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Broken Forum Notifications Undermines Confidence |
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Miscellanea
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By mamlin on
10/20/2009 10:59 PM
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After two years part of the DNN forums' "notification" feature is still not working despite DNN Corp's efforts to monetize DNN by offering "PRO" paid support. Note to DNN Corp: Paid support isn't an attractive option when the Corp's own website continues to exhibit already-fixed bugs...
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Free online EPS viewer |
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Miscellanea
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By mamlin on
7/27/2009 2:02 AM
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I recently needed to do a quick visual verification of a client's .EPS file but was away from my system with the needed software. Google and I quickly located a suitable online solution but it was not as good as the _second_ solution I tried...
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Prevent account sharing using the REPORTS module |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
6/3/2009 3:59 AM
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DotNetNuke currently has no provision for preventing a user from sharing an account with other users. This is a real problem for paid-subscription sites. There is, however, a simple trick you can do using the REPORTS module that will help to prevent simultaneous logins on the same account by different users...
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Tip: Force DISPLAYNAME to a predetermined pattern |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
4/13/2009 5:17 AM
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For sites where users' DISPLAYNAMEs are made public (via forum postings, etc) it is desirable to allow users to pick their own DISPLAYNAME values. If you have a site where DISPLAYNAMEs are NOT public, however, you may save yourself some headache by forcing DISPLAYNAME to a predetermined pattern (plus you'll simplify your site signup process to boot...)
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DNN Hosting Tips: DotNetNuke on Network Solutions |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
3/20/2009 12:46 PM
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This is the first of what I hope will become a series of tips focused on DNN hosting providers. I'm not advocating any particular provider (there are plenty of good ones). I'm simply sharing operational tips regarding various providers I've dealt with when setting up DNN sites for clients. Hopefully these tips will save others some time and a few headaches when setting up their own DNN sites in shared hosting environments...
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Comparison utility for files and directories: WinMerge |
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Reviews
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By mamlin on
3/15/2009 4:54 PM
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WinMerge is a great open-source utility that's quite a step up if you're still using WinDiff. WinMerge features easier to read results, inline editing, better desktop integration, regex support and is extendable via plugins. Oh, and did I mention highlighting of per-character differences within a line?...
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Add "Save as PDF" feature to your Blog for free |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
3/4/2009 1:47 AM
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Easily let users save your blog entries (or any web page) as PDF files for free with Web2PDF. Although this service has been available for nearly two years, I've rarely run across any blogs that make use of it or anything like it. The service does not place ads on your site or in the rendered PDFs and it works even with DotNetNuke's dynamically-generated pages. To top it off, adding the feature to your DNN site is simplicity itself...
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DotNetNuke USER ROLES and ROLEGROUPS |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
2/3/2009 5:00 PM
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Some thoughts and tips on USER ROLES and ROLEGROUPS in DotNetNuke. ROLES provide the fundamental means of determining who gets to see what content. ROLEGROUPS help organize ROLES by defining collections of ROLES but...ROLEGROUPS are not as helpful as you might expect...
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Tip: Stop DNN page from scrolling on page load |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
1/30/2009 8:54 AM
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Here's a scenario that can drive your users crazy: A certain page on your site always seems to open in the middle instead of at the top, making users scroll up to see the start of the page. This has happened to me more than once (thanks to the LOGIN module), but I have a simple solution...
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DotNetNuke SiteMap Submittal, Warnings and Priority Rules |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
1/12/2009 7:31 AM
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These SiteMap-related tips include another way around the Google page-priority warning, places to submit your sitemap and thoughts on creating page-priority-value "rules". This post fills the void between the "Improve Page Prioirty Feature of DNN's Google SiteMap" and our upcoming release (free!) of an enhanced sitemap that enables per-page sitemap priority settings...
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DebugBar for Internet Explorer |
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Reviews
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By mamlin on
12/9/2008 8:16 AM
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FireFox users have a wealth of free browser addons that really help make the browser a strong development and debugging tool. Unfortunately those nifty FireFox addons aren't always helpful when a page renders incorrectly in IE. What to do? Well, use an IE addon, of course! A worthy (and free) addon for IE is the DebugBar from Core Services...
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DNN 5 - List of Changes and Additions from DNN 4.x to DNN 5 |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
12/5/2008 2:23 AM
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I've seen quite a few people around the 'net asking for a list of major changes from DNN 4.x to DNN 5. I have always found it a little frustrating that there never seems to be such a list (outside of brief Gemini Change Logs) when new versions of the DNN framework or even new module versions are released. We often get bits and pieces via blogs and forums but rarely a solid list of features as you'd normally find for a commercial product release. To this end, I decided to make and share my own list of notable DNN 5 features...
