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During the early years of developing with DNN we only had one true authentication model to use.  This was the trusted Forms based authentication built into ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1.  When we started to get to version 3.0 of DotNetNuke, we started to see a lot of buzz around the use of other authentication types. 

One of the first was integration with Active Directory within a corporate environment to allow users just to use their current network credentials to login.  The first version of this was an add-in module. Then with the release of 3.2 we started to see the beginnings of the provider model that we currently have with the latest releases of the product.

As you can see with the image above we have 3 authentication provider types setup on a default DNN 4.8.0 install.  This install had issues with the Active Directory provider type and a new version has been sent to testing but has stalled because of an issue with IIS 7.  But there is an AD Provider Beta available from Mike Horton's site.  We are going to walk through installing this provider to add to the three that we have currently installed.

But first lets check out the three we have. The first is the DNN core authentication provider which allows us to authenticate against the database that we have installed.  The next one is LiveID which allows us to use Microsoft's Live Passport technology to authenticate against.  The third one is OpenID, this is a new ID system that is being worked on openly on the Internet to allow more people to use it as it is not controlled by one corporation or entity in it's entirety.

All of these settings are currently enabled but can be quickly disabled by selecting the appropriate checkbox beside each option.  The other two columns basically show us the control that will be used for the settings and the control that will be used for handling the login procedure in the framework.  Under this is a link to Install New Authentication System, we are going to walk through this and install the AD Beta from previously.  I will provide the walk-through in my next post.

For anyone looking to have their DotNetNuke Breadcrumb skin object not create a link for the last level in their trail. There are a few options available to accomplish this.  Tom Kraak over at Seablick Consulting has just written a great blog post on Fixing the DNN Breadcrumb Skin Object. The suggestions he has there are the best possible and I would definitely do the third of implementing my own skin object to accomplish this.

If anyone has any questions or suggestions for articles like this leave them in the comments.

In our third instalment of the DotNetNuke Tips & Tricks, we have come to the Payment Settings of the Host Settings Tab. This section of the settings allows us to define a lot of information for providing hosting services to portal sites within the DNN Framework.

This is very nice if we want to offer these services and make some money off of the hosting of other sites.  With the payment settings we can define a lot of the necessary features that are important to a portal.  Such as the amount of storage that the site can use and the cost of hosting.

Lets go through the payment options that are available:

• Payment Processor: In this drop down are the payment providers that are available to process the payments for your hosting services with the portal software.  A link is provided below the drop down if it is necessary to sign up for an account or to check the status of your account with the processor.
• Processor UserId: This is the user id of the account that you will be processing the payment through.  Very important to make sure it is yours.  Don't want anyone else getting your money.
• Processor Password: This field will hold the password for your processor account.
• Hosting Fee: This is the base fee amount that you will be charging for your hosting services.
• Hosting Currency: This drop down contains the currency type that you will be billing your services in and consists of the following types:
• Canadian Dollars (CAD)
• Euros (EUR)
• Pounds Sterling (GBP)
• U.S. Dollars (USD)
• Yen (JPY)
• Hosting Space (MB): This is the amount of file space on the server that will be allowed for the account.
• Page Quota: This field will allow you to specify the maximum number of pages that can be created within a portal.
• User Quota: This field lets you specify the maximum number of users that can be placed within a portal.
• Demo Period (Days): This is the maximum number of days that a trial account can be used.
• Anonymous Demo Signup: This checkbox determines if you will allow users to sign up for a demo of the portal software to see if they would like to purchase services from you.

Using this makes for a quick and easy way to get paid for hosting peoples sites for them.  As well as giving them the ability to try out the software with the demo signup enabled. 

Our next Tips & Tricks will cover the will cover the Authentication Settings and Friendly URL Settings of the Host Settings Page.

Past DotNetNuke Tips & Tricks related to this post

1. DotNetNuke Tips & Tricks #1 - Host Settings Configuration
2. DotNetNuke Tips & Tricks #2 - Host Settings - Details, Appearance

Feel free to leave comments or suggestions for tips & tricks in the comment section and I will try to address these for you.

Well seeing at how this is a new blogging platform that is starting to catch steam and move forward I decided to start putting my effort into getting some resources centralized that would allow new comers to the platform to get a quick start on moving forward with it.

