Today I was doing a database backup for a DotNetNuke website.  When I did the backup, I was amazed at how big the database was.

I tried to shrink it, and it didn’t work.

The next thing I did was Googled it, and found a little help in pointing me to what the issue was.  A couple posts in the DotNetNuke forums had commented on big events logs, so I checked mine out.

581MB!!!

Okay now how to clear this?  I couldn’t even view them via the website when logged in as “host”.

I cleared them by doing the following steps.

1. Log into your website as a "host user"
2. Go to Host > SQL
3. Run the script below
   
   Truncate table eventlog
   
4. Logged into my SQL server and Shrunk the database
5. All my issues were solved!!

This seems like an easy no brainer, but I hope it helps people out there with there DNN databases.

Oh and one other helpful hint:  Set your db’s “Recovery Model” to be simple in the options, if you backup your database on a regular basis.  This will keep your db from getting too big also.

I ran into this while working on a customer’s new DNN site.  The install went well and I thought all was good.

Usually my first thing I do is delete the DotNetNuke stuff off the home page and then I go to the admin site settings and disable the inline editing.

When I chose to update settings on the admin settings page I got the following error.

DNN Cannot insert the value NULL into column 'DefaultLanguage'

The first thing I did was to check the admin settings page for a Language setting and sure enough under “Advanced Settings” and “Other Settings” there is a default language pull down menu.  I noticed that I couldn’t fill it in, because the pull down menu was blank.

So my next step was Google.  (Yah, I know I need to use Bing more often now)  I quickly found what I needed and this is what it boiled down to.

Within DNN

1. Go to the Admin/Languages page
2. Click on the Edit Languages link in the upper left corner of the module
3. Select a language from the Dropdown list.
4. Check the enabled checkbox
5. Click the update button.

I got this information from the bottom of a bug fix page. And I got the bug fix page from my trusted DNNCreative websites forums.

I always like it when it is a quick and easy fix.  Go DotNetNuke!

Today I was working on implementing search on a customers website I am doing in the DotNetNuke CMS.  At first I thought this would be automatic and mostly set up.  I instead found that I needed to adjust some thing, so I have put together a small blog entry to help other out who may be having similar issue setting up their blogs.

I have below the three biggest keys to search success on your DotNetNuke site and in your DNN skins.

First, Skinning to include Search

The first thing to do is to include the Register TagPrefix at the top of your .ascx skin file as shown below.

<%@ Register TagPrefix="dnn" TagName="SEARCH" Src="~/Admin/Skins/Search.ascx" %>

Second, Add the control to your skin.

Figure out where you want the search bar to be and place the following code inside your html markup.

<dnn:SEARCH runat="server" id="dnnSEARCH"  CssClass="dnn_search" UseDropDownList="true" Submit="<img src=&quot;images/search.png&quot; border=&quot;0&quot; alt=&quot;Search&quot; /&gt;" />

Attributes explained

• CssClass  (is used in the CSS style sheet to style your search box)
• UseDropDownList  (used if you want a dropdown web/site pick menu within the search box)
• If you don’t want a drop down menu just don’t include this attribute
• Submit  (is used to replace the words submit with an image)
• ShowWeb (false or true)(used to hide web from search options)(default true)
• ShowSite (false or true)(used to hide or show site from search options)(default true)

Third, Make sure the Search Results module is on the Search Results page.

This seems like a no brainer and it is usually set up for you.  If you are not getting any search results, go to your admin menu and select pages.  Once on your pages list go to the Search Results page and make sure to add the Search Result module just like you would any module to the content area you want the search results to display in.

That is about it.  It is not overly hard to add search to your skins in DotNetNuke.

A week ago I got a little tired of dealing with the Core menus offered with DotNetNuke.  I decided I needed something better.  I am a web standards guy and I really wanted something that would spit out unordered lists of my menus, so I could style them however I wanted with CSS.

I looked around and there were two possibilities that I could find and that were recommended.  HouseMenu by House of Nuke and CSS NavMenu by Snapsis.

I checked out House of Nuke first mainly because I had heard of it in the DNN community more than Snapsis.   After cruising their website for a few minutes, and I realized that if I was using DNN 5.01, I might have an issue with HouseMenu.  The reason I say this is that there is a forum post that has been unanswered from three months ago in regards to whether or not anyone has gotten HouseMenu to work with DNN 5.

I am not saying anything bad about House of Nuke.  They have done some great things from what I have heard.  It just looks like they are a bit behind in updates.

My next step was to check out Snapsis.  I cruised their site and they had a lot of examples and demos.  This was great to run against Firebug so I see what was really happening behind the scenes.  This provided me with the ability to see what markup was going to be used and let me figure out what my limitations might be with CSS styling. (if any)

After about an hour of research I decided to buy.

Today I was very glad I bought the CSS NavMenu.  It is very simple to use and allows for some great options.  I can even choose (via different properties to the Snapsis:NavMenu control in the skin) what exact parts I want to display on my menu.   This was great for the menu I was doing today. 

My customer wanted me to create a vertical list menu that only displayed the children of a certain top level menu item. (Services)  By adding the IncludeTabs property and then the ShowType=”ChildrenOnly” property I could do exactly that.

<Snapsis:NavMenu id="SellNav" Level="1-1" CacheTabs="False"
                            NavType="Tabs"
                            IncludeTabs="Services" ShowType="ChildrenOnly" runat="server" />

Then all I had to do was style the list and viola, it was done.

So all in all I have been very impressed with Snapsis and their menus.  Some day I will do some tutorials on this site for those who want to do some more complicated menus.

Okay some days I think the folks at Telligent give us too many choices.  Last week I tried to make it so the user’s full name would display instead of their username.  Were this mattered were in the blogs my customers were in charge of.  I got a request that they didn’t like the username showing up.

