Tips & Tricks

As many of you may know, I work closely with the development team at Engage on various projects. One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen is that developers use <br /> (BR) to create padding between elements. Sometimes, I see big chuck of BR element being used across just to create a larger padding between their elements. This isn’t new to many developers; I often see it in many commercial modules we bought as well. If you find yourself doing this religiously and not know what it means ...

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 ...

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...

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. This is great if you are only providing those links to currently authenticated users. However, if you ...

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 presenta...

Last week I did some DotNetNuke skinning training courses for a few clients from out of town here in our St. Louis facility. It was interesting to see many scenarios that made you scratch your head and say… I don’t know it allows you to do that. One particular situation that my client has is that she has an external employee time tracking system that requires them to enter their billable time. Because they don’t use it that frequently, she likes to put it on the top navigation so everybody can ...