The beta release of DotNetNuke 5.6.1 is now available for download on CodePlex.  In the past we have not made public beta’s available for the maintenance releases because there wasn’t much time between when we started QA and when we actually released.  Given the recent change in our maintenance release to every 2 months, and the extra time afforded by the winter holidays, we have decided to release a beta for 5.6.1 so that people have a chance to test what we’ll be releasing in January. 

At this point, the code is pretty stable and we have a very small list of outstanding regression issues we are working on for this release.  You can see the list of outstanding issues on the DotNetNuke Roadmap for 5.6.1.  If you find an issue, please log it into Gemini and we’ll take it from there.  It is unlikely that any bugs found at this point will make it into 5.6.1, but it will give us a good head-start on identifying issues to be fixed for 5.6.2.

In Occam’s Razor and DotNetNuke, I showed you how to create a Razor script that you can run using the DotNetNuke Razor Host module.  This is great for simple scripts.  One of the downsides of scripts is that Scripts don’t have packaging and installation support.  If you want to re-use the script, or allow others to re-use the script, then you will have to provide manual installation steps for the scripts.

For more complex solutions or those which I want to re-deploy on another site, I will want to package my script as a DotNetNuke module.  Future versions of the Razor Host module will automate this for me, but for now I’ll need to do this by hand.  It’s not really all that difficult, and in this post I’ll show you how to accomplish this for your scripts.

In my first post, a user asked me how hard it would be to add a role selector, so in addition to packaging up my script as a module, I’ll also add this feature.  One of the main purposes of modules is to re-use functionality on multiple sites.  This often requires some configuration of the script to make it usable for many different sites which may be configured differently.  For example, in my original script, I was listing out the users in the “CoreTeam” role, however, other sites may want to list users in a different role.

Occam’s Razor is an often referenced heuristic that basically states that the simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one.  This principle has many corollaries in computer science as we often strive to find the simplest solution to a problem in order to keep the complexity of our applications under control.  The new ASP.Net Razor view engine embraces this philosophy and certainly shows that even simple solutions can be very powerful.  Charles Nurse has a recent series of blog posts which discuss how you can even use Razor within DotNetNuke, with the focus being on lowering the barrier for creating DotNetNuke modules.

In keeping with this focus on simplicity, On December 6th, the Seattle DotNetNuke User Group (SEADUG) will be hosting the DotNetNuke Razor Hackathon.  Like previous Hackathons, we’ll be live streaming the kick-off event on DotNetNuke.com.