I have been using the software now for about a month and a half now.  In the beginning I found very few extensions as that was just being developed as well as very few themes other then what was included in the original download. I want to provide as many themes for people to have available so for any that are out there that I do not have included please leave a link in the comments and I will make sure that I get this added to the list.  As it grows I will try to make the pages as searchable as possible and see how many we can get.

After attempting many different ideas and reading many different support posts.  I did even send a support request that I never heard back from at Technorati's support site. I never heard back from them or managed to claim my blog.

This was sort of a disappointment.  We could get as far as the second step when it would as for us to choose our claim method and no claim methods were enabled.  As it turns out it is an issue with the blogging platform that hopefully shall be resolved shortly in the next release of the software.  Until then there is a solution for anyone looking to claim their blog.

Chris Blankenship made a post on his blog about claiming your blog. Claim your BlogEngine.Net Blog at Technorati described exactly what was needed to accomplish this.  I see that the issue he raises with the format of the xml document created by rsd.axd has been fixed within the latest source release up on CodePlex.

So I followed Chris's instructions and went through the simple issue of commenting out the following line in the web.config file.

<!--add verb="*" path="rsd.axd" type="BlogEngine.Core.Web.HttpHandlers.RsdHandler, BlogEngine.Core" validate="false"/-->

I then went back to claim my blog and received the claim code to be placed within a post and proceeded to follow the rest of the procedure.  I also had to turn full posts back on within the home page of this blog so that Technorati could read the posts properly.  Once the claim was done then I removed the post as well as turned the home page back to just the short display.

Hope this manages to help anyone using BlogEngine.Net.  I'm very happy with this as a blog engine so far.  I like the simplicity and have been working on writing a few different things I plan on doing a little more writing of a couple of extensions if they don't get written by someone else.

Any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments and I will try to get back to you as quickly as possible.

I figured since I have been blogging about DNN heavily that I should be  including a resource page for finding out things about DNN.  So I have started adding some pages which will store all things DotNetNuke.  My first page to add within this structure will be the inclusion of a page of free DNN Modules.  As I review them or use them on sites I will also provide some reviews of what I think of these modules.

I think that this will only be a good resource if I continue to provide this to my readers.  After having written many modules and worked with many other free and commercial modules. I will provide my expertise and hopefully make building your DNN Portal a much easier affair.

The free modules page is available here.

While working on updating some pages on this site and using the built in HTML editor, I ran across an issue which I don't think can be taken care of within the framework of BlogEngine.net but is worth noting to remember for later use.  I decided to run the spell checker as I have IE Spell installed.  I had previously saved my page within  the editor then had went in and written some text about a paragraph.  It was neither a long post to the page or anything else but it was the beginning. 

I then decided I would do a spell check just to see how the integration worked with the browser.  I normally do all my editing in Windows Live Writer for all my posting to the blog.  But as I was working on a page to post about DotNetNuke I figured I would try the page editor.  When I pressed the Spell Checker button   I then received the bar at the top of Internet Explorer asking me if I wanted to allow the ActiveX control to run. I gave the control permission to execute which then did a refresh of my page. And lo and behold the text that I hadn't saved to the page on the site was gone.

So for future reference I guess I should save the document to the server before I run Spell Check.  It will save me a lot of retyping later on.  Hope this helps someone in the future to think about.

Following up with our post yesterday on the Host Settings Configuration. I thought we should continue walking through our discussion of the next two sections of these settings.  These two next sections are the Host Details and the Appearance of the portal. These tow sections control name of the host portal and the appearance.

The first section we will look at today is the Host Details. This will define 4 attributes of the host:

• Host Portal: this field is a drop down list that contains all of the available portals that are located on the framework.  One of these portals is chosen as the Host portal and becomes the default portal when there are multiple ones created.
• Host Title: This is what the host portal shall be called.
• Host URL: This is the URL that will be defined as the location to go to if there are any issues for example with the portal.  This does not necessarily point back to this portal in any way.
• Host Email: This allows us to define an email address that can be used to reach someone who is responsible for the portal.

This takes care of the first section.  The next section is the Appearance of the Host portal and has the following available fields:

• Show Copyright Credits? This is a checkbox and tells the portal whether to display the copyright notice if it is defined within a skin and to include the version number in the title of the DNN site.
• Use Custom Error Messages? This is a checkbox that will determine whether we will use custom error messages on the framework or the default error messages. The custom error messages can be changed in the language editor which will come in a later post.
• Host Skin: The host skin is the skin that will be displayed for the site if one is not defined in the page or portal settings of the portal.  If no skin is specified here then the site will use the default DNN Blue skin.
• Host Container: The host container is the container that will be used if none is defined at the module, page or portal level of the portal. If no container is defined then it will use the DNN Blue containers.
• Admin Skin: This is the skin that will be used while doing admin functions if none is specified at the portal settings.
• Admin Container: This is the container that will be used for admin functions if none is specified at the portal settings.

