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Keeping with their promise to release often, we have a new beta version that was released today.  The new beta can be downloaded from CodePlex.

The following bugs have been fixed in this new release

(5.1.0.364) Beta 3

DNN-9853
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Binary Compatability issue for repository

DNN-9871
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Audit info when creating new pages

DNN-9661
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Errors in user registration form (profile properties)

DNN-9892
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Enable disable host menu

DNN-9898
Installation / Upgrade
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   upgrade from 493 to 5.1.0.266

DNN-9899
File Manager
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Admin cannot add/delete folders or files, etc. in Admin-->File Manager

DNN-9904
Core Modules
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Repository is broken after after upgrading TestBed_493_3 with 5.1.0.266

DNN-9908
Skinning
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Skin ControlPanel breaking change

DNN-9905
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Some Admin/ Host Controls are missing after upgrading TestBed_493_3 with 5.1.0.266

DNN-9903
Installation / Upgrade
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Languages broken after upgrading TestBed_493_3 with 5.1.0.266

DNN-9895
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Adding Module to Another Page

DNN-9897
UI / Usability
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   No longer shows page hierarchy when adding existing module

DNN-9856
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Upgrade from 5.0.1 - Console

DNN-9918
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Exception when emptying recycle bin

DNN-9916
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Menu doesn't refresh after restoring a page

DNN-9930
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Error on Language rename

DNN-9890
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   changes to tabs need to audit tab and tabpermission changes

DNN-9952
General
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Module Settings: Move module to page results in a copy instead.

DNN-9964
File Manager
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Permissions Grid Does Not Correctly Display Permissions

DNN-9965
UI / Usability
New Feature
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Display version info for "Beta" builds

DNN-9967
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   user view shows all users

DNN-9936
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Sitemap priority defaults to 0

DNN-9925
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Fallback Skin Doctype changes not reflected in UI on load / postbacks

DNN-9912
Security
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   5.1.0 - Possible Breaking Change FileSystemUtils.SetFolderPermissions

DNN-9946
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Behaviour Change for Inline Editing

DNN-9254
Performance
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   "PageState Persistence" set to "Memory" kills AJAX modules

DNN-9568
Security
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Permission issues

DNN-9654
Search
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Search Input module: no search text

DNN-9950
Localization / ML
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Incorrect icon for button

DNN-9928
Control Panel
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   User with page edit permission can see admin & host console links

DNN-9953
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Missing Default Language options => Broken Site Settings

DNN-9948
Admin / Host Functions
Bug
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Control Panel Visibility Selection not Saved properly

DNN-9971
Admin / Host Functions
New Feature
Checked-In
Complete

Summary:   Add Skin Event Handling

There is a new release expected at any time to cure the issue that developed today that involves not allowing the install to complete if .NET 3.5 is not installed on the system.

How many new that there was a new Free DotNetNuke Admin Guide available.  I hadn’t seen an announcement about it anywhere.  But the other day after installing one of the latest versions of DNN, there it was on my new shiny install.

I’m not sure how long it has been available, but from the looks of the form that it takes you to to complete information to receive the guide, it is a relatively new document.

Being ever curious I filled out my information and then proceeded to download the document.

The document is 182 pages long and contains some good information for someone who is not familiar with DotNetNuke and has just installed the framework on their system and wants to know what to do from there.

Here’s the short list of topics that the document covers:

• Introduction
• DotNetNuke Concepts
• Managing Your User Account
• Configuring DotNetNuke Host Settings
• Creating One or More Portals
• Installing and Allocating Modules
• Configuring your Site Settings
• Building a Portal
• Managing Content Using Modules
• Working with the Recycle Bin
• Adding Search Capabilities to your Site
• Adding your Privacy and Terms of Use Statements
• Submitting your Site to Search Engines
• Managing Role Based Security
• Managing User Accounts
• Working with Files and Images
• Managing Vendors, Banners and Affiliates
• Sending Newsletters to Site Members
• Managing Site Design
• Text/HTML Replacement Tokens

As you can see from the list there are a lot of topics covered and really gives a new DNN administrator something to get them started with.  There are walkthroughs on how to do the tasks and should help with a lot of newbie questions to the framework.

