Will Strohl's Blog

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.

Any of you that attended DotNetNuke World this year would probably agree… There were few moments when you didn’t see me holding a camera.  Most often, I was pointing it at you too, hoping to catch you having the fun time that we all know you were.  While I am not a professional photographer, I definitely do my best to create the best images possible.  Hopefully the pictures below reflect that.

If you’ve been in the DotNetNuke community for as long as I have and attend any event, you have undoubtedly run into people that haven’t used DNN in years.  In fact, the most common type of person I run into with this situation is someone that last looked at DotNetNuke when it was version 3!  I wanted to take some time and generate some videos to hopefully invite those people back to take a new look at what is essentially a totally different platform today!

I am by no means an expert on open source licenses.  I am not a lawyer.  I have, however, been part of the overall open source software community since roughly around 1999 or 2000.  During this time, I’ve dealt with open source software almost exclusively.  It’s a blur at this point.  I began at a time where PHP was king, and Microsoft’s (now Classic) ASP was trying to get in on the party.  Long story short, I found out immediately that I loved open source software and I never looked back. 

We just had the first Bay Area DotNetNuke User Group (BayDUG) meeting after having a break for over a year now.  It was a great presentation.  Chris Hammond did an overview of the features that DotNetNuke now offers to people that enable them to being rolling out their mobile-friendly websites.  As great as the overview was, it was missing something…  Why would you use one feature over another?  What should I think about before deciding the “best way” for my website when building my mobile-friendly site?

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. 

It was quite a fun thing to run the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan contest for the first time ever.  Though it really was a lot of work both for me and each of the entrants, it was more than worth the effort.  I was very honored to be able to run this contest, because as you probably realize, being a self-proclaimed super fan of DotNetNuke myself, I couldn’t wait to be able to officially designate and announce “the” SUPER fan.  This is just what we did at DotNetNuke World.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting with and giving a presentation to the Queen City DotNetNuke User Group (QCDUG) in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Clint Patterson had been asking me to visit the user group for the better part of a year now, so I decided to finally make that a reality.  Last Thursday, I joined many others in attending their meeting – but I also had a presentation to give…

There are all kinds of ways to make a skin (or design) in DotNetNuke react in a dynamic or personalized fashion, and it can be done in any number of ways.  To date, my favorite article on how to do this was written by Vassilis Terzopoulos (@thinkofdesign).  As his Hook Your DotNetNuke Skins blog post illustrates, a "user control" style skin allows you to use and reuse the DotNetNuke API in your skin design.  This has potentially limitless potential in customizing the user experience from a very high level across your entire site.

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.