Tips & Tricks

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

I often hear from clients or people I do training for asking about the best tools for DotNetNuke skinning. While the question is appropriate to beginners in DotNetNuke skinning, it should be clear for someone who has done skinning before. The answer is “There is none”. If you’re new to DotNetNuke skinning, learning about the appropriate tools for your development is important. But what’s more important is the process of getting the job done quickly and effectively. DotNetNuke skinning isn’t ha...