A quick blog post as we near the final day of Movember 2011.

Thank to all of you who have taken the time to grow your fine Mo's (mustaches) for the past 30 days. Also thank you to those of you who started your mo's but caved to the weight that carrying a Mo brings, your efforts are still appreciated!

Do you work for one of our many DotNetNuke Partners? Are you already thinking about participating in Movember? Have I got a challenge for you.

Form a team for your company, you can do so via Movember.com, and then join the DotNetNuke Network! The partner that raises the most money for Movember

Dear DotNetNuke Community,

Movember is coming up, and I am getting the DotNetNuke Team going again this year. For those of you who weren’t with the company last year Movember is this. You start with a clean shaven face on November 1^st, and grow a mustache (not a beard, not a goatee) for the ENTIRE month, to raise awareness (and money) for cancers that effect men, primarily prostate cancer.

With all of the changes to DotNetNuke 6, a lot can be lost in the fact that you actually maintain the content of your website, and while the maintenance UI has changed, the content that you present is still up to you. A CMS can only do so much for displaying you content, if you want to do some fancy things, branch out of your standard HTML.

I recently wanted to do a couple of things for my car website (yes, I’m a car guy, so it is easy to use the website for examples).

1. I wanted to have a random image loaded in the top portion of the pages of the website, changing, or randomly loading, on each page load (not rotating live on the page).
2. I wanted to display a list of recent photos on the home page, and when you click on one of them I wanted them to open up in a light box.

I could have done this in any number of ways, but I chose to implement some simple jQuery for each, below I will show you how.

First things first, the website uses my free DotNetNuke skin, MultiFunction, available via Codeplex. I have some example documentation on how to customize the CSS for the skin to make your site unique, feel free to check out the Documentation page for those examples.

Have you ever had the need to blog a range of IP Addresses from accessing your website? Or perhaps, setup a website that is only accessible to a specific range of IP Addresses? DotNetNuke Request Filters are a great tool for getting such functionality configured, all configurable within your browser, without needing access to the settings in IIS.

Before configuring the request filters, I’ll throw out an example of why you might do this. If your website has a forum, or other community type interface, you have likely experienced spammers trying to take advantage of these features. Sometimes these spammers come from a specific IP Address, or even a specific range of ip addresses. If that is the case, you may want to turn off your website for those IP Addresses.

A word of warning, the instructions below are very powerful, if you aren’t careful, you could bring your website down. Read through the instructions before attempting to configure your website’s request filters.

Configuring your DotNetNuke website to be accessible from one IP Address

Here are the steps to configure request filtering for an IP Address, essentially making the website ONLY accessible to a person browsing from a computer using the defined IP address. All other addresses will redirect to DotNetNuke.com. (these instructions assume you are running on DotNetNuke 6+

It is a very common question, and asked all over the place, twitter, the forums, blogs, etc. Who do you use for DotNetNuke Hosting? Well, I have recently spent some time moving all of my websites around, and figured I would do a quick post on what I am currently using for hosting.

If you follow any of my blogs, you may remember all the discussion last fall about Movember. Yes, you read that correctly, Movember, take the N in November and replace it with an M, Movember!

Why would you ever rename November to Movember? To raise awareness for cancers that affect men, primarily prostate cancer, but others as well. The basic premise of Movember is this, for the entire month, you grow a mustache. How simple is that? Start on November 1st, clean shaven, and finish on November 30th, clean shaven except for your mustache! All while raising awareness, and money for research into cancers that affect men.

The Personal Connection

Earlier this year my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer. While he is fortunate that they believe it to be caught very early there is always the risk that it can spread, He is getting ready to start the process of treatment. So obviously, my connection to Movember this year is even stronger than last year.

Movember 2010

Last year we formed a DotNetNuke team on Movember.com, which we plan to do again this year, just as soon as they open up the process. I’ll post a blog, and update this blog post as well, with a link to the team and how you can join.

