I am an absolute fan of dotnetnuke - and it has a very active community behind it.  I thought that it was easily as popular as Joomla, but I have had a look on Google Trends, and if what I am seeing is right, it looks like joomla is at least an order of magnitude more popular than DotNetNuke...

Tonight I thought I would put together a development environment to run DotNetNuke 5 RC2 to start exploring the Core in debug mode.  So here is my first article on setting up this environment.  I will add some more articles with about my exploration into the core.

1) Download "DotNetNuke_05.00.00_Source_RC2.zip"

2) Unzip to "c:\development\DNN5

3) Copy"c:\development\DNN5\Website\development.config" and rename to "c:\development\DNN5\Website\web.config"

4) Create a new Database called DNN5RC2DB

5) Add ASPNET user to database security so we can use integrated security

6) Edit the web.config changing the SiteSqlServer connection stings to point to the new database and configure for integrated security.

7) Configure IIS, creating a new Virtual Directory (DNN5RC2) pointing to (c:\development\DNN5\Website\development.config)

8) Configure folder security permissions on c:\development\DNN5\Website\ to include the SQLExpress user and ASPNET user- I normally set with modify permissions.

9) Load Visual Studio 2008 and Open Website

10) Configure DNN5RC2 instance:

a. Test Permissions:	b. Test Permissions:	c. Database config details:
d. Test database config:	e. Database scripts complete...	f. Configure host user settings
g. No to updates for this env.	h. Config Admin user settings	i. Finished:

Ok, so now in the debug environment we have completed the setup of the site.

So now I can run DNN5 RC2 in debug mode, allowing me to step through the code to see what it is doing.

I want to start a UK based DotNetNuke User Group - my aim is to meet up every month in London (hopefully other cities if we can build up the numbers).  I don''t know how many people will be interested - I think a  minimum number of people per meeting should be ten, but I am sure with nearly 650,000 registered DotNetNuke members out there we must have a good few thousand living in the UK :)

This will be an unofficial User Group, so I hope that will be ok; my intention is to help promote and endorse DotNetNuke and I would really like to meet up every month with other people who are using it to either provide modules to the community, or to provide real web-based business solutions.

The meetings would be mostly free format where we can share what we are doing and learn from each other.  It would be fantastic to arrange some presentations from some UK Based DotNetNuke experts - but one step at a time.

So, if you have an interest in DotNetNuke, and you would like to meet up with others to find out what they are doing, so you can share and learn then please send me a message via my contact form.

Do you write DotNetNuke related articles in your blog?  If so, then I would like to invite you to join DNNSecrets.co.uk - all  you need to do is register and then add your blog details.  I will then approve your blog if it is of sufficient quality - i.e. you write about DotNetNuke and related technologies.  We are hoping to build up a list of high quality blogs that will attract the attention of all DotNetNuke fans out there.

To register your blog follow these steps:

1. Register an account on DNNSecrets.co.uk here.

2. Navigate to the "My Blog Feeds" page and complete the "Add Blog Form":

3. I will then review your blog and if it has some interesting DotNetNuke articles then I will add it to our Blog List.

Some rules:

1) You can''t advertise affiliate schemes etc.  You may however advertise your own work.

2) Your blog has to contain articles about DotNetNuke and related technologies

3) Posts which are not about DotNetNuke might be deleted - for example, if you use your blog for various different things like posts about  your Holidays, your new car etc.  then those posts might not be displayed on DNNSecrets.co.uk.

4) Usual rules, like you are responsible/liable for the content you write - I cannot be held accountable in any way for your content, DNNSecrets is here to help benefit the DotNetNuke community in general - and I want to keep things positive, so no flaming of people or other technologies etc.

5) You may include more than one blog, but you must be the owner of each blog.  A limit of 5 blogs will be set, although I can''t imagine many people even having two DotNetNuke related blogs let alone 5!

6) A link to DNNSecrets.co.uk from your blog is required - this is to help promote DNNSecrets (which also helps you because it will bring more visitors to your blog).

Currently DNNSecrets.co.uk is in beta, so certain things will change over the next few weeks/months.  It seems quite stable and it will accept blogs in any RSS or Atom version.

