Many web visitors know what a link does on a web page. For web developers and designers, links can perform certain actions in different context; however, it still is going to look like a link to end-users. Pre-defining the CSS selectors (doing the designer's job) on certain links in DotNetNuke framework or any CMS for that matter is not necessary. Sometimes it can cause some additional work for others.

In DotNetNuke, there are CSS selectors called SkinObject and CommandButton. These two selectors are essential parts of DotNetNuke links to define the look and feel. It is kinda self-expalined that if you want to style the links for any skin objects, you'd find the SkinObject selector and override it in your skin.css file. The same technique goes with CommandButton, but you need to identify which link in the framework that uses SkinObject and which one that uses CommandButton.

Rating is something that I have never seen anybody in DotNetNuke community has done it right. It might sounds pretty extreme, but if you have seen something that provide values as what I am going to discuss in this blog, please feel free to direct me there.

I sometimes run into modules (whether if it is free or commercial) that provide rating ability on articles or products in a way that is… somewhat useless to visitors. Things like five-star-rating is one of most common mistake I’ve seen around. Unless you show the amount of people rated on the article and give them an average rating, it does not mean much if you just show visitors that this article has been rated 4 out of 5. This isn’t rocket science that you have to be a UX expert to figure out how to provide values; I believe this is just common sense to most people.

Often I see people asking about how to design a web site and implement it using DotNetNuke framework while maintaining the integrity of the design. The answer I have is to start with a cleaner CSS file. As we know the team at DotNetNuke has their reasons for keeping the default.css file intact, it does not mean that it prevents you from making changes to the file yourself.

I always start with a project using my very own version of this file. Since the last release of version 4.x, I cleaned up the file and use it across many sites for both client and personal work. If you’d to see how it looks, feel free to download it here (please login if you're already a registered user, if not, go ahead and create an account) and throw it in your testing environment to replace the current one that you have. You’ll be in complete control of your design, I promise.

In Improving the Secured File Download UX for Unauthenticated Users I elaborated on a workaround hack to display a friendly error message and redirect to the login page when trying to access a file that had been through DotNetNuke's file ticket system.

If you're in a situation where that solution makes sense for you - great. But what about future releases of the application? Should this functionality exist within the framework itself? Is it too trivial? Does it make sense for everyone that uses the framework so much so that it should be a part of it?

DotNetNuke has extensive security features. One of which is enforcing role based permissions when accessing files. The general workflow is to say that "Registered Users" get to see a particular file, you then create a link to that file using DNN, and as a matter of course, the roles are enforced. This uses what's known as a file ticket to request the file, so that it is not linked to directly.

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.