From speaking with a number of the DNN Corp. folk over the years, the one thing I’ve really learned is that for DotNetNuke, it’s all about the community and with everything they do it’s the community that comes first.  This includes the recent acquisition of ActiveModules and the addition of Will Morgenweck where the bulk of this acquisition will actually be fed back into the core project and made open-source! 

I also remember when I attended the first DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas back in 2007 and everyone being up in arms about the recent (at that time) decision of the founders to create a corporation so it was great to sit down with Joe and talk about this and reflect on that decision and how it’s moved the platform and community forward through innovation that otherwise may not have been possible.

Well, enough of me reminiscing.  Here’s the videos and the links as promised throughout the videos. Thanks again to Joe and Will for taking the time to sit down with me and for the entire DNN Corp for hosting me for the day.

Joe Brinkman on DNN6 and Innovation

Joe Brinkman on DotNetNuke 6 from Applied Innovations on Vimeo.

Will Strohl on DNN6, DNNworld and Community

AppliedI & Will Strohl chat on DNN6, DNNworld and Community from Applied Innovations on Vimeo.

DotNetNuke Links of Interest

1. Try DotNetNuke Optimized Hosting
2. Visit DotNetNuke World
3. Demo DotNetNuke Professional Edition
4. Get to know DotNetNuke Corp
5. Attend Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group
6. Enjoy Will’s Gaming Clan Community

We’re getting ready to launch the beta of the new awesome.net windows cloud hosting platform. I was showing the new awesome.net site to Will Strohl (DotNetNuke guru and all around good guy) and he said “Jess, make sure you get facebook on there and you integrate it with the open graph api so you can admin it and get analytics and stuff”. The URL he sent me to was: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/.

Now before you go running off to awesome.net, If it’s not after 4/11/11 then you’re not going to see much, but if it’s after 4/11/11 then go ahead and sign up for a beta account, it will be FREE until sometime in September.

Anyway, Will gave me the pointer to the Open Graph but how to integrate it just wasn’t as straightforward as you’d hope so I wanted to give you a quick start guide with this blog post because I think this is something everyone should be doing with their websites.

Quick Intro to the Open Graph API

The Open Graph API allows you to integrate your Web pages into Facebook making it equivalent to a Facebook Page.  This means, when someone clicks “Like” on your web page a connection is made between the user and your page and your page will show up in their likes and interests section on their profile.

Not only that but you can also push information on Facebook to people that have liked your web page. 

Basically, Open Graph will allow the Web to marry Facebook and the two to become one.

You can learn more about Open Graph at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

How To Integrate your Site

What we’re going to do is add a like box to your website so that when visitors like your page it will create a small post on their Facebook page so that their friends will hopefully visit your site and like it too!

The first thing you’ll want to do is visit the open graph URL and give it a read.

1. Pick Your Title

Let’s decide what the title of our page will be. This should be human readable text and t’s going to be the title on the post that people will see.  In my case, I opted for “My Cloud is Awesome.net!” as seen below

so then I create meta tags in a text editor.  It looks like this:

<meta property="og:title" content="My Cloud is Awesome.Net!" />

One note on the title. You’ll be able to change your title up until you have 50 followers and then it’s locked in for good. So make sure you’re happy with the title you picked (I may actually be changing mine soon).

2. Pick your Site Name

Pretty simple, what’s your website’s name? I opted for the domain name in this case so it looks like this:

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Awesome.Net" />

3. Decide on your Type.

Now you’ll have a few options here depending on what your site is about, it could be about an actor, athlete, city, landmark, book, drink, food or it could be about a blog, website or company. In my case, it was about a company so I opted for company and the tag looks like this:

<meta property="og:type" content="company" />

4. Define your URL

This is the URL that will be used to identify your site/object and will be used as it’s permanent ID. I decided to keep it simple and use the main page as the URL so my tag looks like:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.awesome.net/" />

The result:

