Jan Jonas is name you
may have noticed repeatedly in the list of Community Heros who recently contributed to DNN Platform 7.4. Jan’s contributions include:
Keep reading to get to
know this Community Hero better!
Tell us a little about yourself (personal,
professional, whatever you’d like to share).
I’m working as an IT
manager at Jack Wolfskin. Jack
Wolfskin is among the leading providers of functional outdoor clothing,
footwear and equipment in Europe and the largest franchisor in the German
specialist sports retail market. There are more than 600 franchise stores and
4,000 sales locations throughout Europe and Asia.
I studied computer
science at the TU Darmstadt and I’ve done web development for about 15 years. I
started web development using PHP, did some web development with JAVA and today
I’m using .NET for most of the projects.
In 2014, I friend and
I founded weweave Gbr , a company that
develops software, including modules for DNN.
One of the great things about the DNN
Community is that we have members all over the world. Where are you
located?
I work and live in
Germany in a small town near Frankfurt.
What’s one thing most DNN Community
members wouldn’t know about you?
I have a personal blog
where I write posts about IT problems I face in my daily business. My DNN
related posts can be found here.
Describe your professional (and/or
personal) experience relating to DNN. How long have you been using
DNN? How did you get started?
In 2012 we searched for
an open-source ASP.NET CMS and decided to use DNN, which was called DotNetNuke
in those days. The key reason for this decision was that DNN had a long history,
was widely used and had a strong community.
Since then, I am contributing
to the platform: In the early days, I started reporting bugs in the bug
tracking system. Today, I also create pull requests with code fixes and
improvements and, if I find the time, write some blog posts about DNN.
What resources were most helpful to you as
you got started, or when you have questions?
Besides installing DNN
and doing some trial and error, I used several resources when I started with
DNN development:
- Books (not
really recommended, since most information was outdated)
- Official
DNN wiki
- JIRA support system
- Platform
source code (from CodePlex or GitHub)
- Last
but not least Google to find forum topics, blogs posts, or Stackoverflow
questions about DNN
Are there any cool projects you are
working on that you would like to share a little about?
At weweave, we
currently have three modules in our DNN portfolio that add valuable new
functionalities to the platform:
- DNN Dynamic Roles: Allows administrators
to define criteria which adjust
role memberships dynamically
- DNN Dynamic Redirect: Allows
administrators to define criteria which
redirect users dynamically
- DNN Google Analytics Advanced: Extends
DNN’s built-in Google Analytics to enable real time event tracking (such as
download events)
For all modules,
evaluation versions for development environments are available for free. You
can find more information in the DNN Store or on our website.
In your opinion, what are some “must have”
modules and themes (from the Forge, Store, etc.) that you would recommend for
DNN sites?
One of the best
modules I’ve seen so far is the open source “CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke®”.
Basically it replaces DNN’s default rich text editor with an editor that offers
better usability, browser support and many other nice features. The module is
actively developed and can be downloaded for free from its CodePlex project page.
What advice would you give someone who is
new to DNN?
For module developers,
it’s always worth taking a look at the source code of the platform to get an
understanding of how the system works. For experienced developers, I suggest
checking out the platform’s repository on GitHub.
Before analyzing a
specific issue, it’s always recommended to take a look into the project’s support system to see if it’s a known problem and if
someone is already working on a solution.
What is the best part about working with
DNN? What is one enhancement you would add/one thing you would improve?
The best thing about
DNN is its extensibility. By writing
your own modules, skins, providers and using DNN’s extensive API, you can
customize the platform in any way imaginable.
If I could take part
in decision-making, I would vote for improving DNN’s performance and stability
in the next versions instead of adding new features. There have been many
improvements in these areas in the last versions, but there is still a lot of
work to do. Just to mention a small example,
the current version (7.4.0) has problems handling large files (>2GB), and in
my opinion a robust file management is one of the must-have features for any
CMS (see my bug report here https://dnntracker.atlassian.net/browse/DNN-5206 for more details).
And thanks to Community members like Jan, the DNN Platform will continue improving! Jan, thanks for taking the time to answer
our questions and for your contributions to DNN! If additional Community members have
questions, feel free to chime in with a comment!