Jan 12

Written by: Dean Harrison
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 

Towards the end of 2010 I was searching for some very specific modules for DotNetNuke, for the life of me I can't remember what. Anyway I came across a link to a free enhanced control panel for DotNetNuke 5. I tried it out on one of the projects I was working on at the time, and was extremely impressed. You can download the module free of charge from www.oliverhine.com.

It is almost the "missing ribbon control" for DNN, the control panel allows you to do a number of tasks "on-the-fly" like adding a new page, or even changing the settings on a page to appear on the menu. The ability to overide the default module container as you add a module to a page is such a cool feature, that if you don't like any of the others, it is still worth using Oliver's Control Panel. It makes putting a site together so much quicker. I give it a 9/10 rating, and now it's the first thing I install after starting a new instance of DotNetNuke.

I recently helped a good friend of mine to put together a DNN site for one of his clients. We built the beta on my hosting account, and eventually moved the domain there once the site was ready to go live. In doing this we noticed that quite a few of the links across the site were "hard-wired" to the beta address. I think this was cause by a setting in the Telerik Radeditor that ships with DNN. He wanted to run a SQL script that would find and replace all the broken links but after a few failed attempts we were about to resign ourselves to manually finding and fixing the problems. One or two googles later we came across Engage Software's free F3 module, which works like a treat, and within 10 seconds of installing the module our broken links were fixed. You will find the module at www.engagesoftware.com.

The Telerik Radeditor for DotNetNuke seems to me to be a big improvement of the FCKeditor that shipped with DNN v4. I say this though with some reservations as quite a few DNN die-hards still seem to favour FCK. But I think it might still be early days in the relationship between Radeditor and DotNetNuke, but overall I think even the die-hards will come around.  Amongst the strikes against Radeditor is the config files and tool customisation requires you to edit xml files in a folder buried near the surface of your host root. That was until I found radeditor.codeplex.com. Not only does it allow you to change the configuration of the Radeditor through an interface on your portal, it also allows you to bind the configuration to role, portal or page/tab on your website. The interface allows you to change both config and toolbar for each of these bindings. I just recently found the provider, but it seems to work really well. I will keep you updated on my progress with this tool. The 2 forthcoming features alone make for a promising future (Dropdownlist with tokens that can then be added to a HTML content. And Automatically open images in a Fancybox style popup)

As I find more of these "missing modules" I will keep you posted.