By Bo Nørgaard on Saturday, May 31, 2008

The new dotnetnuke.dk skin will contain a tab (sliding door) menu. Last summer I created a skin object that can generate such a menu, with the special requirement that I have. It is working with the standard menu information that is in the dotnetnuke database, and it needs to have the small icon images for the solpart menu, and some larger images for the tabs.

I uploaded the skin object package and it installed without any error messages, but then I couldn't find it in the skin object list. At last i found it, it had been installed as a private assembly module - even though it only contains a single control that is of skin object type. Uhmm, it installed fine last summer on 4.5.5 - so now I must find out what has changed up to version 4.8.

After googling 20 minutes I didn't find the answer, I can see from the DotNetNuke blog that the dnn file format will be changed in the coming version 5, but that is not my problem right now.

I then has a hard look at the dnn file, and found that it had changed to a module definition file. Well actually files don't normally change by themselves, so now I was looking for a local problem.

Later I found that I must have used the skin object when I tested the new builder that I am working on, and that changed the dnn file as it does not currently know anything about skin objects.

btw. after changing the descriptor it installed fine. The only thing I noticed was that all the core installed skin objects have a title of "skin" or "container", which is probably a guide to where the objects can/should be used - I have to look into that later.

By Bo Nørgaard on Saturday, May 31, 2008

Well probably not much as this not a chapter in the advanced programming book. But when developing small projects the budget for hiring skilled designers are most likely absent. It shouldn’t be that way, but welcome to the real world. So the design is the developer’s responsibility, and there have been a lot of focus on building user friendly dialogs and web forms. Being user friendly and looking good is not the same though.

One thing that developers are very good at doing wrong is selecting colors. Selecting good colors have been neglected, and developers tend to select between the original 16 VGA text colors. Thing get worse when the developer needs two or more colors in the design, finding colors that match and look good together is probably an art that our logical brain does not understand.

But help is available…

In Microsoft Office 2007 they have done something about this, they introduced a color theme selection, where they have provided a long list of 8 matching colors. This is a great source for finding a number of matching colors, but you have little control over the selection, like I have this greenish item and need a reddish color for error messages.

Often you have one given color (ex. from a logo) and need to find matching colors for this. I found and used an online service provided by Adobe lab, which is called kuler.

In this you select the base color, and select the way you want the system to find matching colors, like Analogous, Monochromatic, Triad, etc. and the colors are presented with HCV, RGB, CMYK, LAB, and HEX values. Simply print the page and use it in your design – perfect. It’s also very easy to play with the color selection and see what effect even small changes can do.

Another part of Kuler is that you can browse colors created by others, most likely not programmers. There is a rating system so you can sort by rating or popularity.

Kuler can ... Read More »

By Bo Nørgaard on Friday, May 30, 2008

The old site had over 18.000 registered users, but the quality of the user database was poor and most of the users where outdated. This led to the decision to drop the existing user base and let users register again on this new site. The old user database was also in DotNetNuke 2.x format, so converting these to the new provider would also take a considerable time and effort.

So why can't you register yet, well there are no need to do it, as the site does not contains any content only available to registered users. When such information is created I will open for registration again.

By Bo Nørgaard on Friday, May 30, 2008

Finally I managed to get started with building a new dotnetnuke.dk site, it been a long wait and why is a long story that I will get back to later. To make the long story really short, not much of the old site is available, so I have to start building a new site from almost nothing.

Sure I have the skins, the DotNetNuke version 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x modules, and some of the guides to develop modules in these versions. But my guess is that this .net 1.1 information is of little use today. If I am wrong, let me know and I will make a history area with these resources.

So what is the plan with the new site? Well actually the same as the old one, which was quite successful with is simple goal. That is providing any information that I get, find or have regarding module development for the DotNetNuke platform.

As a DotNetNuke Core team member I learnt a lot about the platform and with 29 years of programming experience, I will be able to get this site far, but there are still limits to what one man can do. So if you are capable and willing to help, please let me know about it.

DotNetNuke.dk now operates from a web hotel, as my DELL 2450 server is not alive anymore. First I tried godaddy.com, because I have some domains hosted there and this has worked fine for me. But the web hotel was running slower than slow, and finally I gave up. Then I tried webhost4life.com, and even though I managed to get a fresh dotnetnuke site running, the response time here was also unacceptable.

Now the site is hosted by a small Danish company, that rent servers at a major European hosting provider in Germany, I will blog later about my experience - but until now I am confident that this is the right place for the site.

Current Status:
 - Now DotNetNuke is running
 - I have created a few empty pages
 - I have added a ... Read More »