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BlogEngine.NET has released a theme pack that is compatible with the version 1.4 and 1.4.5. 

The theme pack contains themes designed and created by the community, and they have been brought together as a downloadable theme pack.  Janko has compiled them together for the community to use.

Download the BlogEngine.NET theme pack here.

Paul Scarlett of tressleworks.ca has created a Visual Basic Script to re-package DNN 4.0 skins into the new format for DNN 5.0.

The script is designed to unzip an existing skin/container package and then generate the appropriate manifest and then repackage it back up for deployment to a DNN 5.0 site.

He makes mention of requiring the following library to be installed on your system: XStandard XZip library.

Download DotNetNuke Skin Repackaging Script

For anyone new to DotNetNuke and that hasn’t been a member of the DNN Community for long then they wouldn’t understand the significance of this date in the history of DNN.  On December 24, 2002 the first release of IBuySpy Workshop was released to the community on the ASP.NET forums that hosted the discussion's surrounding the IBuySpy Portal Starter Kit.  That was the beginning of the tool that is now known as DotNetNuke.

So as I like to periodically check for new updates and see if I can catch them happening.  I did notice the change start on Christmas Eve day for the release of DNN 4.9.1 and 5.0.0. I was excited but I let it ride till I could check it out on Christmas Day after the presents were unwrapped and before I rushed off to have dinner with the in-laws.

DNN 5.0.0 has been a long anticipated release with much discussion about the feature set and what would be available when it was released.  What I have seen of the 5.0.0 RC2 release was exceptional and will provide many opportunities to extend this many new features for skin developers and module developers alike.

DNN 4.9.1 is a stabilization release to fix some known issues and bug patches to the community.  There is a critical security issue that has been fixed so an upgrade to this release is strongly suggested.

DNN 5.0.0 Major Features

• Added jQuery support to the core platform.  jQuery will now be distributed as part of the DotNetNuke installation and will be available for use by module developers.
• Added support for Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices.  Administrators can configure any module to use IE8 Web Slices including the ability to set time-to-live and expiration values.
• Removed distinction between admin modules and pages and normal pages.  This allows administrators to easily delegate access to any portion of the application to any group of users.
• Updated the installation services to support manifest files for all extension types.  Now skins, containers, providers and modules are all first class citizens that can be installed and uninstalled.
• Expanded XHTML, WCAG and ADA compliance.
• Refactored core to improve support for Unit Testing.  Refactored several core classes to use interfaces and added a simple component factory to provide dependency injection support. 
• Added ability to deny permissions in the permissions grid.  This new feature extends the permission framework to give administrators greater flexibility in defining permissions.
• Added Widget framework.  The new Widget framework allows you to quickly add JavaScript/html widgets to your site with very little effort.  The framework supports the use of a simple object tag based representation which means you don’t have to know JavaScript in order to add the widgets.
• Added new Object notation for using skin objects in Skins.  Skin designers will no longer need to include separate XML files when creating and packaging skins.  No more funky “[SKINOBJECT]” tags littering your html.  This significantly simplifies the process of creating skins and further opens up skin development to a broader group of designers.  If you include a simple JavaScript reference in your HTML skin, you can even get a full WYSIWYG experience when designing your skin.

Security Fixes

• Includes a rollup of all 4.x security fixes

Updated Modules/Providers

The following modules and providers have been updated in the 5.0.0 packages.  Please see the specific project pages for notes on what bugs or enhancements were corrected with each release.

Providers

• AD Authentication Provider 05.00.00

In addition to these highlights there are literally hundreds of bug fixes in this release.

For more information about a specific issue please refer to the official change log.

DNN 4.9.1 Major Features

• Fixed issue with the cache which was preventing proper operation of the scheduler.
• Fixed issue with web crawlers which could cause thrashing in the cache
• Fixed issue with the EventQueue to remove events that result in an error.  This prevents an event from filling the event log with errors.
• Fixed issue with the RoleController.GetUserRoles method which introduced a breaking change in 4.9.0.
• Added a new column to the version table to distinguish between Community Edition and Professional Edition installs
• Added a new feature for logging server restarts in a web farm environment.
• Added a new admin Dashboard page.  The dashboard provides a single page where hosts can view an overall snapshot of their site.

Security Fixes

• Critical - User can access additional roles for which they do not have permissions

Updated Modules/Providers

The following modules and providers have been updated in the 4.9.1 packages.  Please see the specific project pages for notes on what bugs or enhancements were corrected with each release.

