JUNK!!!  WORTHLESS!!!

This may seem harsh, but I will explain why those are the first two words that come to mind for me.

I have had IX Web Hosting for about a year and a half now, and have seen many a thing I do not like about this hosting provider.  When I first signed up for IX Web Hosting, I was excited and drawn to the fact that they could offer unlimited disk space and unlimited MSSQL 2005 databases.  I thought, “Woo Hoo way to go!”

Well, I was dumb for signing up for the hype.  At first everything was pretty good.  Then as the time past, I found I couldn’t do a simple DotNetNuke 4.9 install because the MSSQL server was timing out.  I looked on the SQL server (via SQL Management Studio) and found hundreds of databases.  They were overloading the SQL server.  (I guess I should have expected this will unlimited space right.  Oh well I live and learn)

Soon after that I started to notice that all my websites were running very slow.  (Once again, what should I expect from unlimited space right?)

Lastly, what is going to make me move my sites off IX Web Hosting is the fact that the server my websites are on crashed a couple days ago and it took them over 35 HOURS (no that’s not minutes, that’s HOURS) to come back up.

I chatted with their support a whole lot in those 35+ hours and never once did I get the same answer.  I got everything from maintenance, to what I believe was the truth when they said the server died and was being reconstructed and that files were being brought back over to the new replacement server.  I also was told many times that I should wait a couple hours and all would be good.  Finally the last time I chatted with support they said they couldn’t give me an ETA.

All in all, unless you are looking to find hosting for a website that isn’t important, do NOT use IXWebHosting!  I promise if you do, you will be disappointed.

~Michael Silva  (MikePixel)

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.