Since our last Digest we’ve seen more progress in the DNN Community. It is exciting to watch the community get energized, come together, and step up in so many areas of the ecosystem. If you are paying attention I’m sure you can see and feel it too!
I’d like to highlight a few exciting things that have taken place in the past few weeks. The DNN Technology Advisory Group continues to hold weekly meetings and has recently put in place the infrastructure for automated builds via Visual Studio Team Services. These resources are provided by the .NET Foundation and our DNN TAG team has been testing them with this release and we are getting ready to “flip the switch” to 100% automated builds starting with the next release. This is a big win for the community and is awesome to see.
Just this week the updated MVP program recognized new and renewed MVPs. We’ve had MVPs in the past, but this time the nomination and election process was somewhat different as it was completely based on nominations from the community and votes from our current MVPs. See our new MVPs in the Spotlight section below.
The 9.2.1 release posted this past Tuesday and, as noted in the 9.2.1 release blog by Mitchel Sellers, it is the official transition release where both DNN Corp and the DNN Community worked together to come out with the release. Moving forward releases will be 100% community driven. We are indeed returning to our open source roots!
June 21st, 2018
Southern Fried DNN
Charlotte, NC & Live-Streamed Online
The Charlotte based DNN User Group, Southern Fried DNN, will host their monthly meeting next Thursday. This meeting will feature Southern Fried’s own David Poindexter who will present his recent nvQuick development “nvQuickComponents” which are framework agnostic, built on modern technology, easy to implement, and are potential replacements for labels, tokens, HTML Editors, and more. Are you interested in a simple solution based on web components? If so, then you’ll want to check this meeting out! This meeting will be live-streamed to the greater DNN Community.
Register for the Meetup
September 5th, 2018
TADUG
Live-Streamed Online
The Toronto based DNN User Group, TADUG, will host their monthly meeting on September 5th. The meeting will feature DNN MVP, Ernst Peter Tamminga, as the main presenter. Ernst Peter will talk about Language Pack management in DNN and how you can find the the language pack you are looking for.
Register for the Meetup
Feb 19-21st, 2019
DNN Summit
Denver, Colorado
DNN Summit 2019 is returning to Denver Colorado. The conference dates and Call for Speakers have been announced. Registration will be opening soon. Stay tuned for more info on DNN Summit!
Submit Your Sessions to DNNSummit.org
Note: This tip comes from Shawn McGillivray, a Senior Support Analyst at DNN Corp.
Custom CSS Options
Occasionally one may need to override a pre-existing CSS rule in order to make a small or surgical tweak to your site. Here are a few options to accomplish that.
Portal Wide using Portal.css
- By default, the Portal.css stylesheet is blank and it resides in the root folder of the portal in question. CSS rules applied here will apply portal wide. It will also override any other conflicting CSS rules.
- This file can be edited two ways. There is an editor specifically to edit this file found on the Persona Bar at apply custom CSS rules to an entire portal. Settings > Custom CSS.
Per Page
- Create CSS file containing CSS rules which are to apply to a single page
- Upload CSS file to site using Assets
- Add path to uploaded to the uploaded CSS file to the page at Page Settings > Advanced > Appearance > Page Stylesheet
- As this is the absolute last stylesheet to be loaded, it can be used to override other styling (including that found in Portal.css), but will only apply to the page(s) it is explicitly linked to.
As mentioned above, these tools are meant to be used surgically and sparingly. It is common that changes to your Theme’s stylesheet (skin.css) is a better option.
New MVPs in 2018!
Just this week the new and renewed DNN MVPs were recognized. We had several new faces join the MVP group and as such I wanted to highlight our new MVP members. Congrats to Andrew Hoefling, Ash Prasad, Cassidi Peterson, Cathy Lee, Daniel Valadas, David Poindexter, Declan Ward, Hans Lenting, Kelly Ford, Matt Rutledge, Mike Smeltzer, Ryan Moore, Sebastian Leupold, and Sergey Velichko for being named DNN MVP. The community appreciates all of your contributions.
UI/UX Conference - Beyond the Pixels
Are you into UI/UX? DNN Partner ITX is hosting a conference you should know about called “Beyond the Pixels”. It’s a 3-day event jam-packed with workshops, talks, and networking for designers and product people.
Learn more about "Beyond the Pixels"
This section highlights updates and contributions to the DNN Core platform and to open source extensions plus we provide details around projects that have recently updated.
DNN Platform
The big news on the platform side was that 9.2.1 released marking the “transition” release as Mitchel Sellers noted in his blog. You can see metrics from the past month in the screenshot below.
DNN Community Projects
There are a few updates around community modules for this month. The Media module was updated and run on 9.2. There is also migration testing being done around Active Forums, work on VSTS continuous integration for builds, work on documentation, and updates to the Gallery module will be available soon.
For international users of DNN there were some foreign-language specific forums created on DNNSoftware.com that you should be aware of in case you want to communicate in a language other than English on the site.
And speaking of languages... the team at DNN-Connect has been collecting language packs for any module and any version of DNN. There are numerous language packs available for the community to check out and use as needed. Check out the language packs on DNN-Connect. Also, if you have any language packs for the platform or any specific modules, contact the team at DNN-Connect so you can contribute to the collection.
Finally, another community effort has been to create a list of open source extensions for DNN. The list was started about a month ago and there are currently more than 200 extensions listed with more being added every week. Do you have an extension that is not listed yet... if so, please let the team at DNN-Connect know. Check out the community extensions list at DNN-Connect.
In this section we’ll feature a DNN Partner and discuss the partner’s firm and any feature projects that show off DNN.
This month’s Partner Spotlight features Upendo Ventures. Upendo Ventures uses technology to help businesses change people’s lives. Based on the belief that relationships begin with love and integrity, Upendo Ventures works with clients to deliver world-class results… and the team at Upendo Ventures loves to use DNN to deliver these results!
Upendo Ventures specializes in extension development, creating automation by integrating 3rd party systems, e-commerce, upgrades, and training. Upendo Ventures enjoys bringing enterprise-class techniques and tools to the SMB space. It’s common that clients have a DNN-project-gone-wrong and then finds Upendo Ventures who resolves the root issues of the problems by applying DNN best practices.
The team at Upendo Ventures has been using DNN since the early days and the wealth of DNN knowledge is and advantage to their clients and helps them succeed. Check out Upendo Ventures’ case studies to see a few success stories.
Recently, the team lead at Upendo Ventures, Will Strohl, was renewed as a longstanding DNN MVP. Kudos to Will and the team at Upendo Ventures.
Learn More about Upendo Ventures
Featured Tweets
Andrew Hoefling tweeted about the DNNTAG’s work on VSTS integration.
Two DNN MVPs, Aderson Oliveira and Mike Smeltzer met up recently.
Torsten Weggen tweeted about being renewed as an MVP.