Modules

• Survey 04.60.00

Providers

• AD Authentication Provider 01.00.05

As always the new releases can be downloaded at the DotNetNuke web site.

This is another post for my own remembrance. While working with controls in ASP.NET most of the back colors use the RGB color references instead of allowing you to quickly plug in the Hexadecimal numbers to the control.  At first glance this looks to be a daunting task as there doesn’t appear to be a quick solution for this within the Color class in either VB.NET or C#. But the solution is pretty simple

VB.NET Example

  1: MyControl.BackColor = ColorTranslator.FromHtml("#FFFFFF")

C# Example

  1: MyControl.BackColor = ColorTranslator.FromHtml("#FFFFFF");

It actually becomes pretty easy after you find it.  There are some pretty elegant solutions to this problem on the NET but a lot of them don’t take advantage to what Microsoft has already built into the .NET Framework.

This release comes with a number of module updates including the following:

• Documents 04.01.00
• Events 04.00.02
• Help 03.00.02
• HTML 04.08.01
• Links 04.00.01
• NewsFeeds 04.00.00
• Repository 03.01.15
• Survey 04.50.00
• UserDefinedTable 03.05.01
• Wiki 04.01.00

• FCK Html Editor Provider 02.00.02
• AD Authentication Provider 01.00.04

This new version can be dowloaded from the DotNetNuke website.

The links module for DotNetNuke was updated today to allow installation on DNN 4.7.  The 4.0.0 release had an issue with installation on 4.7 as well not allowing it to be installed on DNN 4.9 which is soon to be released.  This is the version that will be included with the new version of DotNetNuke that should be released very shortly.   The issue was around the compatibility node of the DNN Config file for installation.

DotNetNuke Links Home

DotNetNuke Links Discussion

DotNetNuke Links Download

I was brought in to work on an asp.net web site recently that had been written by another company.  I was asked to add some features to their current site as well as to fix some bugs that had been left by the previous developers.  Once I had the site ready I moved this web site project to my staging server and then started receiving this error on a couple of pages.  Now I had chosen to publish the website instead of just doing a copy of the site with the code-behind files as well.  This is when this problem started.

I did some searching on the web and came up with the following that the class I had on these pages were duplicates on other pages or other compiled dlls within the published site.  So I started looking for the pages that had the offending classes and I discovered them within the web site.  I wish I had the time to move this web site into a web application project to avoid these issues.  More information can be found here as well.

Mads Kristensen has just announced the release of Version 1.4.5 of the DotNet Blog Engine.  Guess I really have to start getting this blog site up to the latest version.  I’m a bit behind in updating my site and it has suffered for it, but back to the announcement.

The changes that have been implemented in this update:

• File upload improvement – Files and images uploaded will be placed in folders based the year and month. IE /files/2008/07/test.jpg
• Database Support out of the box – With this release the setup folder has support and instructions to get started with Sql Server, MySql, SQLite and VistaDB Express.
• HTML Editor Defaults – There is now a switch to remember to use the TinyMCE editor or to enter your own HTML and now the engine remembers your choice.
• Enhanced Metaweblog API – You can now publish for any user from within Windows Live Writer as well as support for SSL now as well
• Filter by APML – You can now filter your posts of a blog by your own APML file. An APML file is a prioritized list of your own interests in XML.

The latest can be downloaded here.

On July 28, 2008, the Gallery project released a long awaited beta of their new gallery module for DotNetNuke. This version 4.3.0 is a .NET 2.0 compatible version for use with DotNetNuke 4.8.4 and above.  The recommendation is that it not be used in a production environment just because they do not know if there will be breaking changes between this version and the final released version that would prevent a forward upgrade path.

They have also developed a new site specifically for demonstrating the new features and the latest version for users of the gallery.  This new site can be found at http://www.dnnmediagallery.com/, it has information about the module as well as some documentation and there is a forum setup there as well.

Great job to the Gallery team.

As we wait for the Cambrian release of DotNetNuke, we have another service release in our imminent future.  As you can see from the image DotNetNuke.com is currently testing the next version of the 4.8 release for our consumption.  This follows on the release of a few weeks ago of version 4.8.3 that had several security issues that needed to be resolved.  Here's hoping that we quickly get access to this new release and that it doesn't hinder the core team's ability to get us the next great major release of the platform.