5. Define an Image

Facebook is all about the images. So you’ll want to get an image that’s atleast 50 pixels by 50 pixels in size and post it on your site.  In my case I used:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.awesome.net/images/mycloudisawesome.jpg" />

So the image shows here:

6. Define your Description.

This will be the text that shows up next your image and under the post title. I went with some marketing talk:

<meta property="og:description" content="Awesome Websites Deserve Awesome.Net Cloud Hosting. Experience the future of cloud hosting, for FREE!" />

Similar to the title you’re able to change your title at any time but eventually you’ll get enough followers that your description will be locked in permanently. How many? 10,000 followers.  Yes, 10,000. Let’s hope you hit that number (and please don’t do a Charlie Sheen to get there .. good actor, poor choices.).

Here’s how it came out:

7. Define your Admin

You’ll want to make yourself the administrator of your site. You have the option to allow an application to administer your site on facebook or you can have a person do it. I decided to do it myself. How do you pick the administrator? You have to know your Facebook User ID. No this is not your email address, it’s actually a numeric number.  Here’s the easiest way to figure it out.

1. Log into facebook go to your profile and click on photos
2. Next select any album under your photos.  in the url you’ll see something like this:
3. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?id=777777777&aid=269239
4. That number after id= is your facebook user id (in the above example it’s 777777777 and no that’s not really my User ID, I’m only using it as an example.

So your admin tag will look like this:

<meta property="fb:admins" content="77777777777" />

8. Define your Optional Data.

These you can find explained on the Open Graph API docs but I went with the following:

<meta property="email" content="sales@awesome.net" />
<meta property="phone_number" content="866-706-8691" />

9. Add it all to your meta tags in your web page’s <HEAD></HEAD>

So once you have all of these ready, go ahead and copy and paste them into your web site’s source code inside of the <HEAD> section. Ideally, place it all just before </HEAD>.

10. Test Before you Like

Before you go liking your site. Make sure Facebook is reading everything on your site. The easiest way to do this is with the Facebook URL Linter at: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/

Putting in http://www.awesome.net I get:

The reason this is important is that the first time I built my page, it didn’t pull my meta data correctly, I liked the page and then immediately had to remove the post from my facebook profile. So test first. Once you’re happy go ahead and like it.

11. Add the Like Code.

Next we need to add the like code to our site. In my case, I went with iframe code. Here’s a tidbit, when loading external javascript if you load it as a iframe it won’t slow down the site from loading in the event there’s a problem with the site you’re pulling the javascript from.

You can visit: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ to see the different plugins you can integrate with your site. I used the like button builder: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and copied in the iframe code to my site in the footer:

Why you’ll want integrate the Open Graph API

So you probably saw in the image above where I embedded I have links for an Admin Page and Insights. These are only visible if you’re an admin of your application and visit the site. Clicking on the Admin Page I can see:

So I can interact with my page there and if I go to my Wall I can post stuff that will show up to my fans, etc.

Next we’ll take a sneak peek at the insights page. Since this is a new app on facebook you won’t have any insights to display but it’s going to provide information like this:

Where to go next?

First I’m going to ask that you do me a favor and visit the www.awesome.net site and like the page (bottom left hand corner) next I’ll recommend you check out http://developer.facebook.com and start experimenting with what you can do there. 

Oh and if you’re wondering who that was in my Facebook page, that’s Lyza from www.acutevisibility.com their company does online branding and marketing, if you’re not comfortable integrating the Open Graph API with your site or want to learn more about it, I’m sure they’d be happy to chat with you on it.

That’s where WebMatrix comes in, it will allow you build a staging area on your local company that you can use as a test and development environment that will mimic EXACTLY your production environment.  This means you’ll be using the same version of IIS, ASP.NET, PHP, SQL, etc that your production environment would use. Then when you publish it will not only publish all of your files for you but also your database content and set any file permissions, application settings and even change the version of .NET or PHP your site runs as if necessary!  This is HUGE!

