Portals
Posts about DotNetNuke and Rainbow
Here's an article summarising the webcasts that are available for DotNetNuke 3.x on MSDN. I have included some of the blurbs to make it a sort of one stop shop. Hope this is useful for DNN afficionados
Had a narrow escape today. Installed DNN 3.0.9 and updated the site I'm working on at home. Just after finishing up some menus and pages, I decided to set the re-direction of who sees what page. So this way ordinary users get directed to, say, the main page, registered users, on logging in, may get directed to a special page with announcements and news for members. Anyway, for some reason, there is also an option to direct the LOGIN menu somewhere other than the Login page (perhaps to an enriched login module ?). In retrospect, I'm not sure this should even be allowed cos it can lock you out of the site if you are not careful.
I accidentally directed the login page, from a default of [NOT SPECIFIED] to [HOME]. Since I was doing this in a hurry, I didnt stop to think of the fall out. As a consequence, whenever I clicked the Login link, it just showed me the home page and never allowed me to log in. It took me a while to realise what I had done and in the meantime I restarted IIS, backed up and restored the DB, all to no avail.
Anyway finally it dawned on me where I could go and check. Sure enough, in the Portals table the Tab ID's for each of those options are shown. I tried setting the LoginTabID column to 41 which is the actual TabID for the User Accounts module, but that didnt work. It turns out that it has to be updated to NULL to allow the login screen to be shown.
The lesson therefore, boys and girls, is that DB hacking on your own system can be invaluable :-). [Of course, common sense is even better!! If i had done the configuration mistake with the site being hosted by an ISP, that would have been the end - in terms of experimentation. There is a SQL module in the Host option, but the ISP may not give enough DB permissions to do this kind of stuff].
A Note on 3.x Menus: It's also worth noting that the new fancy Horizontal and Vertical menu styles are available in all the skins out of the box in 3.x. Of course, if you load a 2.x skin, it wont have these new structures, but most 2.x skins work if they have been developed correctly. Probably also good to mention that you need to be logged in as host to upload new skins. Admins dont appear to have enough permissions (or maybe thats just some settings playing up).
My previous post sang the praises of DNN. Here's a bit of background.
I went back to DNN again because i nearly tore my hair out with Rainbow. I had built the site with the menu structures I wanted and decided to start working on the skin. So i copied an existing skin, renamed the folder and started working on the CSS. All I intended to do initially was change the banner color and the color scheme for the tab highlighting (active tabs, inactive tabs, hovering etc). But no matter what I did, the active tab name always remained blue which made it invisible when the background happened to be the same color. There was also no entry for the Blue color in the corresponding CSS class. I just couldnt find the blue setting anywhere. I dont know if there is some kind of inheritance in CSS and if this class had an unholy alliance with another class which caused it to be rendered in this color. But i looked for the hex representation in the code and couldnt find that either. A total mystery. And since Im not the patient sort, i just dropped it and turned back to DNN in desperation which, as I explained, has turned out to be a really cool app.
This reminds me of another time where I wanted to change the orange skin in Rainbow to something else and found the orange color hardcoded in the menu building module.
However I wont blame the Rainbow team . As one of the documents (in DNN) pointed out, skinning can be awfully hard especially in a generic portal software. All it takes is one module developer or skin developer to harcode color schemes or absolute positioning and everything gets screwed. In DNN they appear to have taken a different approach to skins which allows a complete separation of modules and presentation. Perhaps in the next version of Rainbow we will see something better.
I'm already very impressed. I downloaded and installed DNN 3.0.8 and then installed one of the competition winning skins, the BLUE theme and was immediately presented with a graphical set of layout options dealing with menu alignments (horizontal and vertical) for the skins and another set of options for the containers. The Preview and Apply options worked flawlessly too and the site I built on my laptop looks really amazing. Its very close to the kind of thing I was looking to build earlier and I've got some ideas on how I can extend and customise it to get exactly what I want. The ASP.NET forums have a good post on "dogfooding" the DNN main site and the lessons learned, issues and workarounds.
I also found an interesting DNN developer site with some nice skins to download and information on module development. Coupled with the other site which has training videos, Im more excited than I have been in a very long time.
Got a little time at last to play with DNN 3.0.5 (the second beta to come out in rapid succession and apparently there are more on the way). Lots of teething problems. It refused to load any of the httpModules saying they were already loaded, so I had to delete the entire section from my web.config file in order for the system to load. I also had to drop the entire database and allow the system to create a new one. I dont mind dropping the DB since its only a test db but having to delete all httpModules from the config file is not a nice thing.
I like the pages concept (dont know if thats new or if thats just me being thick and not seeing it in 2.1.2). Now if I can sort the menu requirements I have, that should have me chirping away happily for a long time.
Checked out Nina's site and found that there are some new skins to be expected for 3.x. There's so many new features in the system, its going to take a long time to get the hang of it. I came across a DNN training site which should help a lot in this regard. Its a bit like LearnVisualStudio where you have free membership and a frequent free video, as well as paid membership and access to more videos. I would have subscribed but the thing is they have a lot of stuff for 2.x and only a few for 3.x (obviously since its brand new), and Im not keen on 2.x anyway. So I'm going to check out the quality of the videos and then when theres more 3.x stuff, I'll upgrade my membership. I have a feeling that it would be a wise investment and that I'm going to be using a lot of DNN in future. May even ditch Rainbow at some time!!
Happy portal building!!
Well, it was supposed to be out on Nov 1st but there must have been some last minute hurdles. It would be good to have some news. I read the article from Nina with the details of DNN 3.0 and it appears that its really going to rock. So I'm waiting eagerly.
Update: Looks like today is a day of posting and immediately updating. I found another post dealing with the DNN delay which linked to this post by Shaun Walker. The post also explains a great deal about the new features expected in the release. Its looking better and better.
I'm sure we can all wait for the product to be released. Its better to get our hands on a stable one with rich features than a buggy one because some people demanded it.
Actually that was the same comment (ie) that its better to wait for a big stable release, that someone in Microsoft raised about the Yukon delay, but the Longhorn excuses about the chop of WinFS from the client OS in 2006 is exactly the opposite (some rubbish about clients demanding ease of deployment and new OS features and all that). Looks like the departments inside MS cant agree on a common approach to these issues. Never mind.