Every year the speaker selection committee for DotNetNuke Connections (formerly known as DotNetNuke OpenForce Connections) has the difficult task of reviewing hundreds of submissions and finding the two dozen sessions that we feel will provide a good mix of topics for the conference.  It is not an easy task as we always face the difficult decision to exclude some great speakers and equally great topics.  We have concluded our selections for this years conference and I am pleased to announce that the following speakers were selected to present at DotNetNuke Connections:

Beatriz Oliveira Brandon...

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.4.1 which corrects the major issues which slipped through the QA process for 5.4.  While we try to do a good job in testing our releases, our recent efforts for 5.3 and 5.4 have fallen short of the mark.  We are currently working with a small team of commercial module developers and the core team to put a better public beta testing process in place that will help augment our own internal testing.  Ultimately, community testing is the only testing that truly scales, and we have struggled with how to effectively use the community even while keeping to a tight release schedule.  While this is not as critical for our stabilization releases where we seem to have no difficulty achieving an acceptable level of quality, it is absolutely essential that we have community feedback and testing of our quarterly feature releases. As usual, you can see the full list of changes for this release on the changelog.

I am pleased to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.4.0.  This release comes hot on the heals of the 5.3.0 and 5.3.1 releases and is aimed at providing ASP.Net 4.0 support to coincide with the Visual Studio 2010 launch.  This release also includes enhanced localization support and additional taxonomy support.  While less than a month has passed since the last major release, we felt it was important to support ASP.Net 4.0 very close to the platform launch which necessitated back to back major releases.  Going forward we will be returning to our regular monthly maintenance releases with another major release coming mid-summer.  As usual, you can see the full list of changes for this release on the changelog.

Last week, I discussed a new change in 5.4 where we have backported the RibbonBar from DotNetNuke Professional to the Community Edition.  Well that is not the only big change that is occurring with this release.  We are also backporting the Telerik Editor Provider!  This is another huge win for the community.

Over the course of the last 7 years we have primarily had 2 different HTML editors that we have shipped with DotNetNuke.  The first text editor we used was FreeTextBox.  It is a great little editor that served us well for the first couple of years of the project.  Unfortunately, FTB changed their license which caused us to re-evaluate the editor we should be using.

About 3 years ago we adopted FCKEditor as the default editor for DotNetNuke and it provided a lot of features that were not available in FreeTextBox.  The FCKEditor Provider has been developed and maintained by Mauricio Márquez and really made a lot of advances over the provider that was used with FreeTextBox.  Mauricio has done a great job on the FCKEditor Provider and has always been very responsive whenever we have had issues that needed to be addressed.  My only regret is that our internal release process was more difficult than it should have been which made Mauricio’s job more difficult. 

I am pleased to announce that once again we are backporting a feature from DotNetNuke Professional Edition to the Community Edition.  In DotNetNuke 5.3 PE we added a new control panel which leverages the Telerik TabStrip to provide increased functionality over the previous IconBar.  Some of the new control panel functionality makes common tasks even easier and provides more streamlined access to some administrative areas of the application.