Using WebMatrix to upgrade DotNetNuke

A couple years ago Applied Innovations acquired awesome.net into our company. It’s still run as it’s own independent company with it’s own website built on top of DotNetNuke.  Today we needed to upgrade the install of DotNetNuke from 5.5 to 5.6.1 and because this is a production website for a company that gets a decent amount of traffic we didn’t want to do the upgrade in-place on the webserver.   I decided to use WebMatrix to do this upgrade and built out a tutorial video of the progress.  The video has been broken down into 4 steps each only a couple minutes long and the total video is about 10 minutes total. 

This is a great example of how anyone (regardless of their web development experience) can leverage WebMatrix to manage their production website today.

NOTE: To do this you have to be on Windows Server 2008, running IIS7 and have Web Deploy enabled.  If you’re uncertain if your site supports this just email support@appliedi.net and we’ll let you know if you’re on a 2008 server that supports this or not.

Getting DotNetNuke Ready

Ultimately, we’re going to download a copy of our production website to our local company and work on it there. Before this will work though we need to set a Portal Alias in DotNetNuke so that the site will run on our local computer just as it does on the web server. If you don’t set the Portal Alias then when you run the site on your local computer the first time it’s just going to redirect to domain and your production site.

In the below video we set a Portal Alias for “localhost:42533” which is our local computer and port number we’re going to run the local web server.

Getting Our Development Environment Ready & Downloading The Content

Next we’ll want to make sure we’ve downloaded WebMatrix. If you haven’t or you’re not familiar with WebMatrix, you can get it from www.microsoft.com/webmatrix.   In the video below we’re going to use WebMatrix to download and install a DotNetNuke site on our local computer. It will prepare the files and database for us. We’re not actually going to run this site because once it’s created the directory structure and a blank database we’re going to connect to our production site and pull down all of our website’s files, images and even it’s database.  Yes WebMatrix is going to do all of that for us including the database!

Setting Our local WebMatrix server to run on port 42533

In my first video we set a Portal Alias for “localhost:42533”.  By default WebMatrix picks a random port to run on each time you create a new site in it.  Chances are you’re on a different port. This is easy to fix though, you just go into webmatrix, click on Site, settings and change the port number to whatever the port is you used in the portal alias.  In this video I quickly step you through that.

Let’s Upgrade DotNetNuke and Publish Our Changes

In this last video, we’ve already downloaded the latest upgrade package from www.dotnetnuke.com.  We’re going to go ahead and extract these files over the top of our development/webmatrix site and then run it locally. That’s going to upgrade our local DotNetNuke site and allow us to test it out completely.  Once we’re pleased with it, then we’re going to use WebMatrix and publish all the files AND the database back to the production environment overwriting everything that’s there.  I know what you’re thinking “oh man, this is where it’s going to blow up my website!”.  But in reality we’ve done the upgrade and all of the testing using WebMatrix so we know we’ve tested that this application runs using the same version of IIS, ASP.NET and SQL that we’re going to use in our production environment, so we’re good!

We’d Love To Hear From You

So that’s how I used WebMatrix to upgrade our production website for www.awesome.net.  I could have used a dummy website for this testing but since we’re telling you that it can be done with production websites, I thought it would be best to actually show you it can by doing it.  WebMatrix is a fantastic tool that would let you do this type of operation with just about any type of dynamic website out there be it based in ASP.NET and SQL Server or PHP and MySQL!  It’s a great way to test new modules, new themes, code changes, etc before actually making them live.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial and if you’re still not certain about WebMatrix and leary about running on your production server you can sign up for 3 Months of free WebMatrix ready hosting at www.appliedi.net/webmatrix and give it a try!

Not long ago, DNN released version 5.01.00 of this framework, marking a major milestone in the evolution of this framework. For the first time, the version 5 series has been officially endorsed as being “production ready,” meaning that the DotNetNuke Corporation says that this version of DNN is ready for you use for your websites.