We had 38 folks join the team, and a lot more donate to the cause. While not everyone who joined the team worked for DotNetNuke Corporation, a number of the members were from our offices around the world. Check out this slide show comparing some of the employees to famous Mo’s (mustaches)

Then of course there is the fact that last year I said if I personally raised $1,000, I would shave my head at the end of the month. Well, I did, and I did.

To be honest, my wife was NOT happy about the head shaving thing, and most of the office was pretty put off by it as well! I won't be making that challenge again, not this year, but perhaps I will come up with something.

Goal for 2011

In 2010 we raised almost $7k for Movember, for 2011 we’re setting a goal of $10k, doable, but it is definitely going to take some work to get there! We’re going to need to grow our team, and we’re going to need to get everyone involved to try and raise money. I think everyone should set a goal

Getting Ready

So you have just under two months to start getting ready for Movember. Most importantly, prep your significant other for the fact that you are going to grow the mustache! If you can't grow a MO, then perhaps you can find a surrogate to do it for you!

If you didn’t hear the news, DotNetNuke 6.0.1 was released yesterday, check out Joe’s blog post for more details.

On that note, I put out two new open source releases as well. I updated DNNSimpleArticle with a fix for DNN6 and made made a few other minor changes. As always, the module is released in C# and you can get the installable package, or the source package over on http://dnnsimplearticle.codeplex.com/. If you want to see the module in action check out http://www.bicycletips.com/

I also released an update for Multifunction, the World’s Best Free DotNetNuke Skin. It has a minor CSS fix for DNN6 (and 6.0.1). I also removed the custom actions menu it was using in favor of the new DotNetNuke 6 specific actions menu. MultiFunction is a C# skin, with both install and source packages available from http://multifunction.codeplex.com/

Be sure to rate both releases when you download!

If you don’t know Will Strohl, you are one of the lucky ones. He’s an annoying guy, a total lunatic when it comes to DotNetNuke, but even that can’t fix his flaws.

You can however help fix one of the flaws of the “Mighty” Will Strohl. Will has a problem, he can’t afford collared shirts. Seriously. if you’ve ever met him you know this.

Check out this public service announcement for Will.

Now, here’s a challenge for you, two of them actually.

1) Bring your un-needed collared shirts (size XL) to DotNetNuke World in Orlando in Florida. Will needs them.

2) Make your own video for Will! Actually, provide your own audio track. I created the video and audio in about 30 minutes. I’m looking for people who can come up with a better audio track for the video, come up with something funny, something sad, something crazy, I don’t care! Just download the original WMV file (right click, save as) for the video and remove the audio, add your own. Then upload it to YouTube or Vimeo, and tweet the link to the video with #Collars4Will in the message. http://cjh.am/strohlc

Disclaimer: this video was generated out of necessity, check out the video that Will made for me a while back.

In case you didn’t hear, DotNetNuke 6 was released yesterday. In preparation for the release I went up to our Engineering office in Langley Canada (I work out of our San Mateo, California office) to sit down with some of our developers and have them do some demonstrations of some of the new features in DotNetNuke 6.

These are all relatively short videos, with the goal of them being under 10 minutes, one or two is slightly longer than that. They are all free to watch! Here’s a listing of those videos, and URLs to them in the DotNetNuke Video Library. In no particular order.

So this year will be my 3rd year, (would be my 4th if I hadn’t bailed at the last minute on year 1), that I will be speaking at the St. Louis Day(s) of .Net. If you haven’t been to the STLDODN you should definitely check it out. It is a great two day event, and at $125 (if you register by 7/8/2011) the price can hardly be beat!

The event is being held this year on August 5th and 6th, 2011. Again at the Ameristar Casino in St. Charles, MO, about 10 minutes from where I used to live (two moves ago now).

Read the full blog post for all the details.