To get your free copy – this will take you to the form to complete and let you download your own copy. After downloading I also received a sales email from Nik Kalyani with more information about the Professional Edition as well as an invite to a demo.

While taking a look at the forum this early morning, I noticed a post that someone had made yesterday or late last night not sure of at the moment, but the post made mention of them receiving an email that the PE version for 4.9.4 had been released, but that the CE version wasn’t posted yet.

So being me I hoped on my trusty browser and headed over to CodePlex to see what I could see.  Lo and behold there was a shiny brand new update to the 4.0 release of DotNetNuke.

So what’s new in 4.9.4

Major Highlights

• Fixed a major module caching issue which resulted in empty content for webcrawlers
• Improved performance of FormatRemoveSQL method

Security Fixes

• Low - Errorpage information leakage
• Low - HTML/Script Code Injection Vulnerability

Updated Modules/Providers

The following modules and providers have been updated in the 4.9.4 packages.  Please see the specific project pages for notes on what bugs or enhancements were corrected with each release.

Modules

• Announcements 04.00.03

Providers

• Removed the AD Provider so that it cannot be installed by the Install Wizard.  It can still be manually installed.

Download the new version

I guess I'm off to start upgrading some sites this morning.

For anyone who has interest in signing up for the technical preview, that is due in July. The registration form page is below.

Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview

After installing the latest 5.1.0 beta of DotNetNuke that was released this week, I noticed a new icon and a couple of links in the Control Panel when I logged in as the host of the new install.

As always in my endeavors with this platform my curiosity got the best of me and I had to see where these two links took me. I assumed that it would be to something that only an admin or host would need access to.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the result on clicking on the admin link.

It brought me to a page in my new DNN install that had a link to each of the pages under my admin menu. As well as when I placed my mouse over any of the items in the Admin Console, a tooltip is displayed telling me about the link and what I can find by following it. 

Also on the console there are two drop down boxes one is to select the size of the icons for use on the page. As well as another one to choose whether to display the contents of the page in simple view or detailed view.  Detailed view basically takes the tooltip contents and places it on the page instead of the popup window.

I also noticed that this console module was placed on the Admin page of the menu and the host console was placed on the Host page of the menu.  In previous versions of DNN these two menu choices were not enabled so we couldn’t navigate to them in the menu structure.  I think this will be a great tool for new administrators and people unfamiliar with how DNN works.

But there are more goodies in this module.  I also checked to see if this module had any settings that could be adjusted. I found that there are a number of different settings in the module settings.

The settings of the module are as follows:

• Show children of: allows us to set this module on any page and then show the children of a different page then the one we are currently on.  If no page is selected then it shows the children pages of the current page the module resides on.
• Default icon size: this can be set to 16px or 32px for displaying the icons in the module.
• Allow icon resize: if this checkbox is checked then the user can select the size of the icons they want to use in the module themselves in the drop down box.
• Default view: this can be set to simple or detailed view for displaying the items in the console module.
• Allow view change: if this checkbox is checked then the user can select the type of view that they want to see in the module themselves.
• Show tooltip: checking this checkbox determines whether or not we will see the jQuery tooltip when we hover over a choice in the module.

If a user makes changes to the console module as to how they want to view that page such as large icons or detailed view, these changes get saved and the next time the user comes back they will be presented with the same view that they previously had.  This is a nice feature and allows each user to customize how they want to interact with the module.  Also the module checks permissions to determine what pages a user has access to.

After looking at the module and the code that it generates, it is nice to see that they code outputs xhtml and doesn’t make use of tables anywhere in the output. So it provides a good example of how modules should be written to take care of the over exuberant use of html tables in module development.

I have some uses that I can picture for the use of this module going forward in the future in some of my development.  Most of which would be a similar use as to how the core framework uses it, but would be incorporated into my modules.

Guess I’ll go back to exploring this new release see if I can find some more new features to let everyone in on.

One of the big complaints that I have seen over the years with DotNetNuke has been the horrible URL’s that get produced by the framework.  This is a problem that is part of most dynamically created content on the web, not only DotNetNuke.

For the successful Content Management Systems, they have come up with ways to make these ugly URL’s more human friendly.  DNN did this back in about version 3.0 with the introduction of Friendly URL’s.  This allowed us to get rid of the dreaded querystring for SEO purposes.  So we went from URL’s that looked like http://domain.com/Default.aspx?tabid=39 to http://domain.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx.

