Will Strohl's Blog

Hey friends,

If you’ve been around the DNN world for a while, you know I’ve worn a lot of hats in the community — speaker, module dev, consultant, core team member, and that guy who’s always posting memes during conference breaks. 😉

So it probably won’t surprise you that this announcement is both exciting and, well… a little overdue.

As you may or may not have realized, we at Upendo Ventures put up a content bounty last month. We challenged the community to do two things... First, create new content to help promote content related to DNN and DNN Summit. Second, we wanted all of you to spread the word to the rest of the community to help generate the content, but also simply to just spread the good word that is DNN. Here are the results of that bounty.

DNN Summit is right around the corner, and this year it's going to be a hybrid event. Those of us who are willing and able, will be meeting up in Las Vegas, but the majority of the event will happen online again. I wanted to let you know what we - Upendo Ventures - are doing for you this time...

This is the second in a series of blog posts and interviews with Gold Sponsors of the upcoming DNN Summit 2021 conference. In this interview, we speak to David Poindexter of nvisionative. David and I speak about his company, our expectations of the conference, and just banter around with some fun DNN stuff!  

This is the first in a series of blog posts and interviews with Gold Sponsors of the upcoming DNN Summit 2021 conference. In this interview, we speak to Mitchel Sellers of Iowa Computer Gurus. He gives us the goods on the event, what you can expect from the event, and he also introduces us to his company.

Google Analytics is often taken-for-granted in too many ways. When the average company thinks about Google Analytics, they simply ensure their Google Analytics code is in place and they keep track of what I refer to as vanity metrics. Copy. Paste. Done, right? Vanity metrics are quite deceiving, to be honest, and you’re only scratching the surface with what you could (and probably should) be doing with Google Analytics. In this article, we’re going to discuss how to dive deeper into your Google Analytics integration to grow your business.

If you didn’t already know, CMS is an acronym for “content management system.”  A CMS is used by many developers, consultancies, and companies to build their website.  It’s an incredibly common thing to do, as any flavor of CMS you choose will always save you effort and money, compared to building a website from nothing.  This is especially true if you look at the lifetime investment of your website.  Using a CMS framework or solution of some kind just seems to make sense.  After all, this is what I’ve built my own career upon since 2001.  However, then, CMS was known as a portal or portal framework.  That’s a long time ago, so it’s not a bad idea to take stock of things every now and thing to see if what you’re doing is the correct thing.  To this end, I asked myself, “How is CMS doing right now, and does it make sense to still be doing CMS-related work in the future?”

DNN Corp is on the verge of releasing their latest DNN Platform release, version 9.0.0.  As a DNN MVP, I of course had to take a look around at the new stuff coming.  It’s still in the early stages though, so there are a few areas where the new updates have some smoothing out to do, but overall, the updates we’re seeing in version 9.0 are very nice.  In short, it’s a much more contemporary user experience for all involved – but a very important step in the right direction for the future of all DNN’ers.  Here’s my preview and insights after using DNN 9.0 for the first time – a pre-release version of DNN 9.0, that is.

David Poindexter is our guest in this month’s show.  David is the “GeekEO” of nvisionative.  I’ve interviewed him before in a Hotcakes Hangout, so you can get a lot of information about David and his company nvisionative there.  In this show though, we wanted to focus on community activities.  David and his fellow DNN’ers in the Charlotte, NC area have been doing great things for years now, so we wanted to pick his brain a bit, and then we finished things off with a very HUGE surprise for the DNN community.

There are two DNN conferences coming up very soon.  DNNCon is in April, held in Baltimore, Maryland, and DNN-Connect is in Girona, Spain in June.  Our guests are all organizers or co-organizers, and they spend some time with us