Entries for August 2014

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One of the best things I love about the DNN platform is the ease of building, releasing, and updating Extensions for your website. If you need custom functionality you can either build something yourself, or likely find something that someone else has developed previously that might fit your needs.

If you are an extension developer for DNN (previously DotNetNuke), you have many options for how you can get those modules into the hands of potential customers. If you want to get your modules into the hands of as many different users as possible, you can’t just stick to one distribution mechanism, you need to reach out and try to get your extension available in as many places as possible.

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In an earlier blog Joe described his vision of  "What Does It Mean To Be Open Source?".  One of the key pieces in that vision is Community Participation.  We have already given committer permissions to our Github repository to three of our MVPs, Peter Donker, Vicenc Masanas and Brian Dukes, and yesterday we held the "kickoff" meeting for a new Working Group, the Architecture Working Group. Continue Reading »

When I published my blog last week, I realize that it was a shock to many folks in the DNN ecosystem. I am humbled by all of those people who reached out to me over a variety of channels, both private and public, to offer their congratulations and co... Continue Reading »

Over the last 12 years I have participated in many discussions about what it means to be Open Source. Is it enough that you follow the OSI definition of Open Source? Do you need to provide access to a public roadmap or offer nightly builds? Do you need to accept contributions, both large and small, to the core code base? Are there certain values your project and community should follow?  All of these are great questions, many of which I discussed in my post 7 years ago on Re-defining Open Source.

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One of the biggest benefits to my new role at DNN Corp is that I get to spend more time working with our awesome community.  I have built many great friendships in this community over the last 12 years.  One thing that I have always believe... Continue Reading »

I must admit, the work I have done over the years with DotNetNuke has involved working with modules that I control, build, and have a say in. I am set in my ways of how I like to do things, and believe that my approach to DNN module development is one of the easiest approaches to the DNN platform, because of this I have put a lot of time and effort into my Module Development Templates.

Occasionally I come across other people’s modules in my consulting work, and it tends to frustrate me when I have to do things outside of my own little “perfect module development environment”. I want to be able to switch to “Release” mode in Visual Studio and build, and have the scripts package the module I am working on so that I can easily deploy it to a customer’s development or staging environment. I had just such an experience this evening, working on customizing a module for a customer, and they had the Source to a third party module that I needed to make changes to. There is no packaging or build process anywhere inside of this module, even to the point where there are missing files in the “source” project itself.

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After getting a couple of questions in the Forums and directly, I'd like to provide options for getting rid of spam users, which is cumbersome via UI, if thousands of registration have been added by a bot. Continue Reading »

About 10 years ago in August 2004 I responded to an email that Shaun had sent to registered DotNetNuke users in the 604 Area Code (Greater Vancouver).  DotNetNuke was growing fast and Shaun was looking to hire an ASP.NET developer to work on the Open-Source project, so he could focus on managing the growing Community. Continue Reading »

I used to believe QR codes were useless marketing gimmicks. Then I visited Japan in 2011 and QR codes were everywhere. You could see them on the walls of skyscrapers in Tokyo, on product packaging - and even on every tiny 1x3-inch ads in the magazines. Usually it's time to re-evaluate an opinion once you see that an large, smart group of people have an opposing point of view. So I re-evaluated.

In this blog I would like to tell you what the QR-Code is (in case you're new to it), why it's great, and how to make bad and good QR-codes (as it's easy to botch up).

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