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Missing Modules - Extending DotNetNuke 5

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:00:00 GMT

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.

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Tags: DotNetNuke,Radeditor,Oliver Hine

Enough Now!

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:28:18 GMT

I have been watching videos of Eugene Terreblanche and his followers on YouTube. It struck me how aggressive and unintelligent his arguments were, he bullied the press, foreign and local. I can only begin to imagine how he acted to non-boer South Africans off camera. I loved the dude storming off of Etv, and it’s not because he was pushed into a corner, it’s because he could not debate on an intellectual level. And was outraged that a black woman was so “cheaky” to him. I loved him telling the body-guard to remove the mans hand, in fact I really began to LOL at that point. What scares me most though are the comments of my fellow South Africans on YouTube, the racial hatred and over-simplification of the current situation. Are there really so many racist and hateful people out there, black or white? The obviously PhotoShopped clippings from Facebook are also a joke and propaganda to stir up more racial hatred, you only have to search FB for the names of the alleged posters to know that these are works of pure fiction.

If you agree that ET and the AWB are out-dated, surely then you must also agree that a freedom song that glorifies the killing of boers, is also then outdated. I am deeply concerned that many people seem to think that the likes of Mandela, Sisulu and Tutu fought for the freedom of blacks only, when in fact they fought for the freedom of all people, freedom from all forms of oppression.

Come on people, don't buy into the haters like Malema or Terreblanche. Don't base an argument on race. And if you are not clever enough to debate openly and intellectually then give up politics and go back to school.

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Happy New Year – now update your copyright date

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:34:32 GMT

Happy New Year everyone. I think it would be obvious to say that 2010 is going to be a year of big things for South Africa with the Fifa World Cup just around the corner now. I think it also means big things on a personal level. While I find the official 2010 World Cup logo has just not grown on me, it’s childish and crude in my humble opinion, I celebrate Zakumi, the official mascot as a triumph. He is cute and energetic, I urge you to get one for your kids, and of course your offices. And from what I have seen the Stadiums are looking amazing, another triumph!

Okay down to some business, an easy, but often overlooked update to your website is the copyright date. As usual DotNetNuke makes this extremely easily.

Once logged in select Site Settings from under the Admin menu.

Now change the date under Copyright to 2010 (shown below)

To close, scroll all the way to the bottom, and click Update.

And it is really is a simple as that. If it does not seem to update, it’s probably your internet cache, press F5 to refresh.

Happy New Year everyone!

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Happy strike season

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:49:08 GMT

I understand the need to express oneself in an effort to better ones lot in life. And in most cases the workforce is often the last to benefit from national opportunities and more often the first to feel inflation. But I have to ask where were COSATU all the various unions before the election? They didn’t seem to be flexing their political muscle quite to the levels they are now. In fact if I remember correctly they put their considerable weight behind the ANC. But literally within months of the ANC victory we find ourselves firmly in the grips of national strike season, not to mention the protest due to non-delivery. My conspiracy theory meter is in overdrive, wondering what agreements were in place to ensure the Zuma victory, especially between COSATU and the ANC? Voting for a political party that has failed to deliver in the past, and that has a history of corruption and greed makes very little sense to me. I can only assume that the union bosses were financially lubricated to ensure the ANC victory, and now with the election out of the way, perhaps some of the real agendas are coming to the surface. So while the new cabinet procure fancy high-end cars with nonsensical features and fancy paint to the tune of R2.3 million, their constituents are struggling to feed their families. While ministers of safety and security feel unsafe in their homes, and thus move into state rented mansions, their are those amongst us who live on the banks of sewer infested rivers in little more than scraps of cardboard and corrugated metal. My suggestion for future reference is to change your voting strategy to put pressure on the fat cats, and/or kick them out onto their fat, lazy backsides. Put a government into place that actually understand what needs to be done, and are more interested in the original vision of Mandela and co, than in enriching themselves at the expense of others. To me that seems to be a more democratic and constructive way to voice yourself, than, say, burning down the train you need to get to work, or pouring tons of litter out all over your own neighbourhood, but that’s just me, I’m funny that way.