I thought that this would be no sweat, and I adjusted it in the Blog Administration, and called it good.  Well today I got to looking and it still was NOT right.  I double checked the work I had done last week and it was still set the way I had left it.  I was a bit confused.

I ended up finding out that you also need to set this per user.  As an admin you can lookup the customers/users account and change it under the “Site Options” tab.  You can also have your user do it in the same area where he or she changes account information.

I hope that helps.  I know it was frustrating and not very intuitive for me.

About two weeks ago I was asked to dig into Deki Wiki so that I could help my customer build an intranet site from Deki Wiki.  There had been a lot of research done on what CMS/Wiki to use for this companies intranet site, and it finally came down to Deki Wiki. 

At first I was a little worried about Deki Wiki.  I hadn’t heard much on skinning the application.  I am a type of person who likes to skin CMS’s and hate to be boxed into a solution that I can’t make prettier.  After I got a chance to look around I was impressed with the way Deki Wiki was built.  It was created in a way that allows a lot of customization and skinning options.

After messing for a little while I found out that you can do all sorts of modification and it’s even pretty easy to create your own skin from scratch to include the markup and php code for the layout.  I decided however that for this intranet site that I would stick to just tweaking and changing a skin that comes with Deki Wiki.  I decided this for the simple fact that I wanted the site to be safe even through future Deki Wiki updates.  I figure it will be less work this way and less pain for the customer.

I ended up choosing the fiesta skin to play with, and I had a lot of fun changing things around.  There were a couple things that were frustrating through the process, but that could be because I started by changing the PRO skin instead of the wireframe.  Below are two screenshots of the skins I have done so far.  I plan on doing many more.

The next step will be trying to figure out a way to install or have multiple Deki Wiki sites on one server so I can display different skins rather than just the fiesta skins I create.

You can see these two skins and some skinning guides soon to come at deki.cornerpixel.net.

~MikePixel (Michael Silva)

I was pleasantly surprised to see that DNN 5.0 was released. I have already downloaded it and have taken it for a spin.  My first impressions are that it is good.  I have run into a couple issues though.

1. I tried to include a bunch of modules while I was running through the install wizard.  That caused the installation to error out.  I even tried to just install 4 modules and got the same result.  It looks like the best thing is to just pick a couple.
2. I noticed that once DNN is installed you don't have the ability to add the common DNN modules like I did with the older versions of DNN.  Now don't get me wrong, I can still download them from DotNetNuke's site and install them, but it used to be easier.
3. The Extropy skin's are pretty bad.  They break and look bad in IE7 and are unpredictable at best when you add new content to the pages.

Okay that is all for now.  I am going to continue to dive into DNN 5.0.  I know some of the above comments are negative, but I am still excited about the product.

Yesterday I was feeling pretty good about how CornerPixel's website and blog are valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup. I had just got done posting my entry about Google Analytics when I decided to run the blog home page through the W3C Markup Validation site. 

Ackkkkk! I had 78 errors.  What is up with that.  Well I got to looking and I noticed there were markup errors in the blog posts.  Well I use Windows Live Writer to post my blogs and I do it from several different computers throughout the week.  I hadn't had that problem before, so I decided to start looking through Windows Live Writer settings. 

I didn't find anything in the Tools / Options menu, and I was starting to get a little worried.  I did notice that you can view the HTML (markup) so I figured worse case scenario I could just change the markup, but I didn't want to have to do that with every post.

Finally I noticed the Weblog menu.  Under Weblog there is an option to "Edit Weblog Settings"  If you click that you will get a popup window where you can make the necessary changes.  Once the window is open just click "Advanced" on the left and you will see the section where you can choose the Markup Type. 

There you go.  Now Windows Live Writer will spit out good markup.  Wooo hooo !

I also noticed that when I had an "&" in the title of the post I got 1 XML parsing error and 1 warning.  So for a good valid blog site with Live Writer, don't place an "&" in the title of your posts.

Well I hope that helps for all you blogger's using Windows Live Writer.

I am extremely frustrated this morning.  I tried to move my home web site, which is in DotNetNuke to IXWebHosting and I keep getting the following error.

Installing Database - Version 4.4.0...FAILURE 400 - Thread was being aborted

I have done some research and have found that it is most likely happening due to timeout issues, and I found the following help.

1. Open IIS, and right click on the virtual directory you set up for running the dotnetnuke install.  Choose "Properties".

2. Open the "ASP.NET" application tab, press "Edit Configuration", and then select the "Application" tab.

3.  Change the "Request execution timeout (seconds)" value to be say 900 or more.

The only issue I have with the above is that I can't get into the IIS configurations at IXWebHosting.  I have placed a trouble ticket into the hosting company and I am hoping that they will fix this for me.  I would just go to another hosting provider, but man these guys are very cheap and so far the service has been pretty reliable.

I don't get a lot of visitors here, but if anyone else has come up with this issue please feel free to comment on it, or give a solution that applies to hosting externally. 

You could also give me an opinion on who the best DNN hosting is.  I wouldn't mind. 

~Mike

One of my other goals with the CornerPixel web site is that I want to work on helping designers and developers who use CMS's to produce better standards compliant web sites even while using a CMS.

I will be setting up a couple CMS's in the near future.  One DotNetNuke (DNN) and one Umbraco site.  I will post in a couple weeks with URL's when I have those installed and skinned. 

The other thing I will be doing is providing DNN admins with good standard compliant skins in the near future.  There has been many who say that this is impossible, but I have seen several out there that have been done very well, and I intend to provide a similar service.  I think for free at first but I won't commit to that yet.

Well just wanted to update you and tell you all to keep checking in to see those CMS sites in action. 

Also please notice the cool RSS link at the top of the page. 

Thanks for listening,

~Mike