DotNetNuke® has gained some great momentum over the past few years. But is it because I’ve been working with it for so long and being bias? Well, I don’t know but truth to be told, not many of my friends (who are also working in similar industry) or people that I’ve talked to know about it. Whether you’ve heard about it or not, Day of DotNetNuke® is a great opportunity to explore the project and meet some of the greatest minds in the community.

Day of DotNetNuke® is a one-day event that is organized by Will Strohl, creator of the Orlando DotNetNuke® User Group. He puts some great effort out to organize this event with the hope to help people learn more about the platform without spending a fortune. So far I have seen many of the respective community members hinted on coming and speaking at the event.

Designing with grid has been around for decades and applied through various traditional design mediums. But in recent years, the trend to use this technique on the web has become quite popular since many influential web designers took the initiative to introduce it to the world. Among those is Khoi Vinh, a Creative Director for The New Yorks Times Online, and Mark Boulton, a well-know author for publishing his series of his approach in grid design.

Many people have discussed the benefits of using grids so in this article, I won’t be talking much about why you should use it. There will be a different post to discuss the reasons to follow grid designs and when to use it.

One of the reasons we all (hopefully, all of us who design web sites) do cross-browser testing is to maintain the integrity of the design. This means that we make sure the site is running and displaying properly across browsers. However, some people may take it to an extreme level by pointing out the fact that their web sites do not look the same in all browsers.

Smashing magazine has published "15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools". Some of you might have already known or used them or a regular basis, the list shows a more complete picture if you haven't seen some items in there.

I've been using some of the plugins for a while and when Rich sent over the link today, I thought I put it out so some newbie in DotNetNuke can find it useful.

My favorite on the list:

• Firebug
• Web Developer Toolbar
• YSlow (I mentioned during my presentaion at OpenForce)
• IE Web Developer Toolbar (great for troubleshooting IE browsers)
• Web Accessibility Toolbar

Enjoy, if you know of any beyond this list and think others might find it useful, please do share.

As the day of OpenForce event getting close, you probably have heard many people talking about the event from e-mail, blogs, user group meetings and so on. I have decided to join this flow of information to offer some content about my sessions in detail of what they're all about.

As I mentioned in my blog a few weeks back, this year at OpenForce, I will present two sessions targeting both developers and designers with the following topics:

• DotNetNuke and Web Standards
• DotNetNuke Designers and Developers: Bridging the Gap

Are you ready for DotNetNuke 5.0 with XHTML/CSS compliant? I don’t know about you but I have been ready. Below is the list of many web sites that provide free XHTML/CSS templates that you can download and convert into DotNetNuke skin.