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Showing only the most recent Dotnetnuke Blog

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:43:29 GMT

I use Dotnetnuke for every website I do, including my own. Dotnetnuke or DNN is a Content (or Web) Management System that ships with some powerful core modules including the blog module. While there are some pretty impressive blogging systems out there like Wordpress, I find them to be mainly for technical types, and very few are WYSIWYG. I’ve dabbled with Joomla and Drupal too, but at the end of the day I find DNN to be the most suitable for all my needs. Of late I find myself using the DNN blog module more and more, after all blogging is a great way to quickly add content to your website, and when it comes to SEO content is king! I am typing this blog up in Windows Live Writer and once I’m done typing I simply push publish and it updates the blog on my website. I have wondered for some time how I would show only the most recent blog entry on my home page, while still having a full list of blog entries on the blog section of my site. It came to me more by accident than experiment, as I noticed on Andrew’s site (www.thewritesqud.co.za) that the blog on his home page was displaying different to the one in his blog section. It struck me that perhaps each instance of the actual blog throughout the site may have separate module options. They do! Its quite simple to do:

Add a copy of the blog module to the page you want only the latest blog to appear on. Make sure you copy the module from the existing blog page.
Edit the Module Options and change the Limit Recent Entries setting to 1.
You can play around with the summary lengths if you like, it’s probably better to show a bit more than you would on the blog entry list page.
Update the settings, and you should now have just the latest entry listed.

Clicking on Read more>> still navigates to the complete entry on the blog page, all you comment and social networking options will work as before.

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The life of Brian and my new HP Compaq Presario CQ61

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:28:33 GMT

Brian’s comment on my blog was almost prophetic. The first notebook arrived from PCMall and within a few hours of finishing the setup I realised that the combination of right-shift and “i” or “o” did not work. All other key combinations seemed to work fine. Cursing Brian a little for bringing on this jinx (kidding) I contacted PCMall to find out what to do next. I was comforted when Ilan (PCMall) told me he didn’t know the procedure because he had not experienced a problem with any of their past HP Compaq sales. He promised to let me know what needed to be done. After some calls to HP and Compaq, we determined that the machine was D.O.A, and would be replaced. After ordering the first notebook on Monday I took delivery Tuesday night, called PCMall Wednesday to report the fault, and now Thursday I have a brand new replacement PC, in fact I am writing this blog on the new Compaq. Brian raised the issues of both service and stock on-hand in his comments. I can tell you that I am more then satisfied with the service I got from both HP and PCMall. I have to agree with Brian about the stock issue, but for me the R1,000 price difference was simply not warranted. I think my initial reaction in the first blog was more to the comment of “online stores don’t have the overheads retailers have, and so they wouldn’t match the price”. That type of attitude is not going to to them any favours in the current economic climate. I think I would have been more pliable if they had tried to match the difference with other products, for example throwing in a laptop bag and mouse would have won me over. And if I do my math right they would have lost a little less in the margin…

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Incredible Dis-Connection

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:22:10 GMT

I love gadgets as much as the next guy, I’ve just never been a fan of notebook computing. Don’t get me wrong I think they are wonderful devices, I have just never had the need to be so restricted in upgrade options or screen-size whilst being free to roam around. Up until now, that is. I won’t go into the the detail as to why I need mobile computing, I don’t want to bore you, let’s just say I need one.

The first place I can think of to go kick the tyres on a variety of notebooks is Incredible Connection of course, so I pop in at the Greenstone store and start to purv. I know pretty much my budget, and have a checklist of techie requirements to cater for, so literally within minutes I have narrowed it down to one specific model. Against character, I resist the urge to whip out the plastic and buy the little sucker there and then, I decide to take my search online. Almost as soon as I am home I’m Google’ing and to my delight I find that there are several online shops selling the same model, but for R1,000 cheaper! I am not adverse to shopping online, I’ve been doing it for years, but I don’t want to wait for stock and delivery. So I thought I would try to haggle the retail stores into a better price. I call the Connection store at Greenstone, but the manager is not available. So I tried the Eastgate store, and I spoke to the manager there. He confirmed that the model was in stock but when I asked him if he was willing to match prices, he gave me some bumf about online stores not having the overhead of retail stores, and that the price was the price! Now while I understand that retail stores have some serious overheads, surely they need to rethink their model, I am a willing buyer and they could make the sale, at a realistic price. Obviously this will reduce their margin, but surely some margin is better than no margin at all! You’d think that they would know, that even the least tech-savvy people know about Google, and will try to find better pricing. And after all they are selling tech stuff!

