Have you ever been given a technical challenge that just seemed to interesting to pass up? This past weekend I was asked the question about extending the blog module to add an author biography to the footer of the blog post.  The gist of the question was how could we do this without causing problems on upgrade.  Since I always like a good challenge, I thought this would be a good opportunity to also show how a little creativity will allow you to solve many of the challenges that you face in DotNetNuke.

I have felt for a while that the DotNetNuke blog module was quite capable, but needed a few helper modules to give it a boost.  This is a perfect showcase on how to extend a module without actually changing the module or any of it’s data.  I also thought this would be a good opportunity to learn a few new techniques so I included the use of the new jQuery Templates which were added in jQuery 1.4.3, but which are also available as a separate download.

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Dotcom today launched a Snowcovered Adaptor for the Licence Master anti-piracy module. The adaptor allows a fully automated sales process for Snowcovered merchants.

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Earlier this Week a public version of the DotNetNuke 5.6 Beta was made available on CodePlex.  For information on how you can help with this release and to get access to the current version please visit our Beta Release page on DotNetNuke.com.  In this release we have spent quite a bit of time cleaning up some lingering issues from Content Localization, Telerik HtmlEditorProvider, user Profiles along with dozens of other miscellaneous issues.

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DotNetNuke is a web content management system and an application framework that has grown over the past 8 years to solve many of the challenges faced by developers when building websites and web applications.  Because of this rich feature set, it is possible that there may be areas of the platform which you have yet to explore.  In this ongoing series, I plan to use short video clips to highlight some of my favorite features of the platform.

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This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Over the last couple of years, I have been doing more and more work with JavaScript.  Whether it is work on web pages with jQuery or work in mobile applications with Appcelerator Titanium, I often find myself needing to transfer data to and from the server as JSON.  In DotNetNuke I frequently found myself constantly converting my .Net objects to and from JSON and it seemed to be a waste of time to constantly figure out what framework I should use to handle the JSON serialization/deserialization tasks. 

I have tried the JavaScriptSerializer,  the DataContractJsonSerializer  and even JSON.Net but I always keep coming back to the JavaScriptSerializer because it is the simplest solution that doesn’t impose any 3rd party dependencies.  The problem with all of these solutions is that I am constantly having to remember how to use them.  The API, even for the JavaScriptSerializer, still requires several lines of code whenever I want to use it.  I wanted something that was drop-dead simple, yet still powerful enough to handle 95% of my serialization/deserialization needs (for the really tough stuff I can still use one off code with an appropriate serializer)

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This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

One of the issues that every DotNetNuke skin designer faces is how to design skins for multiple browsers.  Often, getting a skin to work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require much tweaking.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Internet Explorer.  Making your skin work with IE6, 7 and 8 along with all the other browsers can be a bit of a nightmare.

I previously addressed this issue in DotNetNuke Tips and Tricks #3: Conditional StyleSheets.  In that post, I created a skin object that allows you to conditionally add a stylesheet to the skin based on a condition defined by the designer.  This skin object was subsequently added to the core framework and is currently being used by many designers.  In fact, Artisteer uses it in all the DotNetNuke skins that their software generates.

Recently, I found a method that I like better than using conditional stylesheets.  One of the downsides to conditional stylesheets is that you end up causing stylesheet bloat.  Conditional stylesheets add round trips to the server which we should be trying to minimize.  Conditional stylesheets also require you to maintain multiple stylesheets which can be a little painful.  If you make a change in your main stylesheet, you will need to find the corresponding section in your IE specific stylesheets and potentially make changes to them as well.  From a maintenance and development perspective, this is far from optimal.

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