Development Posts from Chris Hammond

Engage Software is pleased to announce that Engage: Publish 5.1 has been released for download on www.engagemodules.com. For a complete list of enhancements and bug fixes for the 5.1 release of Publish you can visit the release notes.

Earlier this year I was doing some work on a website of mine that runs on DNN, and has SSL enabled. I copied the database and file system, and set these up on my development machine, Vista Ultimate. I ran into a problem though, I couldn't actually get the site to load, I had all the usual configured properly: a) file permissions b) IIS virtual directory under classic app pool c) database setup and the web.config modified

Joe Brinkman posted the call for speakers for OpenForce 08. Check out his post, then get over to www.openforce08.com to submit your presentation topics (must be logged in to access the page)!

Yesterday I spent the day downtown, near Busch Stadium. Though I paid $25 to park, I wasn't there to watch the game. I was there for our first DotNetNuke Training class. Everything went great, the feedback from the attendees was good, and I think i successfully filled their heads with all sorts of information.

As soon as I click post on this blog post I will be clicking "Install" on the windows update screen to install Vista SP1.... Fingers crossed.

DotNetNuke 4.8.2 released today available for download from www.DotNetNuke.com

Wow, tonight I was working on a DNN module and took a little breather by posting in the asp.net forums, thinking I could help a few people out. I haven't posted there in quite a while as I am mostly active over on the forums for www.dotnetnuke.com

DNN 04.08.01 released today! Want to know what changed? Well here's a list I pulled from Gemini

In the January newsletter from the DotNetNuke Corporation Shaun Walker mentions that OpenForce07 in Las Vegas and the conference in Europe last September were enough of a success that there will be two more conferences for 2008!

What is a DotNetNuke Core Team member doing running CommunityServer on his personal web site? I'm not anymore! Last week I converted www.ChrisHammond.com from CommunityServer 2.1 to run on DotNetNuke 4.8.0! I typed up a HUGE blog post covering some of the details of the conversion. If you want to read about it (no one is forcing you to click this link) visit the post over on my personal website. Heck, my wife's website was running on DotNetNuke LONG before mine was, how sad is that?

If you've got nothing to do, take a moment to check out my recently converted personal website located at http://www.chrishammond.com Yesterday afternoon I did the final conversion from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. There is still a lot of work to do for the site, I'll create a few new modules, need to implement the MetaBlogAPI, as well as some other new functionality but the biggest thing is that I need to work on a better skin for the site, which is one of the benefits of DotNetNuke VS CommunityServer. I can easily create and change the skin that my site is running, where CommunityServer was MUCH harder to skin. I'm definitely not a designer, if you can't tell by looking at the site, the skin that is up there now as just something I threw together quickly last night.

It looks like they are finally opening up weblogs.asp.net to more community members, good deal for everyone involved! Check out the post from Joe for more details how you can get your own blog here.

So I've been working for the past few weeks on an a little project. The goal is to convert http://chrishammond.com from CommunityServer to DotNetNuke. I'm not going to be using the DotNetNuke Blog module, instead I've been adding some new features into the Engage: Publish module so that it will support blog like functionality, with the ultimate goal of making it support nearly all the blog type functionality that you find in common blogging systems. I've spent probably 100 hours over the past month or two working on the module (mostly on my own time) to get it setup for the conversion.

Well, the 4.8.0 release of DotNetNuke came out today, and some people are having some problems, so I figured I'd take the time to put together what I hope will be a short post with my professional opinion of how you should handle DNN upgrades. Here are some questions and thoughts you should have before you upgrade.  Does the new release offer you features that you absolutely need? If you answer NO to this question, then step away, go work on something else.

DotNetNuke 4.8.0 dropped today! Get it now from the Downloads page.

Tonight we released the latest version of Engage Publish, 4.4.4 (12/9/2007). This release has a few minor bug fixes, a few UI improvements, and some enhanced features!

While working on the Engage: Publish module's latest round of enhancements I started having problems working with my development machine at home. The machine here is a Vista Ultimate machine that I've blogged about getting configured in the past. The issue I had been stumbling over for a few weeks, though only researched solutions last night, had to do with ASP.NET Ajax. DNN ships with an older version of the System.Web.Extensions DLL. Which appears to work fine on my machine at work (in which I probably also had the AJAX framework installed). At home though on Vista whenever I tried to go to one of my test pages that had Publish installed I would get an error about the Scriptmanager must come before the Updatepanel control.

I've started working on a quick application to export Photos from a CommunityServer website. If there's any interest I'll post up the code for this later in the week. I'm working to get http://chrishammond.com off of CommunityServer and setup on DotNetNuke. Considering I'm a DNN Core team member and my fulltime job is dealing with DNN every day it was about time to do so.