setup quite easy. The author provides step by step instructions and even offers suggested page layouts. This is some of the best software documentation I've ever seen.
Support
Biz Modules maintains an active community forum for technical support. As far as I can tell, Pengtsen personally answers every question (even the dumb ones from people like yours truly) within 24 hours. Pengtsen also seems to constantly take user feedback and add the best ideas into new product builds on the fly. I also traded several direct emails with support and always got a response within 24 hours ... and usually within 30 minutes!
Ultra Video Gallery in the Wild
To see this collection of tools in action, have a look at the video gallery in my soon-to-be-publicly-announced kettlebell fitness website. Amazingly, what you see here is pretty much how it looked right of the box. What little customization we performed was handled easily by the extensive array of tokens and HTML layout options in the modules’ settings.
UVG’s backend is simple, powerful, and well thought out. UVG offers most of the major YouTube features as well as the standard look and feel of any major video sharing site. Rather than re-invent the wheel, Biz Modules focused on making UVG easily understandable to all site visitors. Thoughtfully, users can rate and review videos, as well as upload their own for a true Web 2.0 experience.
I personally believe we’ve passed the peak of success for companies like YouTube, Veoh, and Revver. The novelty of easy access to videos of singing dogs and creepy Britney Spears apologists is fading. The popularity pendulum will certainly swing back to websites devoted to quality, niche content. People will want to spend time on a website full of articles, multimedia, and forum discussions rabidly devoted to a single topic. YouTube is simply becoming too wide, goofy, and tedious.
Ultra Video Gallery offers exciting potential to any entrepreneur with an intense niche passion. It could easily be the basis for an entire online business devoted to that niche. In part 2 of my review next week, I will propose some examples and ideas to spark your imagination. I'll also discuss some legal challenges you'll want to confront if you choose to implement Ultra Video Gallery.
Until then, just download the trail version and start exploring on your own!
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Posted by Tom on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 to DotNetNuke, SEO, DNN Module Review
Thanks to John Mitchell of Snapsis Sofware, you are reading my first ReviewMe review. And to play by the rules, I hereby disclose that this is a paid blog post and I made a whopping $15.
The timing of John’s request to review PageBlaster for DotNetNuke could not be better, as I’ve come across the module numerous times in my DNN SEO efforts, but I’ve never taken the time for a closer look. We’ve also considered the module internally here at Seablick Consulting to achieve valid XHTML of DNN based websites.
What is PageBlaster for DotNetNuke?
At its core, PageBlaster acts as a performance booster of dynamic asp.net-based websites by compressing, caching, and saving static “copies” of dynamically created web pages to memory and/or disk. Once a page has been saved, it will be served from disk on subsequent page requests as opposed to being assembled “on the fly” over and over again. This decreases page load times and improves the overall performance of a given website or web application.
But there is more. Implemented as an HTTP Module, PageBlaster for DNN touts itself as a “Content Delivery Engine,” which “makes it possible to get complete control over all of the output of all your website’s dynamically generated pages (quoted from the module’s manual.) The module features a powerful replacement engine and is capable of pulling content from the file system and another website. It also has the ability to transform XML feeds.
Module Installation and Configuration
I found the installation instruction rather confusing (especially for the beginning DNNer) and out of order for what is a fairly straightforward process.
Installation step number two asks to “copy the Snapsis.PageBlaster.config file (located in DesktopModules\Snapsis\PageBlaster\Config) to the root of your site and change the settings if needed.” Well, at this point I don’t even have a Snapsis folder in my DesktopModules directory since I have not uploaded the private assembly (PA) via DNN Module Definitions | Install New Module yet, which according to the installation instruction is step number three. So either switch step number two and three or upload the Snapsis.PageBlaster.config that comes “outside” the PA to your website root.
As mentioned above, we are dealing with an HTTP Module here and it therefore requires an entry into web.config’s <httpModules> section. Also make sure to remove or comment out DNN’s native compression HTTP Module in the same section.
Once the module is installed correctly, it goes to work right away according to the default settings for caching and compression specified in Snapsis.PageBlaster.config. Up until this point I’ve only tested the module on a fresh install of DNN with a few test tabs, but I did notice faster loading pages almost immediately.
For finer control and to take advantage of additional features such as virtual paths (friendly URLs) you’ll have to drop the module on every page of your website that you would like to configure. The Ajax-like configuration interface is clean and intuitively laid out. It is divided into “Page Setup” and “Replacements.” The page-specific settings are fairly self-explanatory. Where the module really shines is the build-in replacement engine, which works similar to the “find and replace” function that you may be used to from application such as Microsoft Word or Excel. Replacement rules that you create are broken down and saved into “Page Rules” and “Saved Rules” and make heavy use of regular expressions. No need to feel intimidated though, as the “Saved Rules” folder comes stuffed with the most commonly used rules for a variety of goals such as making a page XHTML compliant. The ability to combine replacement rules is where the real power comes from tough and essentially creates a “scrubbing filter,” which ultimately “cleans” your pages from non-compliant markup.
