Although this is still in the works, DotNetNuke 5.2 beta has a minor improvement in panes preview functionality.

When the core team decided to remove the borders around panes when a user logged in with edit right, the replacement for visual cue is a simple animation shows a pane preview with borders surrounding it. However, the animation was implemented in a way that it goes too fast and users can hardly notices.

Dang and I are doing a presentation next week at Open Force entitled “UX in DotNetNuke: Designing Your Applications the Right Way.” One of the challenges we face as presenters is making sure we attract the right people and set their expectations appropriately as to what the actual content of the presentation will be. While our title and description are accurate, it may be helpful to go into more detail.

“Why DotNetNuke?” is a question that comes up a lot from people with all different backgrounds; from project managers, developers and designers, to CTOs and CEOs. dnnGallery was launched to feature high quality DotNetNuke sites from the community, with the hope that all of these people asking "Why DotNetNuke?" would be helped by actually seeing some of the great things you can do with the framework.

I’ve been a big fan of using grid in most of my work in recent years. One of the main things I enjoy doing it is because of the symmetrical of the design and the aspect of re-using many of the CSS selectors within the same project. It’s exciting to write less markup and CSS to do more with design and implementation. And as many have heard “less is more”; by using CSS framework, it allows you to do just that.

I consider DotNetNuke community (at least the web designer community within DotNetNuke) is sort of a laggard group in adopting web standards until recently. Many people have talked and written books about the benefits of using web standards as well as how to do it properly, but I’ve seen a slow progress within DNN community.

For those of you who are using DNNMenu (or DNNNav) from the core DotNetNuke framework, you might notice there is a huge change in DotNetNuke 5.x with the inclusion of DNNMenu version 2. The change for this webcontrol had not been well documented in details so people might find a hard time to get up to speed with what’s new when using it.

As you may know, many experts in the DNN forum have been talking about eliminating SolPartMenu and start using DNNMenu for years when developing skins, but the details about controlling the design of this challenging webcontrol isn’t easy to find or even unavailable out their on the web.

Some claims DotNetNuke is notorious when it comes to performance. I beg to differ. Consider the advantage that you’ll get from using an enterprise-level platform for every web project can possibly build, a little bit of performance sacrifice is worth the tradeoff in my opinion.

But that’s not the point. You can build DotNetNuke sites that have kick-ass performance if you do it the right way. There are many respected developers in the community have spoken about this specific topic, but rarely touched on the front-end aspect. In this post, I’d like to share a few best practices that help to get the most out of your DotNetNuke site's performance by just improving front-end development approaches.