So it’s been way too long, 6 months to be pretty exact, since we had a new release for Engage: Publish. Well last Thursday it finally came! We released Publish 5.4 on our website, though without announcement because of everything else we have had going on. Well here’s the announcement!
5.4 has a lot of changes, bug fixes, and new features, you can see the full list here. I’ll cover some of the major enhancements below.
Article Attachment, meaning you can attach a file to an article and it will now show up in the “enclosure” section of the RSS feed. This was implemented with Podcasting in mind (gee I wonder why I would want to add that –> www.dnnvoice.com). We’ll likely add more functionality to this feature in the future.
Author Name Text entry, you can now define the author name as a text field, rather than only choosing from a dropdown list of DNN users.
Comment Notification (to author) and auto Approval for comments from admins
DNN Token replacement functionality added to the Engage: Text/HTML module
New breadcrumb functionality
There is a lot more functionality included, and a whole list of bugs that have been squashed for this release. Check it out, and if you have any questions be sure to let me know.
So it’s been a long time coming, but finally, today, there is a stable release of the next step in the evolution of DotNetNuke. Version 05.01.00 was released today on www.DotNetNuke.com
If you’ve been under a rock, DotNetNuke 5 has been coming for quite some time, in December 5.0.0 was released, with 5.0.1 coming in February. Unfortunately both releases had a number of breaking changes that caused problems for third party modules. Well 5.1 resolves all of those known issues and moves the platform that next big step forward.
If you’re running older versions of DNN I recommend taking a look at the upgrade to 5.1. Here’s a list of features in 5.1 from Joe Brinkman.
You can also check out the latest DotNetNuke Podcast from www.dnnvoice.com in which Tom Kraak and I talk about the 5.1 release, as well as cover the Day of DNN event.
I’ve updated my personal website, car website, and my DNN Community sites (www.dnnvoice.com and www.dnnblogs.com). I’ve got a few more sites to upgrade tonight, but those are the most trafficked sites for now.
As with all upgrades/installs for DNN I highly recommend you backup your file system and database prior to upgrade, just in case. If you’re looking for how to perform an upgrade, check out this blog post I made a while back.
A huge thanks to everyone in the DNN community who provided development, and testing for the 5.1 release! This is a big day for DNN!
Note:
If you’re upgrading from DNN 4 you might run into an error with the 05.01.00 SQL script during the upgrade process, it’s not a big deal as your site will function fine, but you can find the fix for it here, run this from the host/sql page once your upgrade is complete.
So I meant to get this post put together yesterday, but was totally busy getting a number of other things done, so here it goes for today!
Day of DNN
So this weekend (Saturday 6/13/2009) is the big event for DNN so far this year, the first Day of DNN (http://www.dayofdnn.com) in Tampa Florida. What is the Day of DNN? A free day long event being held at the Microsoft offices in Tampa. There are 30 different sessions going on throughout the day, you can check out the agenda here. If you are in Florida and haven’t signed up, you should! Go to http://www.dayofdnn.com/ for more info, it’s free and there are a number of prizes to give away, so why not sign up? There are people coming from all over the United States, North America, and even other continents!
I will be presenting three sessions, “Handing off a DotNetNuke Site, Training Your Customers”, “Extending Your Web Applications Utilizing the MetaWeblog API”, and “Extending the DotNetNuke Installation Process Using Templates and New Installation Packages”.
Day of DNN Pre/Post Workshops
Even though the Day of DNN is on Saturday, Cuong Dang, Dang for short, and I are heading to Tampa on Thursday morning to get ready for our DotNetNuke Workshops. Through a partnership with the Day of DNN, Engage is providing pre and post Day Of DNN training classes. On Friday I’ll be teaching our DotNetNuke Essentials class, and on Sunday Dang and I will share in the duties of teaching our DotNetNuke Best Practices class. There’s still time to get signed up for the workshop sessions, they are $399 each, which is well discounted from our normal training class rate of $595.
We’ll have some Engage “hunter orange” t-shirts to give away, and maybe even a copy of our DotNetNuke Training DVD that I recorded with Carl Franklin to showcase.
DotNetNuke Voice Podcast
Last night Tom Kraak and I recorded and releases Show #8 of the DNNVoice. You can get the RSS feed into your Zune software by visiting http://www.dnnvoice.com and clicking on the link on the right side of that page. Give it a listen and let me know what you think, Tom and I really enjoy putting the podcast together.
I’ll be taking some of my recording equipment for DNNVoice and hopefully get a few, if not a whole lot, of interviews at Day of DNN. So if you’re going to be in Tampa, watch out I might hunt you down and ask you some questions for a future show.
Another special event this week, at least for me, is that I’ll be getting a few copies of the book that Patrick Renner and I wrote for Wrox. The book is a guide into how to get started with using DotNetNuke, from the first installation, to configuration of your first website. We talk about how to create a few basic types of websites, from a personal website, all the way through an enterprise level system.
The book is just about ready to ship (I think next week) to the major suppliers, and Wrox, our publisher, was kind enough to get me a few copies to take to Day of DNN this weekend. I’m anxious to see how it turned out, I believe that our book might be the first of the “new covers” that Wrox is going to be using.
Here’s the original cover design that was going to be used
and the new cover
Hopefully the book design will update on Amazon soon! I still have to figure out how to decide who gets a copy of the book! I feel like I need to keep two of the first three distributed copies, one for myself and one for Pat, my co-author. But I think we’ll get copies later on from Wrox, so I might just give all three away.
See you in Tampa!