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Give ADMIN tabs access to Non-Admin DotNetNuke Users (Pages, File Manager, etc) |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
11/21/2008 1:42 PM
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The DotNetNuke framework is great in many ways but its website administration rights are not very granular. In many cases you either need to have full admin rights or you simply won't be allowed to perform a critical function (like create new web pages). Well, there is a trick you can do to extend certain ADMIN rights to selected users without actually making them administrators. Best of all, you can do it from within the DNN UI...
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Add Google AJAX Search to your DNN skin: Prevent ENTER key from clearing search results |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
10/29/2008 9:12 PM
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The "Add Google AJAX Search" series continues! If you've implemented the AJAX search you probably have noticed that pressing the ENTER key will actually clear the results. Huh? Sure, Google AJAX doesn't need a button or ENTER keypress to perform a search, but clearing the results upon ENTER is downright confusing since people tend to hit ENTER automatically after typing in a search term. We're going to extend our basic Google AJAX example and stop that ENTER key from clearing the search results...
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Format and Sort your DNN Events RSS feed results with the DNN NewsFeed module |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
9/4/2008 11:45 AM
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(Updated 1-29-2009) If you like to stick to using the core DotNetNuke modules as much as possible (hey, they're free!) and you use or have thought about using the DNN NewsFeed module, you'll likely appreciate this post. Specifically, we're going to look at using the NewsFeed module to list calendar entries from the DNN Events module. By default, the results of mating these two modules is not impressive, so we're going to tweak and improve upon the original using nothing but Notepad and without changing any core DNN code...
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Add Google AJAX Search to your DNN skin (Part 2 of 3) |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
7/27/2008 6:33 PM
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Follow-up to Part 1 of "Adding Google Custom Search to Your DotNetNuke Skin" series. Here in Part 2 we'll examine a few of the many options for customizing Google searches as well as ways to influence the ranking of results. And just as in Part 1, all of this functionality is delivered for -free- from the Google Search AJAX library...
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Improve page priority feature of DNN's Google SiteMap |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
7/2/2008 10:07 PM
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DotNetNuke provides a Google-ready XML sitemap to help you get your pages indexed and ranked in Google search results. Unfortunately, the current implementation sets every page's "priority" ranking to the same fixed value. Because of this, no page ever gets priority over any other. Fortunately there's a simple improvement you can make (using Notepad) to give priority to certain pages without changing any core DNN functions...
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Add Google AJAX Search to your DNN skin (Part 1 of 3) |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
6/7/2008 10:02 PM
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The internal DNN search engine, while convienient, still leaves much to be desired in the realm of content search. It is restricted to its own portal, returns only what is specifically made "searchable" by module developers and has no inherent feature for generating reports of what users have been searching for. With a (free) Google site search, however, you not only get the power of Google's vastly superior search algorithms but you also get to define WHAT gets serached on WHICH portals/domains and also influence HOW the results get ranked and displayed. Plus you can get free reports on what your users searched for and when they searched for it. All it takes is a small bit of text editing...
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Force javascript to run AFTER a DotNetNuke page is fully loaded |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
4/2/2008 4:06 PM
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So you want to insert a bit of javascript on your DNN page to perform some function that you probably should code into a module but you know you can implement more quickly by dropping script into a Text/HTML module (or in the Header/Footer of any module's Advanced Settings). The problem is, your script fires at the wrong time -- before the page is fully loaded. Here's a way to insure your script always waits until the DNN page is loaded...
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Add custom registration instructions to the DNN user account registration page |
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DNN Tips
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By mamlin on
3/12/2008 5:11 PM
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Have a DotNetNuke portal with open registration and wish you could freely add your OWN instructions to the DNN user account registration screen? Sure, you can edit the input field names (to change "Username" to "LoginName", for example) but what if you wanted to put the message "*** Please use your Email address as your Username ***" at the top of the user account registration page? Here's one FREE way to do it without changing any DNN code...
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Free DNN Module: Advanced DataGrid (Part 1) |
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DNN Development
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By mamlin on
2/27/2008 5:05 PM
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The "Advanced DataGrid" module by Efficion Consulting has been around for years. It allows you to make direct SQL queries into the DNN database and return the results in a basic HTML table. This is by no means the only module to offer such functionality but the Advanced Datagrid module (and source code) is FREE...
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