Well, I haven''t posted for a while on this blog - but I have got some good news.  I am about to go into beta with my new DotNetNuke blog aggregator site.  It accepts both Atom and RSS blogs, so if you own a DotNetNuke related blog then please register and add your blog.  I will then review your blog and approve it if it is of sufficient quality.  To have a look and register your blog please visit DNNSecrets.co.uk.

It is in beta at the moment, so you can expect some changes over the coming weeks.  And I would really appreciate your feedback as well.  The reason why I put this blog aggregator together was to raise money for charity by using the same system on my BlogRelief.com website.  BlogRelief.com promotes blogs for a small donation - i.e. to promote your blog for 12 months it will cost the blogger just £30.00 which goes straight to charity.  The bloggers benefit because they get more traffic, and the charities benefit because they receive the Bloggers money donations.  BlogRelief.com is a not-for-profit personal venture of mine, and I hope it will be accepting registrations in the next few weeks. 

I really appreciate the hard work done by the DotNetNuke core team - I think it is a fantastic full featured web framework that allows me to put these solutions together in just a few days rather than weeks or months.  Of course it helps that I am my own customer :),  but even so - the platform is so powerful and the community is thriving.  I just hope that I can make BlogRelief.com work - if anyone wants a version for their country then please let me know - it would be great to take BlogRelief.com global.

I have been playing with DotNetNuke 5.0 Beta 6 (Cambrian). My development system is Windows XP running IIS 5.1.  Here you can see a simple installation guide.

Ok, so you have had the idea for the next killer app - now all you need is some seed money and your away.  I think that may start-ups are missing out if they don''t use a web framework as a basis for their solution.  There are many out there Joomla, Drupal, and many more, but my favourite is DotNetNuke.

Aweber is one of the best Unlimited Autoresponders, Follow Ups, Newsletters systems on the web, so naturally I wanted to integrate Aweber with my DotNetNuke website.

So I signed up to Aweber and created my subscription form.  The subscription form was a simple bit of HTML consisting of a Form, some hidden fields, a few input text boxes and a submit button.  I added it into an HTML/Text module on my front page only to find it did not work!

The reason for it not working is because each DotNetNuke page already has a form.  And the form has an enctype of "multipart/form-data".  The usual trick here (also can be used to get PayPal buttons to work on a DotNetNuke website) is to remove the form tags and add an onClick event consisting of something like:

<input type="button" onClick="this.form.action=''http://www.aweber.com/scripts/addlead.pl''; this.form.submit();" value="submit" />

However, this did not work with Aweber - and I was redirected to a page explaining that the email address supplied was invalid.  I assumed that Aweber wasn''t actually receiving this data with my adapted bit of html code.

The solution - which seems to work well is to change the form encoding to the default "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" so it now looks like

<input type="button" onClick="this.form.encoding=''application/x-www-form-urlencoded''; this.form.action=''http://www.aweber.com/scripts/addlead.pl'';this.form.submit();this.form.encoding=''multipart/form-data''" value="submit" />

I know there are opt-in newsletter modules available for DotNetNuke, but if you want a single Newsletter/autoresponder/Follow Ups system used on a variety of different websites (DNN and other) then Aweber is one of the best.

Google offers an excellent calendar - see http://www.google.com/calendar.  It is possible to share your Google Calendar with the rest of the world by ticking the “Share all information on this calendar with everyone” option in the “Share this calendar” configuration section.  When you select this option Google asks:

Are you sure you want to share this calendar with everyone?
Public calendars appear in Google Calendar searches.

Well, the idea is to share the calendar on our DotNetNuke website, so it is also great that people can find it via Google Calendar searches also.

The last part of the Google Calendar configuration is to select the “Calendar Details” tab and configure your calendar options by clicking the “Customise the colour, size and other options” link.

Once you have completed the look and feel of your calendar, the final thing to do in the Google Calendar settings is to click the green “Calendar Address HTML” button to get the URL of your shared Google Calendar.

Adding your Google Calendar to your website is now nice and simple:

1. Create an IFrame module
2. Paste in the URL of your Google Calendar
3. Set the width, height, and other IFrame properties in the Module settings

The result - you have a great (free) read-only calendar on your DotNetNuke website:

It would also be nice to allow visitors/members of your website to suggest new events - this could easily be done using XMod or ListX or maybe a simple custom module written in VB.Net.

Only 10 reasons I hear you say!  Well, here are my top ten, please feel free and add your comments why you think businesses should choose DotNetNuke for their Business Website.