Chris Hammond

DNN Presentation at the New England Visual Basic User's Group

Tomorrow evening (Thursday the 25th) I will be presenting at the New England Visual Basic User's Group meeting. The session will be on a special date from their usual meetings as they scheduled it around my already planned trip to the Boston area for the Red Sox Yankees series this weekend at Fenway.

I will be developing a new website for their user group as part of the presentation, building the site with DNN of course. Stop by and say hello if you're there.

If you're in the area check out the http://www.nevb.com/ website for more information!

Engage: Publish 5.2 Released!

It's been a few months coming but Engage: Publish 5.2 released last week while I was off in Kansas racing.

There are a lot of new features/enhancements and bug fixes in the release. You can read a forum thread where I discuss a lot of the new functionality and changes here. You can also check out the release notes in our Wiki.

Some of the major features/enhancements are.

1. Ability to change/define the author for an article, selecting a different DNN user than the person making changes to the article
2. Ability to sort by start/end dates, allowing for publishing in the future or past.
3. AjaxControlToolkit 20229 is now packaged with the module
4. Article Comment Notification
5. Better XHTML validation for the Publish html code.
6. MetaWeblog API Integration to allow publishing of articles from desktop applications such as Microsoft Word or Windows Live Writer
7. Performance Improvements, an overhaul of caching in Publish has minimized database hits to repeat requests of content, drasticly improving performance within the module.

Check out the module and let me know what you think! 

All retail modules from Engage Software come with a year of free upgrades available from www.engagemodules.com. If you've purchased the module elsewhere be sure to send us an email to support@engagemodules.com and provide a copy of your receipt as well as your username on www.engagemodules.com so we can get your account setup with access.

DotNetNuke 4.9.0 Released!

In case you've been asleep for the past 8 hours, DotNetNuke 4.9.0 released today! You can find out more information about what this release contains over on Brinkman's blog post.

I've upgraded 4 of my sites this afternoon, and maybe it's in my head, but they sure seem faster!

Finding a DotNetNuke Host

A few months ago I made a blog post about good DotNetNuke Hosting providers, I would like to continue that thought with an update.

I've worked with a few more DNN hosts since that post, from my experience these have been some of the best hosts for DotNetNuke in the industry. If you're looking for a DotNetNuke hosting solution check out some of the following links.

http://www.pointclick.net provides quite a few options for DNN based hosting.

On a more expensive solution http://www.rackspace.com provides great dedicated server hosting.

http://www.ihostasp.net is also going to be attending OpenForce08 in Las Vegas in November, be sure to stop by there booth, I know I will.

I highly recommend supporting hosting providers who are active and fruitful within the DNN community. If you have any questions about a particular DNN hosting provider, please feel free to ask me, I will give you my honest opinion about any of the hosts that I know of. Please ask before you sign up with a host I haven't mentioned in one of my blog posts, there are definitely vendors out there to avoid.

I proudly support the DotNetNuke Project! www.dotnetnuke.com. DotNetNuke is an open-source application maintained by the DotNetNuke Corporation (www.dotnetnukecorp.com), the corporation is tasked with protecting and maintaining and continuing growth of the project. Check it out at www.dotnetnuke.com

OpenForce08 Post Conference DotNetNuke Training

So you're thinking about heading to OpenForce in Las Vegas in November (the DotNetNuke Conference), and you need an excuse to stay in Las Vegas an extra day? Well I have just the excuse for you! Engage Software (www.engagesoftware.com) (my employer) has partnered up with DotNetNuke Corporation (www.dotnetnukecorp.com) to offer a day of post conference training on Friday November 14th, 2008.

You can learn more about the training by visiting this page.  Here's a snippet from the website:

"The session will cover best practices of DotNetNuke hosting, development, skinning and administration. You’ll be exposed to tips and tricks for configuring and maintaining your portals, users and modules for a broad range of websites. We will cover security and hosting configurations for public websites as well as corporate intranet/extranet environments. Module development topics include best practices for solution configuration, debugging, packaging and deployment. We will also cover the new extension types, as well as best practices for the provider model, multiview modules as well as other advanced module development topics."

The training will be provided by Chris Hammond (me), Cuong Dang (Engage Software), Joe Brinkman (DNN Corp) and Shaun Walker (DNN Corp).

If you have any questions about the training feel free to ask, I look forward to meeting as many of you at OpenForce (Europe or America) this year!