DotNetNuke is a web content management system and an application framework that has grown over the past 8 years to solve many of the challenges faced by developers when building websites and web applications.  Because of this rich feature set, it is possible that there may be areas of the platform which you have yet to explore.  In this ongoing series, I plan to use short video clips to highlight some of my favorite features of the platform.

In this video, I focus the spotlight on the Dashboard Module which was first added in DotNetNuke 5.0.  For more information about extending the dashboard, you should check out DotNetNuke Tips and Tricks #9 where I discuss how you can create your own plugin for the dashboard module.

I am happy to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.6.  In 5.6 we spent a lot of time enhancing existing features addressing bugs and including a few minor features.  One of the goals during 2011 will be to not only add great new features, but to also add some depth to existing features.  The 5.6.0 release is a good first step in that direction.  The DotNetNuke Community Edition 5.6 includes new features such as:

• Improved Search: 5.6.0 includes an enhanced indexing capability which allows the standard core search feature to index page names, tag attributes and other metadata for improved search results
• Performance Enhancements: Optimizations to the database architecture and handling of web analytics tracking codes which will result in faster performance for all Editions of the product
• Configuration Manager:  A new configuration manager provides DotNetNuke administrators with greater access and control over their website configuration files without requiring the user to have direct file access.

DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise users also have some significant new enhancements as well including:

• Site Search: Exclusive to the Professional and Enterprise Editions, the new Site Search engine allows site users to quickly locate files and pages in the site. The search engine includes rich query syntax with support for Boolean searches, phrase searches, relevance searches, wild cards, fuzzy searches, and groupings. Based on Lucene, the system includes a true web spider that is capable of indexing any site, whether it is built on DotNetNuke or not.
• Enhanced Analytics Support: The DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise Editions include Enhanced Analytics Support, which allows users to take full advantage of Google Analytics. The system has been upgraded to the latest integration best practices from Google and now enables tracking of sub-domains as a single entity as well as the use of up to five segmentation rules per page.
• Content Approval Workflow Enhancements: The Professional and Enterprise Editions now allow managers to configure approvals in a top-down hierarchy at the site, page, and module level. In addition, content locking improves efficiency and reduces the chance of workflow conflicts. Approvals ensure that users throughout the organization that are impacted by a content change can review updates before they are published. The business rules engine enables workflows with an unlimited number of states and reviewers.

Have you ever been given a technical challenge that just seemed to interesting to pass up? This past weekend I was asked the question about extending the blog module to add an author biography to the footer of the blog post.  The gist of the question was how could we do this without causing problems on upgrade.  Since I always like a good challenge, I thought this would be a good opportunity to also show how a little creativity will allow you to solve many of the challenges that you face in DotNetNuke.

I have felt for a while that the DotNetNuke blog module was quite capable, but needed a few helper modules to give it a boost.  This is a perfect showcase on how to extend a module without actually changing the module or any of it’s data.  I also thought this would be a good opportunity to learn a few new techniques so I included the use of the new jQuery Templates which were added in jQuery 1.4.3, but which are also available as a separate download.