For details on everything I’ve touched on above and numerous other features I did not mention, I recommend the PageBlaster reference manual and the Snapsis support forum. As a former core team member, John Mitchell is a recognized figure in the DNN community and one of the most active participants on the DotNetNuke forums.
So far I’ve only scratched the surface of what the module is capable of and I’m looking forward to implement it here on seablick.com. Please share your experience with Snapsis Software and PageBlaster for DotNetNuke in the comments below.
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Posted by Tom on Thursday, March 08, 2007 to DotNetNuke, DNN Module Review, DNN Tips and Tricks
I received an email the other day that reads like this:
“I need to create a request for information form. Of course when I use the text/html module there's a problem since the page is already in a form. How do you add forms? Is there a core module for it or do I need a 3rd party module? If so, can you recommend one?”
We here at Seablick Consulting use two main approaches when it comes to forms and DNN.
As usual, Vasilis likes to get his hands really dirty by coding forms by hand. Then he adds a sprinkle or two of CSS and in-line asp.net code and sticks it all into an IFrame. This way he has full control over the code, which is just the way he likes it. This is also the preferred way to go for incorporating 3rd party forms such as the Email Updates form seen on our home page.
I on the other hand prefer to use a module named XMod. It’s a very flexible application that provides much more than forms though, but I have only scratched the surface yet by developing feedback-style forms ranging from simple contact forms to lead generators to more elaborate credit applications. I love XMod’s flexibility when it comes to form layout and the gained productivity by reusing forms in a certain industry niche or across clients.
Oh, and let’s not forget DotNetNuke’s traditional Feedback module, which is now a DNN Project. Buts since I have not used it since the DNN 2 days I can’t comment on it at all.
And one other note, XMod is certainly not the only forms module available, but again, I’ve stuck to what works for me so I’m relying on your input on anything else but XMod. Let’s share in the comments.
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Posted by Tom on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 to DotNetNuke, SEO, DNN Module Review, DNN Tips and Tricks
Since the early days of DNN, the forums have been littered with questions on how to secure (https://) a DotNetNuke website. Until this day this feature does not come “out of the box,” meaning you’ll have to reach out to 3rd party implementations in the form of modules or write your own add-on.
In this post I’m attempting to give a brief overview of what it takes to provide secure communication between a web browser and a web server hosting a DNN-based website. I do this by sharing my experience in utilizing the two most widely know SSL modules on the market today: SSL_Module by Thomas Thorp and SSL Redirect by Sanibel Logic LLC. Since both modules include comprehensive documentation, I’m not going into detail on how to install or configure either one of them, but rather focus on unique characteristics each solution brings to the table.
My quest securing DotNetNuke started back in the DNN 2 days. Besides running an ecommerce site, I have maintained a car dealership website over the course of DNN 2, 3 and now 4. This site is a perfect example for the need of securing individual pages of a website as opposed to the entire site. For example, this page contains a credit application which screams for security due to the nature of the information being collected. Other common scenarios include securing the login as well as registration page.
When I first put the credit application live, the site was running DNN 2 and SSL_Module, which was the only module available at that time as far as I remember. The module installation was painless and after setting a few options, selective pages of my website were able to securely exchange information with the web server. Back then life was good.
Just recently however, I rebuild the dealership site on DNN 4 and ran into a road block with the SSL_Module. Technically the module still performs as advertised, but on secured pages you will end up with “unfriendly” URLs in the old style https://www.mysite.com/default.aspx?tabid=xx format. You may say “What’s the big deal?” and I agree, it’s better than an unsecured page. But as a web marketer I strongly focus on SEO and human friendly URLs.
A second issue I noticed is that the first page you request after navigation away from the secure page will also be served by an unfriendly URL in the above tabid=xx format, which will ultimately create duplicate content in the eyes of Google and company. I took my dilemma to Thomas Thorp via the Snowcovered Help Desk, but have yet to hear from him.
My search for a solution led me back to Snowcovered to take a closer look at SSL Redirect by Sanibel Logic LLC. This module runs completely off web.config and an additional XML configuration file called SSLRedirect.config. I personally prefer this approach as opposed to storing settings in the database. So besides adding a few lines to web.config and placing a .dll into your bin directory there is nothing to install. To specify pages to be secure you add the URL to the "UrlsIn" section of SSLRedirect.config. This is exactly the flexibility I was looking for and it eventually solved the issue of unfriendly URLs I encountered with the SSL_Module.
To wrap things up, both modules will get the job done. And after Mr. Thorp takes care of those “unlawful” URLs, it will be a matter of whether you prefer “click and save” setup and configuration over diving head first into XML files.
One last point I would like to make is that most problems that you may encounter while setting up SSL on your site are not caused by DNN or the modules mentioned in this post. Make sure you purchase a reputable certificate and install it properly on your IIS server (or have your hosting company take care of it.) Start installing either one of the above solutions only after you are able to successfully browse your site using https://www.mysite.com.
What have you learned while putting a lock on DotNetNuke? Let me know in the comments.
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