While there were many changes included in the latest series of DotNetNuke releases, there were a few that even I overlooked. When I was going through the code today, I was reminded of a few of them and figured I should share with the community in case they too have overlooked these.
One of the problems I have found with DotNetNuke over the years is that lots of the functionality is dependant on items being available in the querystring. What I mean by this is these very forums, for example. When I receive an email with a direct link to a thread, if I am not logged in I will login and be directed to whatever is set to the Home page under the Site Settings. Now at times, it is useful to be able to push users to a single page after login but it is very often inconvenient for the end user. In the latest x.3.x releases, the login parameters are now retained and a user can go directly to the url they intended to go to. What does this mean for most, probably not extremely important unless you too often log out from a site. This does, however, have additional benefits for users who use the Remember Me checkbox. Again, using these forums as our example and that same email with a link to a thread, if this email comes from a different portal alias (example is http://dotnetnuke.com, when i normally always visit http://www.dotnetnuke.com) I can login and not have to navigate and find the thread I was originally interested in viewing.
Another problem I have had to overcome in many client applications using DotNetNuke was the verification code. Most have always liked having the verified registration to verify it is a valid email account but one drawback has always been there was no direct link in the verification email to input this data for the user. Let's face it, users want as few steps as possible to get going and the verification code input is an additional step. In this latest series of releases when a site is using verified registration, the outgoing email now is populated with a link which has additional parameters to input the verification code for the user. This means one click from the email and the user enters they password and they are through the verification process.
There were also some other membership/email notification changes worth mentioning. These include:
- User Lockout Notification - Enhanced the user lockout ( 3 unsuccessful logins ) to send an email to the admin to notify them of the event
- Profile Change Notification - When any profile attribute is changed, the owner of the account is notified ( using the original email address ). This is to alert people in the event that an unauthorized user has gained access to their account and made changes to their profile ( password, email ).
- Public Registration - The system sends an email to the user on public registration ( to prevent cases where another user registers with their email address ).
Although these things may seem petty, they have always been something I have found as a shortcoming of DNN and it is great to now see them as part of the core. Also, if you haven't noticed there is now a What's New module and another which is only available in 4.x is the new Reports module.