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 ...

I've installed a lot of DNN sites in the last couple of years, but this task just got even easier! http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/WebApplicationInstaller.aspx The Web Application Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce and more. With just a few si...

When creating a DNN module, you have the option to choose from the web site project (WSP), or a web application project (WAP). I prefer the web application project approach, and I'll explain it for developers who are new to module development, or unfamiliar with the WAP approach for developing modules. There are two major reasons why I feel WAP is generally better than WSP for DNN module development. 1. Conciseness - the project contains only your module's code, nothing more. Separating your m...

With the new skinning changes in DotNetNuke, it may be helpful to give an overview of available approaches to skin developers. Each of these approaches attempts to answer the question "How do I embed and customize all that great functionality that DNN provides in my skin?" In other words, given that we have a pre-set base of options for functionality (core skin objects), and each of those options exposes certain customization points (skin object properties) that I'd like to set…how the heck do ...

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. Many of them have good designs and I think it’s a good practice to get your skinning skills ready for DotNetNuke 5.0. Also, you’ll be exposed to many web designer experts layout approaches. I always enjoy seeing other people’s work through their codes to improve m...

If many of you are early adopters like me, you probably had your web sites upgraded to the latest version of DotNetNuke. In this version, there’s a minor change in the [SEARCH] token that hasn’t been documented anywhere. I thought I would share a new attribute just in case for non-developers can understand. When designing your DotNetNuke web skin using HTML approach, if you wish to use the dropdown list, make sure to use this: If you know a bit about ASCX skinning, you can embed this code wi...