DotNetNuke 6 is coming, DotNetNuke 6 is coming! That’s right, we’re getting close, close enough that we had our first “beta” for DNN6 today. While we’ve had a couple of CTP (community technology preview) releases, the beta today has quite a bit of things wrapped up and addressed.

I’ve been meaning to make some changes to the skin I was using on ChrisHammond.com for a couple of weeks now. Basically it was running the MultiFunction Free DotNetNuke Skin that I created/released back in May. I wanted to make the “Home” skin use a different header image than the other pages, meaning the home page would have a larger header graphic, and the other pages would have a smaller graphic.

If you are in the mid west and looking for a new job, you should check out this position with United Benefit Advisors. They are looking for a developer to work with DotNetNuke on a variety of projects. You can find out more information on their Monster Listing, or via the Forum post on DotNetNuke.com.

http://jobview.monster.com/Web-Developer-Job-Indianapolis-IN-99784599.aspx

If you are interested in presenting a session (or three) at DotNetNuke World in Orlando in November time is running out to get your sessions submitted!

You have until June 8th to get them in. Even if you haven’t spoken at a DotNetNuke Conference in the past we are looking for new talent, new ideas, and new topics!

So head on over to the speaker submission page and get started, obviously the more sessions you submit the better your chances are for being picked!

DotNetNuke World is November 9th through 11th, 2011, and will be held in Orlando Florida. What happened to DotNetNuke Connections? Well, while doing the conference in Las Vegas the past few years, we’ve grown up, and it’s time to do our own show! Having our own show, and having it in Orlando offers a lot of benefits. 1) It’s far cheaper for you to attend compared to Las Vegas. 2) it is easily accessible for our DotNetNuke user’s in Europe. 3) You can easily turn it into a family vacation, as I hear there are a few things that families might be interested in around there.

DotNetNuke Training

We will once again have some pre-conference training available, the topics and registration information for those will be announced within the next couple of weeks.

If you haven’t checked out the DotNetNuke Video Library lately, you really should, there is a lot of great content in there. I just uploaded 5 new videos as part of a new series that I am recording.

Beginning DotNetNuke Module Development, creating a Task Manager module for DNN. This will be a series of videos that get created over the next couple of months revolving around the creation of an open source Task Manager module. The module will be part of the DotNetNuke Forge, and the source code will be hosted on Codeplex.com.

The first videos show you how to get up and running with a new project, creating the project in Visual Studio using a template, how to install the module, and how to create the module in the Forge and how to use Codeplex for source control. The next round of videos (coming in the next couple of weeks) will get you into the development aspects of DotNetNuke.

You can check out the first 5 videos now in the Video Library, or using these direct links.

1. Task Manager Series Introduction
2. Creating the Task Manager Project
3. Task Manager solution overview and installation
4. Creating a project in the DotNetNuke Forge
5. Adding your source code to TFS on Codeplex
6. More coming soon!

For a continually updated list of the videos in the series, check out the Module Development Wiki page which has the videos listed, and will be updated as new videos are added.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been feeling awful open source like. We come from an open source background, and we, DotNetNuke Corporation, are still very very committed to stick with those roots. So I put together a couple of releases for projects I work on, and created a new project as well.

Read the full blog post to find out about

Wiki Module v4.5 almost ready for Release
The World’s Best Free DotNetNuke Skin
An Update to the DNNSimpleArticle Module

Well it has been four days since MultiFunction, The World’s Best Free DotNetNuke Skin was released, and over 104 people have downloaded it from the codeplex site. You can see it in action on our demo site http://multifunction.dnndaily.com 

Have you tried it out? If so, let me know what you think of it. I’m open to suggestions, though I don’t promise to implement all of them!

Have you found the commented out DIV tag yet? Know what it is for? Perhaps I’ll turn that on in a future release for all to see

If you are using the skin and want to be included in our list of Links be sure to fill out the Contact form on the MultiFunction demo site.

If you haven’t tried it yet, go download the skin!