This was great for getting better rankings with the pages in the search engines but doesn’t give us that URL that is easy to remember in human terms.  This is the default setup that has made it’s way into the DotNetNuke eco-system, and has given us this common complaint about DotNetNuke sites in general.

There is a solution to this that anyone who is looking to make their site distinctive and remove that stigma about it being a DNN site can use.  It is available within the core framework itself we just need to make some changes to the configuration of the web application.

So lets look at the default configuration in the web.config file for the Friendly URL provider:

   1: <friendlyUrl defaultProvider="DNNFriendlyUrl">

   2:   <providers>

   3:     <clear />

   4:     <add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" 

   5:         type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" 

   6:         includePageName="true" 

   7:         regexMatch="[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]" />

   8:   </providers>

   9: </friendlyUrl>

As you can see it only has a couple of options defined by default in the config file when you first install DNN which are the following:

1. includePageName: this is set to true by default and determines if we have the name of the page included in our URL when we are in searchfriendly mode of the provider.
2. regexMatch: I'm not a regex expert by any means.  But the default match allows the inclusion of all upper and lower characters as well as ll numbers, spaces, underscores and dashes.  If I’m wrong someone let me know in the comments would you.

This is what gives us those ugly URL’s everyone complains about. 

Now when we venture into the Core Framework code for the FriendlyUrl Provider, we have a few more options that aren’t shown in the web.config and can really give us some nicer URL’s to work with on our DNN site.

FriendlyURL Provider Options

1. includePageName: this was explained above.
2. regexMatch: this was explained above
3. fileExtension: by default the file extension on DNN is .aspx. I played around with this option and also looked at the code and although it is defined and being pulled into the provider in the code. I don’t see where this is actually doing anything in provider.
4. urlFormat: this is the real treasure in the provider we have two URL formats that we can use here the default of searchfriendly or humanfriendly. If we do not include it in the web.config then by default it is searchfriendly but if we add this and change it to humanfriendly then we have much nicer URL’s to work within the framework.

So lets change it in our web.config file to be humanfriendly:

   1: <friendlyUrl defaultProvider="DNNFriendlyUrl">

   2:   <providers>

   3:     <clear />

   4:     <add name="DNNFriendlyUrl" 

   5:         type="DotNetNuke.Services.Url.FriendlyUrl.DNNFriendlyUrlProvider, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" 

   6:         includePageName="false" 

   7:         regexMatch="[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]" 

   8:         fileExtension=".aspx" 

   9:         urlFormat="humanfriendly" />

  10:   </providers>

  11: </friendlyUrl>

Once we do this and save our web.config file. We can go refresh our site, and now should have URLs that look like the following: http://domain.com/home.aspx or http://domain.com/admin.aspx.  It also makes it easier for allowing direct logins without placing a link on the page for logging in because in this format our login page becomes http://domain.com/login.aspx.

I hope that people find this information useful although what we have in DNN is just a basic URL provider there are other providers out there in the DNN community.  When I have time I will try to add some of them to this post or provider another post with a list of them out there.

Well today has been a great day for anyone who uses and develops with DotNetNuke. The first public release of 5.1 was released to everyone on Codeplex today.  Although it wasn’t without mishap today.

The first version that was uploaded and released version 5.1.0.254 had a couple of show stopper issues that prevented the installation of the framework.  This was quickly noticed and replaced with a good version. 

I recommend anyone who is developing modules and skins for DNN and want to get a good look at the direction that the framework is headed, then you should download this version and see what is coming.  There are some great changes that I will document in some future blog posts as time permits over the next week or so.

I will be posting a blog post about the installation of the new version and hope to have that available shortly.

To find out more:

• Public Beta Program
• Issue Submission
• Beta Discussion @ DNN

One thing to remember with this software, it is beta software and should not be used in any production system.  This software should only be used for evaluating the software as to new features that will be available in the release.

For anyone who may have missed this. I thought I would post this so that everyone can get an idea of where DotNetNuke is headed over the next little while as well as few other things that the Core Team is batting around for the public to know.

DotNetNuke Team Meeting Notes from 4/30/09