Lately I have been helping some users upgrade DNN sites from older versions, some all the way back to 3.x. If they had kept up with the DNN upgrades and advancements in .NET some may have saved themselves some cash.

Christmas is right around the corner and it is time to to make sure that Christmas wish list to Santa is ready to send, if not already on its way. Here is my list to Santa for DotNetNuke.

SEO is a vital part of a successful site, especially if you offer a service or sell anything on your site. Sometimes the SEO abilities of the core blog are a little lacking. Here is one way to help control the permalink URL for blog items.

Twitter, LinkedIn, various blogs and social media all have flame wars, discussions, analysis and reasons why each CMS is the best or why such and such developer will not or cannot use another CMS. Frankly these discussions and arguments are a bit on the pedantic side. As the old saying goes ‘Opinions are like insert expletive here everyone has one’.

The reality of the situation is that developers get both comfortable and lazy. (Before emailing me with a flame about how wrong I am let me explain.) Developers love to reuse things code/screens/ideas, it’s in our nature and it’s in our training. There are people who spend years thinking up patterns to make developers more productive by stamping out like pieces of programs. We spend years trying to refactor code so that one piece of code can be used over and over. Developers also like to work within their favorite language/IDE/operating system/insert computer term here. It makes up prejudiced towards other systems and ideas.

So if trying to evaluate a CMS what is a web site owner to do? I can’t tell you any rules that will lead you blindly to the right fit but here are some guidelines, hopefully they are common sense.

...

With the release of DNN 6 have been seeing a fair amount of requests for upgrades. Thought just to help out I would put together a simple upgrade checklist.

Thanks to Will Strohl (@willstrohl) for his suggested upgrade path (http://www.willstrohl.com/Blog/EntryId/102/Suggested-DotNetNuke-Site-Upgrade-Path-s)

Check List Download

I have been working on a new web application and recently ran into an interesting situation where I wanted to add possibly hundreds of records from one data entry screen. In the past I have done this a few different ways:

Loop through set of data and add each row one by one. Create some delimited string and create some SQL to parse it into a temp table.  Both of those methods work but have serious drawbacks. Method one is very easy to program but all those insert statements cause a lot of traffic to and from the database, this can cause a lot of scaling issues. Method two works if you are only inserting one value at a time and that value is not complex like lots of text or image byte arrays. A much easier method of doing this would be to create a table fill it with data and simply use a insert statement to select all records from the table into our datatable. Now with SQL 2008 we can pass Table Valued Parameters (TVP) to a stored procedure and use it just like any other table in the...

The next few months will be hectic as I reach into every trick I can to start building what I consider my masterpiece. Built on DNN and Telerik controls hopefully this will become a standard.

From http://xkcd.com/936/

One would think that by now, articles on this subject would be common but yet again and again I get asked, 'Can you build a Flash site for me?'. I still see sites that are a) built in flash and / or b) have image-heavy design, which is super irritating. Not to point fingers, but I've found that the most these sites tend to be for design agencies (showing off their skills) and for some reason bars and restaurants. There are millions of reasons why sites built in flash or image heavy are bad, here are my top 7.

Top 7 Reasons to build a text-based site

20% of the users disable Flash plug-ins, these movies takes forever to download (and so does the plug-in that plays it). Users are more-and-more moving towards mobile devices to visit website (the iPhone cannot read flash - and most likely never will) Many large corporations block installing flash on browsers. Journalists and members of the trade cannot easily copy information about your business if it's image-based or in flash,...

This question came from Twitter but thought it was a good quick fix here is a step by step on doing just that.

1. Log in a host account
2. Navigate to the SQL module under the Host menu
3. Run the following script

   UPDATE Users set UpdatePassword = 1 WHERE UserID in (SELECT UserID from UserPortals WHERE PortalId = X)

   --replace x with the id of the portal
4. Select 'Run as script' check box
5. Click Execute

Of course this script assumes you know what portal you are running this against, and that there is no object qualifier for the DNN database.