The History of Menus When DotNetNuke was first launched back in 2002, website navigation was just beginning to undergo a major shift.  At the time most sites still used a relatively static navigation structure with very little interactivity beyond a few simple hover animations and hyperlinks.  In fact, the original navigation structure for DotNetNuke was only a single level deep.  Over the course of the following 3 years...

Today marks another milestone in the upcoming Hadron release of DotNetNuke.   For the first time ever, DotNetNuke is offering a Community Technology Preview that will allow you to begin testing the latest version long before we have completed all the features.  As I discussed last week, the CTP is not intended to be production ready software but is an opportunity for the community to get a chance to start kicking the tires.  The CTP is an important milestone as it will allow us to gather feedback from the community much earlier in the release cycle and thereby allow us more time to incorporate that feedback into the final release.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Sometimes a name is everything.  It can convey meaning and emotion.  In the world of software, a name can convey the stability or instability of a release.  The name, or label, that we apply to a release is our way of communicating to you some important information about our product.

Next week, for the first time since DotNetNuke was created, we will be releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP).  This CTP will be for the upcoming DotNetNuke 6.0 release.  Later this spring we will release another CTP, a Beta or two and a Release Candidate (RC).

Each of these terms (CTP, Beta, RC) represents a specific milestone in our release process and it is important to understand the distinction to know what you can expect in each release.  Most developers in the Microsoft ecosystem will understand the terminology, but this post is intended to be a refresher so that as we discuss these releases in our community everyone will know what we are talking about.  Our definitions may be slightly different than the way it is used by other companies and that is ok, as long as we are consistent in our usage.

In my position as the release manager for DotNetNuke, I end up installing DotNetNuke numerous times every week.  While I have a set of PowerShell scripts which makes this process relatively painless there were still some areas that I felt needed improvement.  In the past I have created all of my sites as applications in a virtual directory under the default site in IIS 7.5 (Windows 7).  This usually results in some URL for my site that looks like this: http://localhost/myDNNsite.

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.

A few weeks ago, Ash Prasad, a software engineer at DotNetNuke Corp. discussed a new feature he worked on for 5.6.2.  Ash did a really great job on the feature and I thought it would be worthwhile to show this feature in action.   The new user management features definitely make deleting and restoring users much easier and restores the ability to permanently delete users from you DotNetNuke site.

Over the past year the DotNetNuke team has been working hard to improve the pace of our releases and to provide the community with the opportunity to participate in beta testing in order to provide feedback prior to a release.  As of this morning DotNetNuke 5.6.2 beta packages are now available for download from our Beta Downloads page.  We have made a number of fixes to the platform and incorporated a couple dozen performance enhancements.  5.6.2 further stabilizes the 5.6 platform and should be a solid foundation for your DotNetNuke site.  Please keep in mind that this is just a beta and is not intended for production use.  Upgrades to the final 5.6.2 release are not supported.  We still have a few additional issues that we expect to be resolved prior to our Mid-March release but welcome any feedback.