DNN 5 promises that fastest, most secure, and most flexible release of the DNN framework ever. DNN has always had a great selection of modules for you to use for free, such as the Forums module, Blog module, Survey module, Wiki module, Chat module, Store module, Map module, and so many more. DNN 5 brings a rewritten module called Forms and Lists, which allows you to build things like a custom feedback form to present to your customers.

With DNN 5, you now can integrate cool features such as Widgets into your website. Widgets are a great way to interact with your website visitors. They allow you to import JavaScript-based widgets to do things like adjust the design of the site, import videos from sites like YouTube, and more.

This release also makes your website more valuable by implementing SEO (search engine optimized) features for you such as human friendly URLs, Google Analytics, a Pure CSS library, 301 redirects, improved XHTML and ADA compliance, and more. These features are some of the most important in our current economy, where every little bit of edge can help you get ahead of your competition. You DO want to be ahead of your competition, don’t you?

Another very notable feature that is now found in DNN is content versioning. You are now able to roll back any text or HTML content in the HTML module that is included in DotNetNuke. You can also require content approval, allowing you to stage your new HTML content until the right person looks at it. Once they approve the new content, it will be pushed out to your website for your website visitors to see. This feature alone is with the price of DotNetNuke (which happens to free).

If you’re a developer or power user, you may be happy to know that DNN implements technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 8 web slices, improved support for unit testing, .Net framework 3.5, support for any data source, an extensive provider model, and a web-based dashboard showing the “health” of the site. DNN is also an open API, allowing you to extend nearly any feature that it has, such as the Token Replacement Engine, which allows you to do things like build custom template engines.

We could go on and one with the new features. Just know that you can trust the DotNetNuke Corporation to constantly add new features, fix bugs, address security issues, and not allow the framework to get “stale.” They regularly evaluate the latest and greatest technologies out there, making sure that you too can take advantage of these new technologies without having to worry about your level of knowledge or expertise. Roll out your next website using DotNetNuke today!

It’s simple, if you are a shared hosting or fully managed server customer here’s all you have to do!

A little about DotNetNuke

If you’re not familiar with DotNetNuke, it’s an open-source content management system (CMS) that is extremely popular. In fact, at the conference Shaun Walker (father to DotNetNuke) stated that the dotnetnuke.com community has reached over 500,000 users and I forget the exact number but it was something like 4,000,000+ downloads. Also announced OpenForce was the availability of DotNetNuke 4.7 (and if you’re planning hosting dotnetnuke at appliedi.net, don’t worry our one-click installer was already upgraded to 4.7).

Today website builders like our own free sitebuilder are commonly used by novice internet users that want to build a website without learning HTML. A CMS like DotNetNuke evolves the sitebuilder and I suppose would be the Web 2.0 equivalent of yesterday’s website builder. With DotNetNuke (or almost any other CMS) you’re able to assign multiple users roles to your site and allow them control over specific areas of the site so that they can edit or maintain the content in that one area.  You add to that the extensibility of hundreds of free and paid templates/skins for dotnetnuke and hundreds of modules for everything ranging from a guestbook to a full blown e-commerce application (like aspdotnetstorefront) that are just simple click and deploy applications and you start to see the power of DotNetNuke. Want to change your site’s look and feel? Just change the template. All the content remains the same but the look is completely different.  Want to add a forum to your site? Just enable the built in forums or purchase one of the 3rd party forum modules and all your users are already enabled and can begin posting immediately.

DotNetNuke is definitely an exciting application and one we’re proud to have hosted and supported on our platform since it’s inception.

A little about the DotNetNuke OpenForce 2007

Tom from seablickconsulting has a pretty good day by day review of all three days at DNN OpenForce and they can be viewed here:

• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 1
• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 2
• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 3

In fact, Tom’s blog is really chock full of DNN information so I highly recommend subscribing to it.

Expect many more DNN related blog articles to come from us in the coming weeks and a few very exciting DNN related announcements.