Will Strohl's Blog

Many of you are not even aware that the Open Graph Protocol even exists.  However, it has been the backbone of inter-connected websites ever since social sharing of content and web pages has existed.  This is the standard that Facebook, Google+, and others have adopted to properly connect, share, and display content from site to site when a visitor decides to share it.  Of course, like any other standard, every site varies on how well they adopt this particular standard. 

It’s once again been a while, but this version of the Media Module for DotNetNuke has been sitting in the hopper for a while.  Since before DNN 6.0 was released!  As of this moment, I am proud to say that the next version of the Media Module is available to you in the form of version 04.01.00.

I look forward to many things at DotNetNuke World – the networking, the events, the people, and more.  But one of the things I enjoy immensely is preparing a presentation for people.  This year, my presentation for DNN World was DotNetNuke Widgets, from A to Z.  Widgets (a.k.a., skin widgets) in DNN are largely misunderstood and seldom used. 

There is yet another release of the most popular image gallery module for DotNetNuke, the Lightbox Gallery module.  I am very proud of this release, as it marks a few important milestones for this module.  All the while, it continues to be one of my favorite open source modules to work on.  With this release, it continues to also improve upon the number of features it has and the number of people that use it as their standard image gallery module for DNN.

I need to get back on track with having a blog post ready for each and every DotNetNuke module release I make.  In this case, I definitely wanted to make it a point to have an update here in the blog.  There have been 4 different releases of the Content Slider module since this module was first made available two months ago.  As it turns out, there is a lot of demand for this module.  After all, there have already been over a thousand downloads so far.  Not bad for being in the wild for 8 weeks.

I was speaking with another member of the community about general DotNetNuke stuff, and the conversation turned to modules.  It was mentioned that there wasn’t a single known open source module that offered the ability to integrate content sliders or banner rotators into your DNN website.  There are of course a ton of ways to implement such a feature.  Snowcovered has numerous modules that allow you to do this.  So, I decided to create a nice and easy one for the Forge.

It’s that time again…  The Lightbox Gallery module for DotNetNuke needed some attention.  There were a few minor bugs that were annoying people that needed to be fixed, and a couple of enhancements as well.

I cannot honestly tell you where the time has gone.  I first embarked upon doing something about the Media Module as a team member in 2008.  Unfortunately, for many reasons, the module never really was updated until last year.  I was able to get a release out the door last June.  Somehow, nearly a year has flown by since that release.  Where did the time go?!!  Well, I was able to put my head down a few times over the past few months, and I am very happy to say that I have another release nearly ready for the release tracker.

The Widget Suite for DotNetNuke launched in late November of 2010 with a very simple purpose.  I wanted to document a few of the widgets I had created for technical presentations, and make them easy for others to use.  As with any other open source project that sees a little success, I had no idea how popular it would become – nowhere near as successful and DNN mind you – but unexpected just the same.