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. The reason for testing is to make sure it doesn’t break. We make sure that visitors can get to see and use all the functionality...

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 ...

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 selecto...

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 aroun...

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...