When I started up here at DotNetNuke Corp. in March, I spent quite a bit of time planning and tweaking our plan in regards to the DotNetNuke Training that we would be offering. The initial phase launched when we started offering our paid DotNetNuke Training Webinars in May 2010 covering a variety of DNN topics. Since then we have conducted almost 80 hours of live webinar based training, with hundreds more hours scheduled for the rest of the year.
This was just the first phase of a multi phased plan. Having been involved in the DotNetNuke Community since it’s early birth in 2003 I wanted to make sure that we provided resources that would be accessible to everyone in the community, and let’s face it, sometimes budgets aren’t lined up for everyone and paid training isn’t always an option.
Today I am proud to announce that we have launched another phase in our training offerings with a number of Free DotNetNuke Training courses. These courses are going to be offered monthly, and a couple of them start up as early as next week. For now we have four courses in addition to the free DotNetNuke Introduction webinar that you can sign up for. These courses are a great primer if you are looking to quickly get up and running with DotNetNuke, as well as great starting points if you look to continue your DNN education with our paid training offerings.
The four topics are
- Installing DotNetNuke
- Basic DotNetNuke Administration
- Basic DotNetNuke Module Development
- Basic DotNetNuke Skinning
To get signed up for these sessions visit the DotNetNuke Training page and click on the Basic Training link!
In the coming months we will announce even more training offerings, both paid and free, of course! Stay tuned to our DotNetNuke Training page for all the latest info on these offerings.
If you are looking for Free DotNetNuke skins be sure to check out the entries from the DotNetNuke Skinning Contest earlier this year. There are a ton of great skins there on the page that you can download and use on your DotNetNuke portals. The skins are all licensed under the same MIT license that DNN is released under, meaning you can do just about anything you want with them!
I’ve got the Maple skin in use on my Nissan Leaf website, it was a perfect fit for the site I setup earlier this month.
There are a number of other free dnn skins there besides the Maple skin, some I’m using on sites I can’t tell you about yet!
So last year, shortly after I moved from St. Louis to Denver, I went back to St. Louis to present at the 2nd St. Louis Day of .Net. Now, having moved from Colorado to California I’m headed back to St. Louis again. Once again presenting at the St. Louis Day of .Net, August 20-21, 2010. I will be presenting my crowd favorite DotNetNuke Best Practices session, the same one, possibly tweaked a bit, I delivered in Toronto in May. This session always seems to go over well with DNN people, old and new alike.
There are a few other “big name” DotNetNuke speakers who are also rumored to be attending and submitting sessions for this year’s Day of .Net. They are still taking speaker submissions (deadline unknown?), so if you want to present a DotNetNuke session be sure to get your submissions in quick!
If you aren’t up for speaking at the event you can still attend! What good are speakers if there is no audience? Get working on your boss/employer now, start the thought process of getting them to pay for the event. At the $125 price you are going to see a plethora of great sessions about DotNetNuke and other great topics.
If you can get away from work for the event (it’s actually a two day event) I highly encourage you to check out the St. Louis Day of .Net.
You can find more info about the event at http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com, be sure to check out their website, guess what it runs on? DotNetNuke of course! (Site designed and developed by Cuong Dang of R2integrated.)
Last week sometime, perhaps the week before, I got an email from INETA reminding me to get my submissions in for the INETA Community Champions contest for Q2 2010. I last entered Community Champion info for the Q4 2008 contest, in which I was graciously awarded a prize. Being ineligible for a year after winning I failed to keep up with all my various entries.
So the recent email got me going, I thought, boy I hope I can pull all my Community-Credit.com data over to the INETA Community Champions program, to which I found out you can’t. The programs aren’t currently linked, as they once were. That was a shame as I am pretty good about getting all my community related activities into Community-Credit.com, even though David Silverlight has basically had the site shutdown for over a year now, I figured if he ever turned it back on I would be all set!
I figured I would just get my Community-Credit info from the website manually and manually put it into the INETA Community Champions program, no such luck on that either. Something on www.community-credit.com is hosed because you can’t pull up results for anything you’ve done since July of 2009, last month it was June of 2009, and next month it will be August of 2009.
So in comes the API for CC. I have a codeplex project I created long ago for a simple DotNetNuke module that works with community-credit.com, I host an instance of the module on my site (on a restricted page of course) so that I can quickly enter all my activities via the API, which makes all my forum posting on DotNetNuke.com very easy to track. So I got to thinking, I know that the website is busted, but I wonder if the API itself works?
A few code tweaks to my module (uploaded to codeplex, vs2010 project) and boom, I was able to easily pull back a list of all my community-credit submissions over a specified date range, even for time within the past 12 months.
Then it was just a matter of filtering through that list of info to get the INETA related activities, user group organization, newsletters, meetings, speaking engagements, etc. I had a busy year! Between moving to Colorado last August and starting a DotNetNuke user group in Denver, speaking there, at the Denver User Group, DevConnections last fall, then moving to California and starting up the Bay Area DNN User’s Group and presenting at the Toronto DNN User Group, I had a lot of submissions to get caught up on. I also realized I completely left out my sessions at SDN in The Netherlands last December!
Nonetheless, yesterday I was honored to receive an email from INETA telling me that I was once again a Community Champion
What is an INETA Community Champion? Check out their website for more info, http://www.inetachamps.com/ If you are active in the .NET development community I encourage you to get your submissions in for Q3 2010. It’s a lot easier to enter them over time, as you do activities, then it is at the last minute, trust me!
Thanks again to INETA for putting on the Champs program. I look forward to trying to keep my activities up to date so that the next time I’m eligible I’m ready and waiting!
PS- if you are interested in checking out my CommunityCredit module on codeplex feel free to get the source and start playing with it. It isn’t pretty, and you likely will need to remove the Engage: Publish reference that is in there. In a future release I will likely pull that out of the project completely. It’s the Blog engine that powers my website at www.chrishammond.com and I think I just came up with a better way to get the info into community-credit.com for my blog posts ;)