My sister-in-law delivered her 1st baby last week. As I met the newborn Charlie it formulated some thoughts that had been on my mind. I have been giving a lot of thought regarding trust. We are all born dependent and must innately trust someone else from the very beginning. It obviously continues throughout our life including our daily activities such as driving, picking out food and so on. As a software engineering firm our peers and clients trust that we can provide successful solutions. In turn we must trust our personal knowledge and experience as well as the tools and resources used daily.

Do I trust DNN; the architecture it relies upon, the source code, roadmap of the future, management, functionality, security, its’ core and outside development community? The answer is a confident, “mostly yes”. DNN’s domain represents a large and varied background of people authoring and driving it forward. Bi4ce believes enough in this community that we have invested thousands of man hours adopted DNN as a viable core solution for many of the Bi4ce systems built for our clients.

But as DNN matures it must continually maintain and build upon this trust. Testing practices, version releases, future product enhancements and the ease with which consumers attain useful information are difficult tasks to manage but critical in the maturity and impression of the DNN to worldwide based organizations making decisions right now. The recent introduction of the DNN Module Review Program is a long needed step in this direction. I hope this and other areas are expanded in the near future.

Last week I gave a presentation to a large government contractor. This organization was convinced DNN represented a strong CMS that could satisfy their needs but were extremely concerned with two things: the phrase, “Open Source” and DNN Security. In preparation for the meeting I did some research and found several DNN white papers on security (see http://dotnetnuke.com/SecurityPolicy/tabid/940/Default.aspx - scroll to the bottom) and from several other DNN community members was able to get the names of several USA government agencies using DNN. After presenting this information to the client they no longer had any issues and signed our contract. That is trust

New Releases

Amigo Skin V2.0 - This skin features a visually exciting and user friendly design. With three colors to choose from (Blue, Yellow and Green) and five simple containers, your site will look sleek and clutter-free. Each skin comes in fixed-width or 100% width to stretch to fit your screen.

Salsa Combo V2.0 - Stylish and elegant, this skin comes in 6 different colors (Verde, Rosa, Amarillo, Anaranjada, Azul, Roja, Rosada). A unique asymmetric header and footer with matching containers set this skin apart. Will stretch to fit any browser window with a tab menu style navigation.

NukeDk.ListX 1.78 with AJAX is the ultimate toolbox for DNN users who want to give their sites sophisticated database-driven features but don’t have the experience, time, or budget to develop them from scratch. With its simple interface, NukeDK.ListX makes it easy to pull information from your data sources such as database table, SQL views and stored procedures, spreadsheets and XML to drive dynamic information portal sites. Lists, views, editable forms, e-commerce orders, tabs, and endless other display types and functions all with advanced DNN portal integration like parameter passing between pages and parent child relationship forms come out of the box with NukeDk.ListX.

New Administration Control Panel

DNN Tip of the Month

Pretty Handy Tip - Creating Custom Links from the Skin.

Ever Wonder How to Create Custom Navigation/Links from your DNN-Skins?

For Instance if you have pre-defined text-links that you want to manage from the skin.

Example: Home | Sitemap | Help | Contact

One method is to define the hard-coded links associated with the appropriate tab id/tab name (ex: < a href ="/Default.aspx?tabid=36" >Home< / a >).  This requires that you have the exact tab id’s/tab name. This is not the ideal solution.

Here is the best practice method.  

A better method is to manage it via friendly URL’s by following these steps:

more info...

About Bi4ce

Bi4ce specializes in rapid development and design of information technology solutions including custom skins and modules using the Microsoft .Net Framework and DotNetNuke (DNN). Click here to Request Information.