Oh well, thanks to www.PCmall.co.za I will be getting the notebook today. I just can’t help wondering how long the Connection group will be around, especially in this economic environment. I tried to look for financial results on the Connection Group Holdings page, but that looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005!!! Could they find themselves more disconnected from what is really going on in the world?

Perhaps the online shops should send a thank-you note to the Connection guys for providing them with a show-room for their products and a compelling reason for shoppers to buy products online, cheaper.

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The Missing Link – FOUND!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:42:45 GMT

I met Richard Mulholland and Don Packett (Esq) from Missing Link yesterday. Rich should change his name to Mal-holland, if you meet him you will understand. It was refreshing because it reminded me that something is missing (thus the missing link). The energy that has gone over the last few years. Straight after I had to phone Dani (my bbbooooiii) and let him know too, okay i lie, I had to urinate first. Anyway I digress, if ever someone has missed their calling, its Dan. He would be right at home with ML, I hope he gives them a call to check it out. I even went back to watch the videos that Dan, Saul and I did for AllAboutFootball in the early days, and I LOL’d. Even got a little teary-eyed too. We had some real fun back then. “Fun don’t pay the bills” I hear you say! I think the guys at Missing Link would beg to differ, and I can’t wait to see them in action. I think they might be awesome! (they told me so).

What’s weird is Dan already knows a couple of them personally, but that’s no surprise, because he has tattoos and almost 4 billion friends on Facebook. And an even bigger coincidence, Donovan who works at ML directed and edited the AllAboutFootball videos!!!

I am not a big believer in the “things happen for a reason” BUT, If anything it made me realise, I need to take a step back, and reclaim my energy.

If you are in a business that needs to reclaim your energy, or want to be awesome perhaps you should check them out www.missinglink.co.za.

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Div (and not the HTML tag)

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:53:36 GMT

Peter de Villiers’ comments about Springbok supporters being racist makes me chuckle to my self. Ricky Januarie was booed on Saturday when he knocked the ball on. Div made a comment about getting your car fixed by a black or by a white, basically implying that the crowd were racists. While I am sure there were some racists in the crowd I am amazed at how he knew it was only the whites that were booing! With such powers of perception no wonder “we” picked him to coach our national side. Although, he seemed to overlook the cheers for Habana and JP, and the roars of “B E E E E A S T” from the very same crowd, or perhaps that was only from the black, coloured and non-racist whites in the stadium. Puke Watson is often booed (and rightly so), is that racist too? What about Percy in days of old, he too fell foul of the crowds very vocal displeasure! I don’t deny that there are racists amongst the crowd, there will always be. But playing the race card each time something negative happens to a player of colour is pathetic. Div if you don’t like your job give it to a White, and I mean Jake White!!!

Please feel free to express your thoughts…

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Staying Fresh

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:19:47 GMT

When you are full time employed, it seems easier to stay fresh with all the trends and tools that effect your job, but as a contractor it’s quite a bit more challenging. Contractors are under pressure to bill for their hours, and in most cases you can’t bill for research. If I don’t stay up to date with the tools and trends, I know that I am going to struggle down the line, as it is one of my competitive edges. So finding the balance is going to be an important challenge for me, It’s probably going to boil-down to a discipline issue, actually setting aside specific non-billable time to read-up, research and play with the new technologies. The upside is that in doing so I add value to my offering, value that is passed on to my customers and partners. Focusing on specific resources, also helps me in this task, ironically one of the resources I find useful is a magazine in a blog format – www.smashingmagazine.com – it feeds quite a few of my areas of interest from design, web design and tech right through to simple creative resources.

How do you ensure that you stay fresh?

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