It has been a little over three months since the official release of DotNetNuke 6.0. While many of us were downloading, installing and upgrading our sites, the DotNetNuke team was already working hard on the next release. DotNetNuke 6.0 was our first big step on the path towards redefining C.M.S. as Cloud, Mobile and Social.
Over a billion people are looking for information from their mobile devices every day. That number is only expected to rise. Making it easy to build websites is no longer enough. We need to make it easy to build interactive websites that can display content optimized for the user’s device. With more and more people browsing the web using phones, tablets and even televisions, better tools are needed to manage content. DotNetNuke 6.1 is here to help!
Client Capability API
DotNetNuke 6.1 includes a comprehensive Client Capability API to help module and skin developers build mobile solutions. With just a few lines of code, you can quickly determine if your content is being rendered on a mobile phone or tablet. However, in many cases, you still need to know more about the consuming device so have also made it easy to find out the screen resolution, if it supports Flash, if it is touch-enabled, and more. More details will be available soon in the blogs and the wiki.
Site Redirection
The ability to manage site redirection based upon device detection is an important aspect of any mobile strategy. DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise Edition include two additional modules so that you can easily manage multiple site redirection rules and target specific devices.
Mobile Template and Skin
Building your first mobile optimized site can sometimes be a challenge. As part of the DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise packages, we have included a new mobile template and skin to help customers get started in the right direction.
Site Groups
Many organizations leverage the multi-site capability in DotNetNuke to manage departmental websites or micro-sites. This functionality provides a great way to utilize a single installation to manage multiple sites while also keeping various content items isolated. There are also cases when an organization wants to keep the content isolated and not have to maintain independent user accounts for every site. DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise edition allows organizations to define a group of sites so that user authentication and profile information can be shared across sites within the group.
Client Resource Management
DotNetNuke 6.0 introduced significant improvements with HTML rendering and user interface controls. However, over the past few years the overall page output size has been growing along with the total number of resource requests. While we wanted to make even more improvements in this area for the 6.0 release, we needed additional time to come up with the best solution. We had several goals for improving page rendering, but our first objective was to reduce the total number of http requests. We are proud to report that a default DotNetNuke 6.1 install now only requests 7 JavaScript files and 2 CSS files for anonymous users. We still have room for improvement, but we are making great progress. Learn more about the Enhancements for working JavaScript and CSS files in DotNetNuke 6.1.
Give Us Your Feedback
The Beta Forum is ready for you to give us your feedback. We do ask that if you find encounter an error or a bug that you report those items using our issue tracking system. Please make sure you include the steps to reproduce the problem. If you aren’t exactly sure about the problem then please create a topic in the beta forum.
Download DotNetNuke 6.1 Beta!
Keep in mind that this is a beta release and not recommended for production use. The DotNetNuke 6.1 Beta is available for download on CodePlex.