Above the drop downs we have two radio buttons  that are Host and Site this tells the dropdowns where to populate the information in the drop downs from whether to use the _default portal root or to use the site roots to get the skins and the containers from.

We have two upload buttons underneath the 4 appearance drop downs that allow us to upload skins and containers to the site.  As we are within the Host Settings section of the portal this will upload the skin and container to the _default portal location within the framework.

I hope as this series continues everyone finds value in the posts.  Feel free to comment on the post and offer any corrections if I have made a mistake.  As I've been using this framework for approximately 5-6 years now and having started with it before it received the name of DotNetNuke it has been amazing to witness the growth and capabilities that have been added to this product.

After discussing a few issues with a client on the phone last night and them talking about how hard it was to find someone knowledgeable enough with DotNetNuke to do the upgrade of their intranet site.  It became clear to me that I needed to start putting my knowledge of the DNN platform out in the public view so that other people would be able to be better informed on how to do things with this wonderful platform. What I will be doing with my DotNetNuke Tips & Tricks will be discussing issues that I have run across and providing solutions.

One of the first things that needs to be done after installing DNN is to configure the Host Settings.  We need to login in with our host account that was configured during the installation.  After logging on the menu bar we will have an Admin drop down menu and a Host drop down menu.

The first configuration changes need to be done for the Host Settings.  These settings are global for all the portals that will be created on this installation of DNN. 

Today's Tip is going to allow us to see what information is available to us in the Configuration Section of the Host Settings.  The configuration section of the Host Settings are not actually configurable but gives us important information in the case of issues that may arise while we are working with DNN.

The configuration settings consist of the following:

• DotNetNuke Version: this is the version number of the DNN installation.
• Check For Upgrades: this is a newer feature introduced around version 3.3 and 4.3 if I remember correctly. If this is checked then DNN will query and see if a newer version is available.
• Upgrade Available: If an upgrade is available it will show what the new upgrade version is and provide a link to go and download the latest version.
• Data Provider: This will show us the current data provider that DNN is using normally this will be the SqlDataProvider.
• .NET Framework: This will display the version number of the .NET Framework that we are using with DNN.
• ASP.NET Identity: This field can be useful if you are having permission troubles on the file system as this is the user that needs to have permissions to read and write to files on the system. In our case here it is DEV05\ASPNET which is a  local user on my laptop.
• Host Name: This is the name of the host that is hosting the framework.  Ours is DEV05.
• Permissions: This is a new feature of this section but is very useful because this field can tell us if we have the necessary code level permissions to do certain things within the framework.  In the image I have on this page we do not show any available code permissions because at the time of the image the framework was running in Medium Trust on my laptop.  If the site was running in Full Trust then we would have the following permissions available to us: ReflectionPermission, WebPermission. Reflection Permission would allow us to use reflection within our code to get access to other dll. But the permission i've always ended up having trouble with has been the WebPermission. This stops us from making requests to other hosts to get information.
• Relative Path: This will display the path from the root of the web site in our case our URL to access this instance of DNN is http://localhost/dnn480 so our relative path is /dnn480 of the virtual path of the URL.
• Physical Path: This is always useful for finding out where the site is located on a system.
• GUID: This is the globally unique identifier that is used with the core ASP.NET membership tables to identify this application.  We can use this value to move those tables to another database if it was needed.

That is it for today's post on DotNetNuke. Tommorrow I will start discussing the next two sections of the Host Settings. If there are any questions please leave a comment or if you want to suggest a topic for the Tips and Tricks please leave a comment

Jesse Foster of GravityCube has released a new extension for BlogEngine.net. This extension is designed to overlay images on the current page. The emphasis for this extension is to allow continuous flowing of content without sending the user to a blank page. 

By displaying the image on top of the existing content by simply clicking the image to display and then clicking it again it eliminates the need to click the back button and distract the user from leaving your site or closing out the window expecting to be back at the page.

Jesse based his work for the extension on the following JS script which can be found at http://huddletogether.com/

This extension will definitely be used in my version of BlogEngine.net.